The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries
karawynn.substack.com
karawynn.substack.com
I'm not sure this qualifies, but IMO it comes close. There's a lot of nuance in the whole discussion about ebooks and public libraries and handwaving about "enshittification" avoids all of it and dumps the responsibility for maintaining the concept of libraries on publishers and private companies.
Consumers and communities are free to continue consuming books using the same models libraries operated under for decades. Ebooks came along and don't fit well with that model, at all. It's another public commons problem we're basically hoping that Somebody Else will solve and then complaining when the foxes guarding the hen house do what foxes do.
I think Cory is about half right about enshittification but there's also a huge dose of entitlement and apathy. If you expect corporations or government to just Do The Right Thing when it's not in the interest of those in power, without regulation or continual threat of loss of power or market share, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
It's not just corporations or government. Any system of organizing multiple human beings that depends on an unbroken chain of Good People Doing The Right Thing is bound to fail, and fail much sooner rather than later. This happens all the time in nonprofit organizations, civil societies, and what have you.
Individual people can be expected to Do The Right Thing, even at personal cost, sometimes. We've all helped strangers change a flat tire even when it's uncomfortably hot outside. But I'm sure we've all also just driven by someone on the side of the road, because we were in a rush to get somewhere.
Over time, and in groups, people can only be expected to operate based on the incentives and disincentives that are presented to them. (Hence your "regulation or continual threat".)
Sure, but do you think Cory expects people to do the right thing? The entire thesis assumes everyone basically having good intentions except the middleman who mostly wants to make money.
It's not a judgment, so much as a very obvious pattern driven by understandable and predictable human behavior.
If we can find a way to break away from the pattern while still assuming people will not do the right thing and keep doing human behavior, we should do that.
Parasitoids are parasites that corrupt a host, eventually resulting in its death. Endoparasitism is where the parasitoid infects and lives inside the host.
That's the whole point? Enshittification is a response to the idea the capitalism optimizes for the consumer, when instead it points out that it optimizes for the business. It doesn't provide a solution, but it at least names the problem.
Note that again, libraries are already paying for the product. This is not "free."
Ah yes, the enshittification of "enshittification". Definitely did not see that one coming.
It's an old joke that the only group besides Tech Companies to call their customers 'users' are drug dealers, but there is great truth in that.
When tech companies performs enshittification, it's not terribly different from a heroin dealer doubling the profits he extracts from a customer by cutting with other substances (mixing with cheaper substances to dilute the concentration of the most expensive component, for those unfamiliar with the lingo) when he knows that customer is experiencing withdrawal - he knows the customer is hopelessly hooked, addicted, and desperate for more, and he knows he can manipulatively extract even more value from the customer in such a vulnerable state.
For this reason, I propose it may just as well be called something more like "Addict Abuse", or "Heartless exploitation of the vulnerable", because that's exactly what it is.
That society continues to cherish and prize companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, Apple, Twitter, and others rather than regarding them with the extreme prejudice and utter contempt commonly reserved for manipulative dealers of addictive drugs is nothing short of baffling to me.
P.S. Before any corporate shills accost me for using the previous names of technology companies - I know I'm using the old name. I'm using the old name for the same reason I still call Blackwater "Blackwater", even though they call themselves "Academi" now - rebranding to cover up old sins is itself a manipulative tactic to memoryhole the sins. I will be no more complicit in covering up the rampant psychological, privacy, and government-directed first amendment abuses of Facebook or Twitter than I am in covering up the war crimes of Blackwater.
You don't need to sell people on the idea. Cool your jets and reread the comment you replied to.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/we-have-entered-the-self-loa...
BigVirtuousTech is now BVT!
Not to mention that this piece isn't even about "enshittification" at all -- it's a long rant against a feature change which is really just "I don't like this change in behavior". The search box likely changed to show results from only your library, instead of worldwide results, because it was confusing a lot of library patrons -- who, remember, are not always very tech-savvy.
The whole concept of "enshittification" is supposed to be about behavior that benefits the corporation at the expense of the user, like stuffing full of ads or jacking up prices. But this is just a UX change that the author doesn't like.
So it's a misleading example of "enshittification" even to begin with.
Overdrive sacrificed its usefulness to its users to gain market-share with libraries, and it's achieved 95% penetration there. Now it's paring back functionality for libraries, hiding features that might enable them to leave their platform, and using its monopoly advantage to force them to pay more for features that were previously free and easy to use. The most apparent reason it's doing this is because it was bought by a notorious investment firm with a long history of squeezing as much money out of their acquisitions as possible before leaving them to die.
That seems to support the original definition pretty well. I agree that the word does a disservice to its definition.
that doesn't make sense because Overdrive seems to be a private company working with the government to provice a service. It was described as already having a monopoly before this feature change. It has no financial incentive to make things worse, not for money nor market share. This sounds more like Hanlon's Razor to me.
