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it's the opposite if anything! how many people got into reading and writing BECAUSE of libraries? I know I did! I started writing because I was always holed up in the library reading fiction and it inspired me. If libraries didn't exist, I wouldn't have had so much access to books. I didn't have money to buy books, I didn't have bookstores near me. Without libraries, your incentive to write if you ONLY care about paying audiences and profit, would also only be narrowly targeted at people who bought books, and not the general audiences available to you through libraries.

also libraries allow you to try out tons of books, i can't imagine without libraries how people would even decide what to purchase, simply going in blind based on reviews like movies except way more expensive and with a much larger time commitment which means people would be even more selective

but then publishers don't actually care about that, they want to turn digital books into a streaming model, where all works are just "content", a featureless sludge to be pumped into the machine to drive subscriptions :\

the other thing is libraries are one of the few remaining public spaces that people can go to that serve people and not profit or landowners. the reason I read so much as a kid? I hid in libraries to escape bullying. Sure, there's some bookstores that allow people to sit & read, but they're still private stores, and they'll kick you out if they think you're "loitering" or the wrong kind of person. and they're not a place unattended children can just go into & stay.

Libraries provide access to information and access to the wider digital & analog world for so many people, but also, they're run for a completely different purpose than almost any other kind of "public" space left. The death of libraries would hurt more than even the lack of ability of people to read free books. :\

"Tragically, the Court then undermines the important ruling in the Betamax/VCR case that found “time shifting” (recording stuff off your TV) to be fair use, even as it absolutely was repackaging the same content for the same purpose. The Court says that doesn’t matter because it “predated our use of the word ‘transformative’ as a term of art.” But that doesn’t wipe out the case as a binding precedent, even though the Court here acts as though it does."

It's also really bad and is going to hurt a lot of other things about digital preservation and being able to copy/backup/record stuff if the courts now start to decide that recording TV never should have counted as fair use :\

also, libraries aren't a charity, they're a public service

the anti-IA people say the IA allows anybody to borrow while "real" libraries exist for the poor but that's not the purpose of a library & RL libraries don't just exist as charity for the poor

we as a society have lost the concept of what a public service is, we only see things in terms of profit and charity

public libraries exist b/c our societies decided that access to culture, to information, to knowledge, and to a public space that preserves those things is a public good, it's something everybody should have

public libraries are not and should not be a charity that we only minimally fund b/c some people are too poor to partake in capitalism and therefore need a little handout so they can get smarter to partake in capitalism