shiny things 25/ manufactured scarcity

Libraries and Learning as a battleground

I love libraries. I grew up in them. They are truly palaces for the people. With the growing ebook and audiobook industry and the sheer convenience of it all — and I’m not complaining — libraries have new complicated problems to solve. How does one adapt a scarcity-based sharing model to a platform where there is no inherent scarcity?

Overdrive / Libby is THE platform of choice for global libraries to provide e-services. they may have had some competition, but today they dominate. Overdrive is available in every US zip code I tested, as well as here in Singapore. My Canadian friends have it (and brag about the quality of the collection).

A few years ago I discovered this article from the New Yorker, that explains the fragile economic treaties that make libby e-services work. Libraries had long provided some e-services, but as you can imagine, these all exploded in popularity during the pandemic.

KKR owns Overdrive, and “private equity debt barons buy your favorite thing” has never been good news for users. How will KKR squeeze their rake from a service based on providing free services? They have plenty of options, but they came into the deal owning multiple Audiobook brands (RBmedia, Tantor, though recent news has these for sale) and are finalists in a bid to buy Simon & Schuster.

I enjoyed this salty AF series of complaints about how the overdrive experience is going for some users:

Nine Lives

The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries

As a hyperlexic child, I read the way other people breathed — constantly if allowed, desperately if thwarted. As an adult, books are still only slightly less necessary to me than air. I read over a hundred of them every year — many times more books than a permanent member of the precariat like myself could ever afford to buy…

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6 months ago · 63 likes · 49 comments · Karawynn Long

I’d summarize it as such: if breaking it makes more money, they’ll break it, user rage be damned.

Overdrive’s biggest competitor might be the Palace Project, but in any circumstance where marauding capitalists (Overdrive’s B-corp be damned) are set against non-profits, I don’t set even odds.

There’s an amazing link hidden in the 9 lives discussion above: Library Technology merger charts — The KKR agglomeration looks tiny in comparison. Elsevier, for example, owns thousands of academic journals, is STAGGERINGLY PROFITABLE, has a history of shenanigans and recently alienated an entire scientific journal and their editorial board.

Those journal editors left to create an open access journal, which is admirable. They join the existing roving tribes of the Curious, who lean into the internet’s infinite scale and want information to be free and freely available. The curiosity movement has martyrs and Guy Fawkes-like heroes of the Internet Archive and Sci-Hub.

While most creative writers today can imagine a 1000 true fans path to success (thanks, internet), the Scientific / Academic publishing world has profoundly different economic forces. All of this platform and imprint consolidation reeks of rent-seeking and the Private Equity playbook, but what’s to stop it?

I don’t really have an argument here — this is the end of this week’s rabbit hole.