They have a very limited supply for my books. I put a hold on the Four Thousand Weeks audiobook 12/2/2024. Libby estimates I will get to check it out in about 12 more weeks.
There are several in our neighborhood in Iowa. We saw at least one in Wyoming a couple years ago when we were on vacation.
In theory yes, my wife is french, we only communicate in french, its a french village, i am on the activities committee, I have been here 20 years … in theory I read and speak french, but sometimes I have no idea what they are talking about … if its a simple subject and going in one direction, ok I follow. But if its a book (or conversation) where there are many twists and turns or things going on in the background it gets complicated to follow. Think all languages have this issue.
Imagine the word baguette…
Easy its bread, or is it a thin piece of wood, or what a conductor in a orchestre uses to guide the musicians … complex
In computing they have words completely different to english … my wife kept talking about lia I thought it was a girls name, she kept saying non ! So she wrote it down l’ia which is *the intelligence artificiel * or ai in english…
But does it remove the copy or just leave it on your device, ok they are not big files but after a time they would mount up.
Or is it automatique at a set date based on system clock.
AFAIK, they cannot delete something on your device, they just invalidate the license key.
But I think Amazon can remove something from their kindles, as happened in the past.
I avoid purchasing DRM’d ebooks, because you don’t actually own them, and you never know when your access could be revoked. But I do frequently check out ebooks from my library.
The books still return to the library on their end - holding on to them longer by disconnecting from the internet doesn’t prevent anyone else from checking them out. (I checked with my library.)
I have found numerous sites that will give me side-by-side translations of some of my favorite Russian authors (haven’t tried Sholokhov yet) and got a few chapters into this: Читать бесплатно книгу "Братья Карамазовы" - Достоевский Федор Михайлович. This site may have other classics in the original. There are indeed paperback versions, some hard to obtain, leading to my main observation on this topic: I haven’t yet found a good ebook reader that lets one scribble notes in the margins, which I can do with my paperback version of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time!
In my youth that would have been a massive crime even in books I own, but then I started myself doing it and my linux bible has so many notes in could not possiblely replace it.
A friend of mine did just that using
But it had limited interest, she gave me a copy and as yet never opened it, even though I get a mention for helping her do it.
You can do that with pdf files.
I think you will find that it is automatically copyrighted to the author.
What is really different is that your author friend has decided to not attempt to profit from those rights.
‘Giving it away’ does not seem to be popular in the writing domain , but it is popular among software writers.
Ok if you think so, but it doesn’t prevent anyone else from checking it out, doesn’t cost anyone anything, gives me a couple more days to finish it up if I need them, and my local librarian doesn’t object. Anyone else on here care to jump in? I’m genuinely curious. I had never considered it unethical (and I certainly don’t see how it could be considered rude).
It seems ok to me. All you are doing is making a slightly fuzzy return date.
I think the library should allow extensions, like they do with real books.
took me so long to get 100 pages into the second volume of Brothers Karamazov (two hardback volumes) - my library wouldn’t let me extend the loan (for the 3rd time 
) - that was ~25 years ago… So I gave up… I have a personal copy of Crime and Punishment which I’ve read twice.
But I finally read it (Brothers Karamazov) in e-book format late last year, early this year…
Well with an ebook, they should be able to record the time you spent reading, rather than the date, and return it temporarily while you are not reading , so that others can have a read. That way one licence could be shared , but with only one user at a time being active.
After all, they are licencing use of the book, not the time it spends idle waiting for your attention.
I think what @Karena1 does is fair enough, given that they have not set the licencing up properly in the first place. They should licence the user for so many hours of actual reading time.
An advantage of ereaders vs paperback is that you can change various visual settings, such as font size and the text color.
That is OK but imagine you are waiting to borrow or need as a reference…
Then you should buy it. Lending is for one-off reads and browsing.
Sorry to disagree, but imagine you are student doing an exam, you need it for one term then may never refer to it again.
It should solve that problem, because when it is temporarily returned , someone else can use the licence. With no books held idle, there should always be one available when you want to read.
You could take it further… why should you borrow the whole book when you only use one page at a time? You should be able to borrow one page at a time… then you could have up to 300 people using one licence.
