Thanks for a good piece. It’s an important issue to address. I want to take issue a key theme of your argument: that having to pay recurring fees for access to digital books creates a big problem for all-digital libraries. You say:

“If the library purchases an ebook, how do they legally provide access to that ebook? This is a critical issue for an all-digital library, because the fines for breaking an electronic copyright are extremely high. Thus far, the problem has been resolved by paying for licensing through publishers and aggregators, but these continuing fees can also dramatically increase the budget of a library.”

Your solution seems to be that authors and publishers should make their works available mostly free so that libraries can lend them mostly free to readers. The irksome question of how authors and publishers should make a living is addressed with some wishful thinking that in future they will be able to find some unspecified products or services to sell so that they can then afford give away their books.

But consider this. Those “free” paper books sitting on the library shelves, paid for long ago with no further need for payment to the copyright holders, are costing millions and millions of dollars for the buildings, staff and operating expenses to make the freely available. These costs can be mostly dispensed with when a digital library is used. So why not pass these savings on to the copyright owners so they can be fairly compensated instead of housing the all-digital library in expensive, over-staffed buildings and asking the content creators to sacrifice?

Rather than shunning a recurring payment model, we should be emracing this as a way to help address the economic difficulties that authors and other content providers have making a sustainable living from their work.