Yeah, I covered this:<p>&gt; One can argue that the former is slightly better because the both of us can&#x27;t read it at the same time, but in my view we&#x27;re just rationalizing.<p>With books, most of us just lend books when we&#x27;re done reading them. It&#x27;s rare where both need to read at the same time, although (I guess) that can happen.<p>My greater point is that we, as a society, are perfectly comfortable lending books out to friends or having public libraries simply because we&#x27;ve grown up doing it that way. In an alternative universe, if public libraries or paper books were invented today, most people (especially intellectual property lawyers) would view it as a form of intelletual property theft and consider those things &quot;morally wrong&quot;. Not that I&#x27;m saying that&#x27;s right or wrong, it&#x27;s just that people have a tendency to understand the present in terms of the past (case-based reasoning).