My past few posts have all been on a theme – it would appear that the surviving library will find a way to disperse its materials electronically rather than physically – of course this might, by the way, mean that what we call a LOCAL library will look incredibly different from our current idea of what that means. If most of your material is hosted and distributed digitally, physical location begins to matter less.
Anyway. Hulu is pretty sweet. Hip to the times and all that.
I should point out, though – things on the internet are not currently free. Unless you can obtain internet access without paying for it (at the library, for example – and even then, that’s tax supported, SOMEONE is paying Verizon or whoever a pretty hefty bill, I’m sure), you are paying for capacity to have information streaming into your face at your whim.
But yes, all THAT said – Hulu. Sweet. And all legal problems being equal, I don’t see any reason not to have a visual collection that works a lot like OverDrive does.
AND – I feel I should say again: I am aware that it’s only a fairly small segment of the developed population (and a TINY segment of the world population) that has access to the technology required to make these ideas feasible. BUT, the technology is getting progessively cheaper, and costing less in extra-monetary ways as well. Also, it’s important to remember that books used to be for only the unbelievably elite – some pleb like me would never have been able to write these sentences, much less have access to anything that might clue me in on the world of the written word at all.
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