Licensing should make sense for all books, it just requires a reasonable per lend fee. It shouldn't really be in the publisher's interest to prevent libraries f

Licensing should make sense for all books, it just requires a reasonable per lend fee. It shouldn't really be in the publisher's interest to prevent libraries from lending more copies. They'd just be limiting their own customer base. That's the capitalist ideal though, there's plenty of reasons why it's not currently happening. Most publishers still seem to think they can continue pricing digital and physical books the same and turn the significant savings in printing costs into pure profit. And they might have some second thoughts about this whole 'lending books' thing. CDL is interesting here because it is in essence a threat that failing to provide a fair digital alternative will just lead to libraries digitizing the books for themselves, and in the worst case cooperate so you can lend a copy of the book provided any (statewide, countrywide, worldwide) library still has an unlent copy.