Comment by lukejduncan

I think you're being downvoted too much for this. It's a reasonable statement, and it's the premise of the licensing mechanisms libraries pay for with ebook subscriptions. Books have an average shelf life, you can compute the number of reads per copy and use that as a proxy for how much to charge a library to lend an ebook. (That's the premise anyways, there's plenty of politics to deal with too)