See KiwiX.
The text-only version from 20?? I have stored on my SSD takes up about 55GB.
Project Gutenberg contains most well-known non-copyrighted books and is freely available;
although the quality of the files is of course not up to publishers standards.
Classics like Shakespeare and the works of Charles Dickens.
A 2023 snapshot of all of their books is available here at a size of 83.1 GB.
Standard Ebooks is a more selective offering
but puts significant efforts into formatting and typesetting resulting in a “high-quality” edition.
Could I pay to get a high-quality, up-to-publishers-standards, EPUB version of a library?
Text is so small it would take up (relatively) little space, perfect for throwing on a microSD card for a portable library.
We could even make it read-only.
Illustrations might need to be left out, they just take up too much space.
Now for copyrighted material.
Could I buy a microSD card with all of the ebooks a publisher has?
How much would they ask?
Would a price of $1000 for all children’s books in your native language work?
Kindle Unlimited costs $12/month at the time of writing,
that comes out to $11520 over a (reading) lifespan of 80 years.
Of course, once they have gotten enough people hooked on their service they’ll slowly ~boil the frog~ raise prices.
Would people pay and publishers dare?
How would publishers divide the revenue of such a sale?
Can I get all English YA novels? All Dutch ones?
Buy all dictionaries?
All sci-fi novels, all distopia?
All history books about WWII?
Can I buy a bundle of all work from every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature?
A top 100/1000/whatever books?
In essence I’m trying to turn the subscription model (e.g. by Amazon) on its head.
The subscription model offers you a very large amount of books for a (relatively) fixed amount of dollars per month/year,
but the flip side is that you don’t own anything and
all of it can be arbitrarily taken away by our mighty tech overlords, the moment you go offline or the moment you stop paying of course.
I want the same idea of paying a single (large) sum of money for (almost) all the books I could ever want.
But this time I would own them, read them offline, frictionlessly transfer them between multiple devices (laptop/phone/e-reader/desktop etc.)
and be sure nobody will yank it out from underneath me.
I get a system I can rely upon.
It’s basically the opposite of
“you’ll own nothing and be happy”.
Of course, once they have gotten enough people hooked on their service they’ll slowly ~boil the frog~ raise prices.