Margen
You have within reach, from the sofa and without paying anything, a library of 50,283 different titles. It is called eBiblio, it has been run by Spain's Ministry of Culture together with the regional governments since 2014, and it lends e-books, audiobooks, comics, magazines and newspapers to anybody holding a public library card.
The 2023 figures, which are the published ones: 3,503,259 loans, 50,283 different titles and 536,482 licences — the copies that can be out on loan at the same time. And a fourth figure that does not match the other three: 171,860 people used it. In a country of more than forty-eight million.
It is mainly for starting a book you are not sure you will like, which is exactly where paying nineteen euros hurts most. Four steps and that is the end of it.
1. Get the card. It is free and it belongs to your public library, not to eBiblio. In a good many regions you can get it online in ten minutes with an ID document; in others you have to go to the desk once. That is the only paperwork there is.
2. Go in through your own region's door. eBiblio is not a single website: there are seventeen, one per region and autonomous city, plus the phone app. If you live in the Basque Country or Catalonia, your platform is the local one: the service is the same, the door is different.
3. Borrow it and forget about it. A digital loan expires by itself: you do not return it, you do not go to the desk, and the late fine does not exist. If the title you want is out, you reserve it and it tells you when it comes free.
4. If it isn't there, ask for it. Almost every public library has a purchase suggestion form — the slip with which a reader tells their library what to buy. It takes a minute to fill in, and that is how a catalogue ends up resembling what people actually read.
And one warning, so nobody is disappointed: the new-releases catalogue is shorter than a bookshop's and the most wanted titles have a waiting list, exactly as on paper. The books you already know you will reread, you still buy.
Do one single thing today, two minutes' work: open your region's catalogue and look up the last book you nearly bought. If it is there, you know what that card is for.