> But this is just a UX change that the author doesn't like.
That's not the case. This removed the ability for me, a library patron, to request a digital title that I had before. I can still request a printed book to be added to the catalog, but for digital title our library FAQ states (which I presume is copied from OverDrive): If you’re looking for a specific digital title that we do not have, you can use a Notify Me tag in Libby. Notify Me will alert you if the library buys the title. However, not all publishers sell their content to libraries in digital format. If you cannot find a title in Libby’s catalog, then we cannot buy the item.
This looks like the control for digital purchases was removed from the libraries and moved to OverDrive/Libby, which is definitely not a simple UX change.
This doesn't serve my interests at all and, according to the article, doesn't serve the library interests either, as they don't have the information they had before about who requests what books and can't control the purchase process. It's also (according to the author) a sign of the (coming) platform changes for the worse, which I tend to agree with.
But maybe it requires people who are that shrill and eyeroll-inducing to change things?
But it's delivered in a way that is wholly unpalatable to anybody who's not already close to his thinking.
[1] Former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, continues to dabble in music with various bands / backing bands and has a YouTube series called "What Would Jello Do?" Also did a lot of spoken word shows but may have cut back on that in the COVID era.
if we're still relying on social media like Reddit and Twitter to spread the word organically, perhaps.
Consequently, from a user perspective, this leads to the counterintuitive idea that you probably shouldn't trust any platform who doesn't explain how they're making money off of you.
All the corporations accused of acting this way are network-effect quasi-monopolies. That's the root cause.
If you like it, that’ll be $0.79 per use or $5.99 per month on the value-saver subscription.
If you're going to argue for normalizing this word, you need a better reason than it being edgy to the straw pearl-clutchers living rent free in your head.
These people do literally believe that. They represent a sizable political faction in the United States.
best of luck with your mission. Meanwhile I simply want to convince companies to not make their products worse for short term profit.
Which is not especially new - rent seeking in general is explicitly not illegal. But historically, it was viewed as a general negative for society, and something to be addressed through policy.
Now it seems to be "business as usual" in the race to accumulate as much wealth as possible, consequences to society at large be damned.
Seems people want a nicer word than "Enshittification". Something more polite.
But then the 'nicer' word like 'rent seeking', half the people don't recognize that it is bad, or what it is.
So think that is the argument that "Enshittification" is a good description, because people instantly get what it means,
Definition->'something is happening and it is taking something good and turning it into shit'
If something is "verkakte", then it is "enshittified", i.e. it has has reached the end of the process of "enshittification".
The new English word has a more specific meaning though.
Yes, companies would like to make more money for doing the same work or less. So would everyone. Would you like a raise every year, even if you’re the same person doing the same job? Would you like to have passive income so you don’t have to work so hard?
It explains why some things get worse over short or long periods of time, but is not great at explaining why so many things get better over time. Like if I held mobile phones from 2003 and 2023 and said “you can buy either for $600,” for most folks it would be a no-brainer. How did mobile phones, a huge market with huge investment, avoid “enshittification”?
Now I know that Cory’s writing is more sophisticated than what I’m saying. But most folks who throw the term around (like this blog post) are not. It’s become a broad label for anything some people don’t like, like “late stage capitalism” or “woke.”
App changes interface slightly: “enshittification!!”
The original essay was interesting. The broad application of the term, I am finding tiresome.
They didn’t. They spy on you more and more to extract more value from you after purchase. They have non-replaceable batteries and screens, which means you can’t service them easily. They are worse at being phones than plastic Nokias 20 years ago. Companies are incentivized to create apps which are trapped in the phone’s walled gardens rather than creating webpages which anyone can access. The list goes on.
People don’t care about replaceable batteries and voice calls. They want the magic pocket oracle to just work with a minimum of faffing about.
You have to reach people on what THEY care about, not preach to them about what they should care about. (And yes, I’m self-aware enough to see the inherent irony of this comment.)
And the first-gen iPhone didn't have a replaceable battery or screen either.
As far as I can tell, iPhones have only gotten better. And ever since Apple introduced the SE, they've become more affordable as well.
It's way better at being a phone than an old Nokia as well -- the convenience and sound quality of wireless earbuds, using higher-quality audio and background noise removal, is really something.
Well, based on Docorow's term, it's because there wasn't a 2 way market. Instead of phone manufacturers playing 2 sides off each other, it was a a much simpler arrangement: manufacturers sell phones to consumers, and there are enough manufacturers that they can't get entirely complacent.
Perhaps in the early days, when manufacturers acted as an intermediary between the carriers and consumers, that was more prone to enshittification. And phones in those days were pretty stagnant, looking for new ways to grab a couple of bucks (remember when they charged for ringtones? Or wildly overcharged for SMS messages?). Phones becoming unlocked, and phones rapidly improving in abilities and price did happen roughly around the same time, but perhaps that's unrelated to enshittification.
