The exact same books are available electronically nowadays, and are likely to be more up to date than a paper version. Building a library won't make anyone stop reading facebook drivel.
> The exact same books are available electronically nowadays
Not even close. In 2010, there were about 130 million published paper books.[1] In 2012, there were only 1.3 million Amazon Kindle books available.[2] Note that availability is region-based, so no, those books may not actually be available. Google ebook store launched in 2010 with only 3 million titles.[3] A lot of the Kindle "books" are not even books, they are pamphlets or long articles. Library genesis is only 2.1 million books.
I can tell you don't actually read any ebooks. If you did, you would notice that about a third of the digitized Kindle books have the same review: "the formatting of the book is unreadable, I want my money back."
Many of the older books are not digitised and probably never will be. And reading poorly scanned PDFs on a computer screen sucks. Some of the new books are released in paper only as well. Non-tech books don't get more or less up to date. In fact, paper books are great that they can't be easily edited.
Of course "build it and they'll come" doesn't work. But if we could get more people to come to libraries, it'd be awesome in all sorts of ways. And without building it, nobody will even have a chance to come.
Only if you know how to pirate the book, have internet and are willing to do the pirating. Now I afford to buy ebooks or audio books but as a student I could not buy the c++ gaming programming book, the Linux books were not in libraries and I did not had internet. Even if you afford to buy a book or tow a month, if you have more free time you can get more books from the library, start reading them, see if you like them or not, return them and get other ones.
The copyright compensation on electronic books is different from paper based ones. The super greedy licensing deals (where even available) is one of the things that hold back electronic books; they're simply much more expensive than paper-based ones. The Finnish libraries do have e-books, but they're not as common to loan as paper ones are, and not everything is available in e-book format.
Your don't seem to entirely grok just how many books there are available in deadtree format, and how small a fraction of them are easily (and legally) available in electronic form, not to mention professionally laid out and typeset. Plus how few people actually have an e-book reader.
> The exact same books are available electronically nowadays, and are likely to be more up to date than a paper version.
Huh? I was always under the impression that most of the books are still not available electronically. What may be true is that most of the currently published books are also published in e-book format, but that still leaves out a majority of books.
