It's a little bit like grocery stores... you can often get a better deal if you go to another neighborhood. But most people want to hang out with their peers in the nice grocery store. The savings isn't worth the trip either.

When your (cash-rich, time-poor) friends buy books on their Kindles instead of going to the library, it's most likely because they value the convenience of (a) not having to go to the library to get the book (b) not having to consider whether the book is stocked (c) not having to got to the library to return it (d) not having to keep track of when the book must be returned (e) not having to actually carry a physical book around -- more then they value their $10-15.

It's interesting to listen to the cascading excuses when bringing up books with friends. "Why not use a kindle?" "I like holding the physical book." "Oh, then why not go to the library?" "Well, I like owning the book too." "Oh."

I think you're right in that people like the "culture" around reading more than reading itself.

You can save a ton of money using your local library though. I really need to start doing that.

The usual price for a used book on Amazon is $.01, which with shipping comes out to still far less than the ebook.

There are other good sources of free books include this blog: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/category/books/free-fiction...

I don't like losing access to things. If it was "you can download one per month and keep access as long as you're a subscriber" sort of the way Playstation Plus works that would be OK with me.

But the rental program feels more like a cruddy crippled library than a real service.

I'd rather pay the $5-$10 for the eBook and not have to deal with it.

This new service is interesting. I don't read enough for it to be useful, but I could see it saving my dad quite a bit of money (or trips to the library) if they had enough books.

It's sort of a hidden link or a special way of narrowing search results with the criteria on the left side of the page. If you google I'm sure you can find instructions.

In the search box on the main amazon.com page, there's a drop-down list on the left hand side of the text entry. Click that and change it to "Books". Now just hit search (you can leave the text field blank). That will bring up a search results screen with a bunch of filter groups on the left. Scroll down and select "Kindle Edition" under "Format". After the page reloads, scroll down even further and you'll have a checkbox for "Prime Eligible". Select that, and you'll have only the books you can rent with Prime. You can then further refine by genre, search term, whatever.

The selection is generally pretty awful though.

Losing the sync ability basically killed the main utility I get from eBooks. If I have to carry the Kindle around, I can carry a library book around.

An appropriate term to use in a discussion that's literally about different media for books.

I'm quite specific about what I want to read. My local library (that happens to be just round the corner) never has what I want. I often don't even seem to be able to order in what I want. So I gave up and just buy books on a Kindle instead.

There's no catch. You order the book from whichever library has it, and they deliver it within a few days. Plus, the eBook loan program's collection gets bigger all the time. More states should adopt a system like this. The software behind PINES is free and open source: http://evergreen-ils.org/

There's an entire corpus of literature between 1920 and 2014 that is out-of-print for licensing or estate reasons, rather than quality, much of which can be found in libraries.

I mentor at a program at my library every week, and it's been really awesome.

They have budgets for things, and space, and a desire, they just need help figuring out where/how to spend things and how to then use the things they've gotten.

Once you're all there all the time anyway, then ease into the "now we want/need/demand permanent storage" And machine tools. And a pony.

The concept of a "Hackerspace-Lite" is interesting. No permanent stuff onsite. Carry in and carry out. The library is already full of meeting and presentation rooms and ours finally caved into to sell coffee and junk food for fundraising.

The biggest problem locally is the whole "A library is also a day care, right?" situation. Up to and including police taking abandoned kids into protective custody after a couple hours, which is weird.

There is a big cultural, uh, mismatch where the library requires more police intervention than any of the retail stores or bars or parks... liquor licenses have been lost for consuming far less police budget than the library. The library gets a free pass.

If all the policies were printed out from the web page it would be at least 100 printed pages. It is a very verbose CYA that boils down to anything you do that a librarian doesn't like will get you banned, and being there while banned is a legal trespassing offense, so one strike and you're out. If the librarians like you, you won't be banned no matter what you do. I can photocopy copyrighted materials, take pictures or videos of my kids, talk (whisper) on my phone, hang out for an hour while my kids take a class ... folks of a different race or economic group may have a somewhat different experience when they break any of those rules.

I was unable to find a minimum age, but I think you'd have to be at least upper grade school to survive not violating at least one of the hundreds of rules for more than a minute or two.