Do you have any friends who are companies?
It's amusing that so many people who comment here are so bothered by this, while using absurd words like "orthogonal" to describe a concept for which simpler words exist. Just one example.
that's the issue. We don't need to be crude to get a point across.
Not everything has to be jargon.
If the telephone were invented today, we'd be listening to ads instead of ringing tones.
It seems to me that capitalism reinvented itself over past 100 years by privatizing things that were either previously public or nobody could imagine them to be private goods. Aside from the military, utilities, copyrights (and fair use), attention and personal data, there are also various forms of consumer debt (mortgages). So I think it's important to put all these things into same context.
But it's a goofy term, and Doctorow is indeed annoying. Bird of a feather with this writer, whose style is also incredibly irritating. Nevertheless, good points worth making.
If this term must be ironic. And I guess, dismissed.
Then what is the non-ironic, serious word, that does capture this intent, that we can use without being dismissed.
Libraries are a great public service. Really, these moves to enshittify otherwise free or modest cost to use public works, can be seen as an encroaching of capitalist ways and means into what are traditionally public ways and means.
And it really is not that either is bad or good.
Markets, sales, money, competition, ADS and all that clearly have a place and value in society.
So do public works, like libraries, parks, and the like.
The branding should better reflect these realities.
It is really nice to have places where there is not an expectation of spending money.
Cory sees denying society of these places as "shitty"
While I agree, that is toxic when it does not need to be.
slumping into the melt
reversion to the mean and nasty
californication
Instead of discussing the very real social consequences of companies like KKR gaming the ridiculously over-revered economic system and notable absence of any legislation preventing that.
HN falls prey to simpleton spin-doctoring.
You mean HN is getting enshittified?
> that's how this is supposed to work, right? They make money, we serve our customers.
Yes*, but they make _a lot_. Being bought by an investment firm should be an indicator. Also, while I was there, they could give each employee half a million dollars and still be in the black at the end of the year. My point is that a company that profits from taxpayer money should be accountable to at least _some_ effort to be more efficient and less greedy. OverDrive is an example, but is not the only case. Yes, I realize the irony of expecting a business to make less money. But they are also dealing with budgets of (involuntarily) collected tax vs individuals voluntarily paying them.
My dream is that a different service comparable to Libby/Overdrive woud exist without any profit motive. Give it a similar funding model similar to libraries, or something directly from the federal government. It's hard to think like that in this neoliberal status quo, but the public library is a shining example that a different way of doing things is possible.
I always thought it was weird that well-capitalized companies like Canonical weren't leveraging the fact that libraries pay so much money for shitty enterprise-grade desktop deployments and other services for library operations. Seems like the perfect target for the "selling services and support" model that everyone talks about wrt making money off FOSS.
Is that Overdrive's fault? That's how the game is played.
Why aren't more companies coming into this space if it's so lucrative?
I appreciate your optimism, but hasn't it recently become more clear that the world is full of wrongs that cannot, will not or for some reason are not yet fixed by good ol' rational market economics?
https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-eboo...
The publishers and libraries end up trapping themselves with DRM and other requirements that make it hard for other platforms to come in.
So even then, why begrudge anyone for offering a product or service that someone wanted at a price both parties considered fair? Users saw value in the service otherwise they wouldn't use them. Is there some sort of mandate that this type of service be used? (If Overdrive is breaking the law or defrauding customers then that's a separate issue.)
So yeah, this could come crashing down. But more likely it will be like the transition of any format. Audiobooks have moved from tapes to CDs to digital in the span of about 15 years (in 2007 we still had lots of tape audiobooks) so we tossed the tapes and bought CDs because people got rid of their tape players and then did the same with CDs. We didn't dig in our heels and tell people tape players were good enough because it's not a luxury we have.
If the public wanted a building filled with nothing but adult magazines, or nothing but gardening books, would the library not have any choice but to fulfill those narrow desires at the expense of preserving great works of literary art?
Yes, it is the only driving factor for a public library.
It turns out people do want to preserve stuff, so we keep an archive of local interest items that the public wants (microfilm, city directories, notable local authors and artists), but we don't view ourselves as an archive. That's not our mission nor are we equipped to do that work beyond the limited capacity we already have.
The same goes for materials in the collection. If they do not check out, we remove them and replace them with things that hopefully will. Years of experience has taught me that people do not want an old collection, no matter what its value. They want current items that are clean and relevant to them and that's what we're here for. We're a government institution and are ultimately answerable to what the public wants.
