this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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The ramifications of this ruling are astoundingly dire.
The notion of controlled digital lending was a good counter to "ebook packages" that come with a yearly sub. At the moment, that yearly sub eats a large chunk of university budgets because academic texts are harder to get for free (we are a captive audience, though we do have scihub to help somewhat). In terms of books outside academia, I'm not looking at prices but I can tell you which direction they'll now go.
I'm sure you can guess which direction library budgets are not going to go.
In essence, it's forcing digital from a "purchase to lend" to a "subscribe to lend" model, which is going to really hurt libraries. This doesn't even begin to explore the full horror of censorship - "I'm sorry, LGBTQ+ texts are not available to bundle for your library due to local laws prohibiting them". That's a topic that deserves its own book!