I did find that they define loitering as being in an area for longer than 15 minutes other than defined study desks, so no need for crayons or tagging. I've violated that rule a few dozen times, but I'm in no danger of being punished...

Given the sheer workload of homeless people and child day care, the librarians show quite a bit of restraint and can't enforce all the rules.

Did you complain to a librarian about the restrooms? That is a cleaning issue, same as a busy airport. The library belongs to all local residents, chip in and help make it the space where you would like to linger. Bathrooms can be cleaned. The rest of the building and books are wonderful.

Not to mention the, literally dozens, I get for my kids every month.

I use the library to sample books and because if I bought every book I read, despite my healthy income, I'd be broke. I am an information devourer.

I am pretty sure there are a lot of people like me, at least in the Austin area, because I have to wait on some of the books I'd like to read that I don't think very poor people would be interested in.

YMMV because my library is pretty awesome and well stocked, but I think libraries are a shamefully underutilized resource.

In some areas, it is definitely significant that libraries have bathrooms and shelter. But the Internet is always a big draw. With more and more of life moving online, libraries are providing an extremely valuable service by making Internet access freely available.

This is most likely true of any large city, but I don't have any first-hand experience beyond those three cities.

In the US, this might be the case. In Sweden, mostly you'll find kids, moms and people studying (depending on the city, if it has a university or not). A very small subset is there for computer access, but it's certainly not a majority.

In Bulgaria, no one seems to go to the library. They check your ID when you go in and it's not really a place to hang out.

Libraries aren't the same everywhere.

How this goes for authors depends on how Amazon are purchasing the rights to the ebooks. Having seen what streaming has done to music revenue I can't say I'm too optimistic about this. Some authors will do fantastically well, of course, but the much larger number of people who make a modest income from writing may well see it shrink drastically. The problem is that this doesn't necessarily improve things for consumers. Super-successful authors are often producers of lowest-common-denominator material. If high quality writers who appeal to a much smaller audience are no longer able to support themselves by writing, then they either move downmarket or take up another line of work, which results is a loss of quality for consumers.

The problem with streaming is that proponents treat creative output like a commodity and then point to the laws of supply and demand to justify economic upheaval. But pure supply and demand only applies in cases of perfect competition, where commodity goods are actually perfect substitutes; I have no particular reason to buy oil/ gravel/ corn from supplier X if supplier Y can deliver identical goods at a lower price. This is not the case for creative works.

PS I don't mean this as a dig against Amazon in particular, but there is a potential monopsony problem. I worry about this a bit less with Netflix because the economics of film production and distribution are enormously different than for other media, and Netflix is more like a peer among distributors.

I had to get rid of several hundred of my books years ago when I went traveling. It was tough since I had a lot of attachment to my physical books, but upon examination I realized there were few advantages and in my case many disadvantages. Exceptions are books you habitually reread or reference, but most novels fail that test.

My bookshelves are still crammed with books, but they've all got a date with the slicer! Mua-ha-ha-ha-haaaa!

BTW, for examples of books I've cut & scanned, see http://www.generalatomic.com (yes, I either acquired permission to post them or they are public domain).

The paper guillotine was impossibly heavy to carry around and terrifying to operate.

You'll also need a sheet feeding scanner with a hopper on it, that'll scan both sides at the same time. Otherwise, it takes far too long. The software with the scanner will OCR it automagically and create a PDF. I scan at 400 dpi, which looks real sweet on a retina screen. There are a lot of settings to tweak on the scanner, some experimenting will get you the best results. Make sure you turn the double feed detection on.

Use some denatured alcohol to regularly clean the window and rollers, I also use a solder sucker to blow the paper dust out of it.

And lastly, you'll never get 100% of a book to go through cleanly. Just rescan the screw-ups, and assemble the result using pdftk (a marvelous tool). I also like to scan the covers separately in color and fold them in.

Times vary, but I can scan an average paperback in 5 minutes. Turning the sheets sideways makes it go much faster.

Great tip, thanks - presumably it also reduces misfeeds.

Would you recommend a particular scanner?

