Libraries, the places where homeless people, famously, shave and go BM, are seeing an uptick in subscribers thanks to their embrace of ebooks. Our own Brooklyn system has had downloadable ebooks for a few years now and the system is fairly simple: you check out a book to read on your device and then “check it back in” when you’re done. This frees up the download for the next person. The book deletes itself automatically past the due date.

The The Telegraph believes these downloads could help save libraries. Quoth some librarian dude:

Tony Durcan, former president of The Society of Chief Librarians, said: “Book issues have seriously declined in recent years.

“This is an exciting development. These are not going to replace the paper book, they are as well as.”

Exciting development indeed. Now when are they going to clear out all those pesky “paper books” and turn libraries into huge computer clusters?