In The Guardian

Across Australia, 3.7m households have experienced food insecurity over the past 12 months, a jump of almost 350,000 on the previous year, Foodbank’s annual hunger report has revealed.

More than 2.3m of those households were “severely food insecure”, meaning they were actively going hungry, reducing food intake, skipping meals or going entire days without eating.

Today, the ownership of digital books is routinely denied to libraries. Many books are offered to libraries in electronic form only, under restrictive temporary licenses; libraries can never own these e-books, but must pay for them over and over, as if they were Netflix movies.

Some publishers have even explicitly named libraries as direct economic competitors.

Digital books have been removed from libraries and edited without librarians’ knowledge or consent. Library patrons who borrow digital books can no longer have the expectation of privacy, with large publishers, distributors and e-book retailers snooping over the shoulder of every reader to build databases that can be sold or shared with advertisers, law enforcement, landlords or immigration agents.