^ Not all public libraries carry Star Trek books - particularly paperbacks.
I have yet to encounter a public library that does not take requests, and most participate in an inter-library loan system these days.
Unfortunately, neither of those options are always helpful. The last system I lived in charged 5 dollars for each inter-library loan request, in addition to any fees charged by the lending library; essentially, inter-library loans cost as much as buying a mass-market paperback at full price.
The last three systems, further, were interested in recommendations, but saw little demand for the few Star Trek novels they already carried. Non-fiction circulated well at one, but non-fiction Star Trek books aren't published very often - nevermind that they still aren't the novels.
But when it comes to luxury items that you just don't need? When it comes to items that are, frankly, a sign of minor affluence more than anything else, like an eBook? Then I'm very much a Capitalist. You don't need the eBook, so let the market decide what the price should be. If enough people get pissed at a given practice, then they won't buy it and the price will go down or the ePublishing industry will collapse.
The ultimate problem with the ebook market - as with many similar markets, like digital music, home video, etc. - is that it is distorted, not fully capitalist. The current structure of intellectual property law grants monopolies to content owners that prevent effective competition and true market pricing. Mass-abandonment or the use of some other monopoly or near monopoly is usually necessary to provoke any change in practices that benefits the consumer.
As it happens, readers have been abandoning the publishing industry. A 2007 report produced by the National Endowment for the Arts (Research Report #47) found that between 1992 and 2002, the percentage of adult Americans who had read a book not required for work or school in the preceding year declined from 61% to 57%. The declines in several age groups were more pronounced. Seven percent of both 35-44 year-olds and 18-24 year-olds disappeared from the reading population.
Between 1985 and 2005, average household spending on books declined 54%, adjusted for inflation (I use a form of the unskilled wage adjustor, not the CPI; the former better predicts the prices of inexpensive luxury goods such as books, movie tickets, comic books, magazines, pre-internet newspapers, etc.). Consumer book sales declined 6% between 2000 and 2006 alone.
It would be easy to suggest that the decline in readership over the two decades examined in the report is due to competition from video games, home video, cable/satellite television, and the internet, but the report also found that recreational reading among children under 13 remained steady despite those influences (which now take up a large part of children's days, but seem to have drawn their time from activities other than reading).
Falling readership, however, seems to have produced little change in the publishing industry. Like the music industry, they seem to have assumed that the problem they face is technological and external, not one of their own making. The simple fact is, though, that the market is not capitalist; it is distorted by monopoly. And monopoly breeds inefficiency.
