4.2.3.4 Whatever happened to the online library?
In the early 1990’s when the Internet was just coming into public focus, an analogy that was often used to describe it was “a kind of online library”. In the decade or so since then, the web has become a wonderful research tool with many excellent news and information sources. However, it still lacks many of the aspects of a traditional library.
For example, if you have a credit card you can buy most any book, movie, or video you can think of online; but the concept of borrowing a book from a public library is totally absent.
In fact, very few books are freely available online. While some sites, such as the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org) and Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org), do make books freely available online, the offerings of these sites are modest – even compared to a local branch library. Why? Well, lack of funds for one, but there are other more serious reasons.
Traditional libraries routinely purchase copies of copyrighted material, which they then make available for lending to the general public. In the physical word, the expense and hassle of copying a book, means that the library can only lend out as many copies as it has purchased, and that these copies must be returned before they can be loaned to other individuals. In the digital world, absent a secure digital rights management system, reproducing a copyrighted work is inexpensive and hassle free. For this reason, online libraries are limited to works that are already in the public domain – effectively limiting them to works published prior to 1923. Thus, the vast majority of works published in the 20th and early 21st centuries are unavailable.
If secure digital rights management systems were widely adopted, then an online library could purchase one or two copies of a work and “lend” that work for a fixed period of time. When a book was due back at the library, the borrower’s ability to access the work would expire, and the library would regain the right to loan the book to someone else.