i type with my fingers not my breath

i type pretty fast

I think pretty fast

I know it's not the whole world (🙄) but it is the kind of move more and more impoverished schools are going to try or are already thinking of trying. This is only the tip of that iceburg.

We saved our colleges and universities during Covid, no joke. But once the crisis ended our budgets get cut again, layoffs ensue, etc etc. academia business as usual.

this is my career and livelihood and I depend on it to pay my ever-climbing rent and keep my health insurance stable so my disabled spouse can stay alive, so yeah, I take it pretty seriously, dude. I've been overeducated, underpaid and under-appreciated for too long so I'm fairly cynical, full of thoughts and opinions, and exist only by the grace of coffee and cardigans. 🤷‍♀️ welcome to the internet?

It absolutely did not "work for everyone." It worked for a selection of students in certain majors and fields where most of their required materials were already available in an online format. The rest got a cobbled together pile of JUST OK, and that's only if they had a damn good library team who worked their collective asses off to get students the things they needed.
Things you may not know if you weren't in the librarian trenches during quarantine (from a 15+ year veteran of academic librarianship):

* A lot of the fancy databases full of content that helped students get through the pandemic? THE PEOPLE WHO SELL US THOSE GAVE US A SWEET DEAL OR GAVE IT TO US FOR FREE FOR THAT PERIOD OF TIME, due to the unprecedented nature of what the world was dealing with. They did this out of the goodness of their hearts..... OH WAIT, no, sorry, I mean they did it to get our students hooked on their content so we'd have to then keep the subscription once the free trial wore off the next year or else have sad, angry mobs of students. One the one hand, I'm glad the students were finally using all our digital collections! But on the other hand, those things are NOT cheap and they gouge us more every year because we don't own any of the content, just license to view it on a yearly fee basis.

* We broke copyright. We broke copyright A LOT. Like A LOT A LOT. Every single academic librarian I know did exactly the same. There was a general consensus until, I think, partway into 2021, that temporarily stretched the "fair use" clause we labor within to infinity and beyond. We basically ignored copyright and did what we had to do to keep schools afloat. Some of the bigger, richer, fancier schools managed to implement a Controlled Digital Lending solution of some kind to maintain their copyright purity practices - the "one copy, one loan" idea. The rest of us? We did what we had to do to keep our universities open and keep our jobs because without them we'd lose our health insurance and get Covid and die.

* The pandemic pushed academia as a whole to adopt MUCH BETTER policies with regards to digital materials and digital access, including the move to OERs (Open Educational Resources, i.e. the "free text books" you describe). Some profs moved to them out of need, some profs moved to them because they were directed to. But lots of profs said nope, I'MMA TEACH THIS HOW I ALWAYS TEACH IT HARRUMPH. And while I don't like working with that type of mindset in a professor, at the same time, it is a royal pain in the butt to change your course's textbook because it means you have to re-write your entire curriculum. And considering how many classes are taught by adjuncts making less than a living wage, they do not have the time to be rewriting their entire class to a new book. Sometimes it's the department that mandates which books to use. Those of us who are in charge of Course Reserves are often met with profs who insist on using the out-of-print version of a textbook rather than change their ways, so.... good luck with that? Now that we follow copyright to the letter again, we can only scan and provide up to a small portion of each text. And those digital books cost WAAAAAAAY more than anybody outside of libraries realize. What you pay for a digital book of any kind, textbook or romance novel on kindle, add a zero to the end of your price and you'll approximate the low end of what it costs a library to buy it. OR, I should say, buy the opportunity for our users to view it under certain conditions, because we don't usually actually own them. Greedy publishers gonna greedy.

* The research databases that have been "online for decades"? Um... did you use a research database in 2003, per chance? Because I did. LOL they were NOT what we have now. We were still forming complex boolean phrases and stuff then to get a tiny fraction of what is available now, and even then, it was only to get the abstract and citation. THEN we went hunting for either the physical copy or, sometimes, a digital one, but it was still iffy. Yes, I'm old, etc etc. When I was in college, a few short years before that in the late 90s, I'd spent my entire undergrad life using a DIAL-UP MODEM to get search a text-based version of the library catalog. These modern databases haven't been around for as long as you think. That said, yes students are better at reading things online these days. HELL, I was an early adopter of reading things online rather than print when I got to grad school 20 years ago, mostly because printing costs were high and reading online was free. BUT NO MATTER HOW EASY online reading is, not everything is online, especially in any humanities degree program or a major that requires you to learn history of some kind. And even if these databases have technically been around this long, students come into my library every day not knowing how to use them at all, or what awesome other stuff the library has that they can access, digitally or otherwise.

I want to live in this world where a sudden, shifty move to ONLINE ONLY LIBRARIES makes sense, but holy crap we are nowhere near there yet so please slow your roll.

With all due respect, NO, not everything is online. Only a small chunk of the world's print collections have been digitized. Also, not everything online is free, or available at all to most of us due to a messy web of copyright restrictions around the world. Yes, much of what is newly published today comes in digital format as well, but what about the thousands of years of printed records we have behind us? If you think "just digitize them" is a solution, I can tell you that librarians and archivists like me have been doing just that very thing for decades now and have only made a tiny dent in the world's knowledge supply. Digitization is a slow, costly process that has a myriad of legal pitfalls in your way due to copyright. And even if we wanted to only buy digital copies of new publications from here on out, don't think that the price you pay Amazon for a kindle book is what libraries pay for our digital books. OH, NO, we pay a complex and exorbitant pile of money for licensing fees to the publishers (10x your price or more) EVERY YEAR, who often then limit how many people we can check it out to, for how long, and then sometimes if you buy access to a big book collection they will randomly remove a bunch of books from it with no warning. This idea is ludicrious.