Physical books impose a natural limit on the number of simultaneous checkouts. I... | Hacker News

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tedunangst on July 28, 2011 | parent | context | favorite | on: Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Sta...

Physical books impose a natural limit on the number of simultaneous checkouts. If a book is very popular, the library will buy more copies to accommodate demand. If a PDF is popular, the publisher expects the library to buy more copies.

It's artificial scarcity, but this is hardly new. The number of books in a library was never limited by the cost of paper.

antihero on July 28, 2011 [–]

Artificial scarcity is possibly one of the most perverse things to come out capitalism.

stcredzero on July 28, 2011 | [–]

The particular 1 bits he took were of unusually high quality.

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