How does pdftk help with rescanned pages, does it magically know where to reinsert?

You have to explicitly tell pdftk what to do.

http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

https://www.syncfusion.com/resources/techportal/ebooks/pdf

It explains use of iTextSharp, a C# library.

Do I want my Louis CK DVD autographed? Or do I want a picture with him? I'll take the picture every time.

If my Library let me donate $120 to them annually with the ability to borrow from an eBook collection of 500,000+ without having to go to a local branch or waiting for someone to "return" the digital file then I'd write the check tomorrow. I just get so tired of everyone on social media so smugly pointing out that libraries exist and have books you can borrow for free. Yeah, we get it, but many libraries don't provide the service I'm (and others, it seems) looking for. I have the means to be flexible in my selection of service/product providers, and I choose to spend money on those that match my habits and preferences.

My university's library sometimes has this feature. In my experience it's more delimited by the availability of ebooks beyond PDFs (especially scientific publishers only hand out PDFs, no mobis/ePubs at all) and a good measure of paranoia.

Currently, I can read the uni-library's ebooks only using Adobe's 'Digital Editions', which doesn't have a Linux client, and doesn't want to communicate with my Kindle, even if the file in question is an ePub.

(Of course with the right plugin Calibre can remove the DRM making the whole security theatre completely unnecessary)

I can't get a library card, because I don't have mail show up at any residence I stay at. $120 for all I can eat books? Take My Money.

It works the same as a regular book (only one person per copy) but you can pick it up on your Kindle or other appropriate device.

Yup. Remember that well. "Bookstores" were tiny places with fewer books than we had at home. If you really wanted a selection, you'd go to the library. Then came B&N, Borders, etc with vast holdings on par with the local library (or bigger), and - better yet - newer content: everything was new & content turnover was frequent, as contrasted with the library which was pretty much stuck with what well-thumbed old volumes they had. In-store coffeeshops just clinched the attraction.

Local libraries already lend ebooks as well. I'm not sure why more people don't take advantage of that.

Mostly that it's just a new option that hasn't normalized yet. 'til recently, the process was obnoxious enough that physical media and/or a CC# made it much easier to get what you wanted. I'm using Hoopla a lot now; it's improving fast but hasn't quite reached the UX needed for normalization.

Have you ever tried that? Limited selection and weird rules like only certain devices and complicated account creation and then you only get to "keep" the ebook for 2 weeks or whatever.

I can get "free" audiobooks the same way. Its sadly easier to borrow the physical CDs and rip them.

Authors can make money by people who get gifts, and are in a hurry, or want reference tomes. I can read Stross's new novel after waiting in line just four or so months from now for free at my local library... Ah, who cares, its like an expensive lunch to just buy the ebook so I'll do that instead and downloaded it on release date. Another method is gifts. Nobody I know goes to bookstores anymore other than to buy gifts. We don't buy books for ourselves; we do buy gifts which happen to be books. Like the hallmark holiday card business, I don't buy myself Christmas cards, and thats OK, buy some and send them to other people.

If you're not in the "gift" "reference" or "trendy in a hurry" markets, you're in big trouble.

One would think that since ebooks are digital, any number of people could borrow the same book at once from a library. Alas, that is not the case. Just like libraries might only have one or two physical copies of a book, they might only have one or two copies of an ebook available to lend as well. If you want to borrow a new release, you might end up on a lengthy wait list. Additionally, if you borrow from a library, you miss out on a ton of books (especially self-published books).

As a reader, I'm excited about the prospect of Kindle Unlimited. As an author who self-publishes on Amazon, I am apprehensive (though the compensation for my books that have been borrowed with Prime has seemed fair so far).

I write because I want to share my ideas and point of views, not because I care about the money. It's nice though when someone pays the 5 EUR it costs, that keeps me awake with the coffee I can buy for the money.

Amazon unlimited seems good for the people that enjoy fiction, but I don't think they will be able to compete on the technical stuff.

Will amazon continue to allow books to reach those services as soon after release? Do they have the power to stop it in the first place? I think it will be interesting to see how the company, which it is clear has a lot of leverage in the book publishing community, handles competing with a free alternative.

paid by taxes.

nothing is free.