I posted a while back about how Cover and Thomas’s book was posted online now, but it turns out that the license for online access uses “tokens.” Once Berkeley has run out of “tokens,” access is denied to the book. This is one of the stupidest decisions I have ever heard of, akin to the music industry’s head-in-the-sand approach to digital music. The way in which online book resources are used is different from print medium, and to force the library to buy more tokens is akin to selling someone a book which they can read only a certain number of times. I’m not saying that they should not charge at all for the book, or that they should charge less than for a library-bound hard copy, but this token system displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how books are used. I wonder if the person who designed this system has ever had to use a book other than “How To Stick Your Head Up Your Ass for Dummies.”

Yes, I’m angry.