No, it’s not an option for them to purchase retail copies. They are legally required to purchase special “lending license” variants of books because book publishers lobbied that libraries cost them too much money by just existing.

Afaik, the lending limit only applies to digital copies of books, as physical copies naturally wear out or get lost with time, and thus will require repurchase either way unlike a digital copy. The physical copies are still hellishly expensive.

IA are definitely in the wrong here, but I’m afraid that the publishers will use this win to push for even more restrictions on normal libraries. As it stands, a normal library has to pay exorbitant amounts of money per copy of an ebook they buy, and the ebook can only be lent a certain number of times before it has to be repurchased.

Combined with libraries getting less and less funding every year, this is going to turn into a death knell for libraries.

Libraries pay for each copy, and they pay about 30x as much per copy. And each copy can only be lended a certain number of times (40 or 50 times) before it has to be repurchased.