But here's the thing, like with our local archive, the desires of the public and preservation do often align. That's why libraries look the way they do. People do check out great works of literary art and we often replace those as they wear out. People do want some archival materials and ask for them when doing research. The situation you describe doesn't happen because it turns out most people don't want all gardening books or adult magazines. But we don't keep anything that doesn't get used just for the sake of it, all of it serves the mission.
With all due respect: if this is true, how come it feels like I can never find any recent-ish literature in any given library? be it a rural area or university, I feel like trying to find anything more recent than 20 years old or so just doesn't happen. And technical books evolve quickly.
maybe it's a domain problem.
So generally speaking, providing "what the public wants" is the entire purpose of public libraries. Obviously librarians exercise a lot of discretion about what specifically to buy and make available in the library, but most have long since moved on from paternalistic notions of needing to provide access only to The Great Books.
One might posit a phenomenon parallel to enshitification, perhaps deeply tied up in it, which might be called "inshutification": the shrinking of spheres of awareness, responsibility, and influence
Starting off with the very first premise: that you need to install an app. Libby is available as a web app, so that first big point the author is making just factually incorrect. They didn't need to install the app. So instantly the author here loses a massive amount of credibility to me.
Then, it's not like this whole "deep search" and "notify me" tag is hard to find, and no you don't need to make.it yourself, and no you don't need to study the help articles to understand how it works. The only part I might say is tricky is you need to click the filter button to get to the advanced search settings where there's a big button that says "deep search" and explains what that means. Then for results not in your library there's a dedicated notify me tag button which when tapped explains how it works. I didn't have to go to the help area at all to get a detailed explanation of how stuff worked, and I got to it with obviously interactable UI elements.
The actual enshittification here is that readers used to be able to tell libraries what they wanted for free, and now this data is apparently an Advantage Plus(tm) premium feature that libraries need to pay for, so OverDrive can make more money.
Like, if they're missing that extremely basic thing, how can I trust they're not also missing big parts of the rest of the story?
If I write a blog post with deep analysis about NASA but start off with a rant about how they faked the moon landing and the moon is made of cheese you probably wouldn't trust the rest of my writing right?
And they act like Overdrive was free while Libby is charging, but Overdrive wasn't free before. There's no actual breakdown of the total costs of these two platforms, just some vague trust us its more expensive. Which I can't really trust a blog post of rumors without hard facts when the things I can check as hard facts are downright wrong!
The whole round earth thing is just a basic thing I missed!
Overdrive gave them something better than what they ever had, and then took it away. The libraries aren't left off worse than before.
Personally, I always search using the library catalog's web site, so this whole article is about a feature I never saw. I would encourage everyone search that way instead of directly on Overdrive.
I haven't looked up the numbers recently, but after a spike in ebook usage several years ago, the percentage dropped and I suspect continues to do so. Most people are over the hype and have returned to physical book usage.
It doesn't. I used to be able to submit a request for printed and digital books, but my library stopped accepting those requests for digital books and (just as I commented elsewhere in this thread) now refers me to the Notify Me feature and Overdrive catalog (and if it's not in the catalog, I can't request it do be added).
But the feature still exists, so this is just untrue.
> “For about a decade now, OverDrive has provided users with digital library access two ways: through its website (individual library portals hosted on overdrive.com) and its mobile apps (OverDrive and Libby). I’ve always gone the web route myself — at first because it was the only option, before the app was built; later deliberately avoiding the app in order to reduce the amount of surveillance data collected.”
As for the feature itself, your comment seems to boil down to “Dark pattern UI changes are ineffective” but we know that’s not true; if they were unprofitable, companies wouldn’t constantly exploit them.
Libby isn't just a mobile app
> ...through its website (individual library portals hosted on overdrive.com) and its mobile apps (OverDrive and Libby). I’ve always gone the web route myself — at first because it was the only option, before the app was built; later deliberately avoiding the app in order to reduce the amount of surveillance data collected.
Once again stating Overdrive is the website and Libby is only an app, while missing Libby is also a website.
> Okay, so at the very least, OverDrive is trying to force people away from the web and into their proprietary app
Here they're directly stating the functionality they're looking for is only in the app, which as stated Libby is available as a website so this is factually incorrect.
> Disgruntled, I downloaded Libby and tried to figure out how to “add a ‘Notify Me’ tag”.
If they knew Libby was a website and they hated the idea of installing the app, why would they disgruntly download the app?
> you must first run a search, and then activate the “deep search” filter tag (!?!) in the search interface. Because that is intuitive and makes total sense.
I mean, kind of? Huh, I couldn't find it from the basic search, let me press the advanced search button, oh hey there's a description of what deep search is right in the advanced search filter area, neat.
And as an actual user of the feature that discovered it entirely organically, I don't see how it's a dark pattern at all on the client side.
Adding dead clicks to a feature you don’t want people to use is a dark pattern whether it affects you personally or not. Normally one tries to remove dead clicks in good UX design, e.g.: https://userpilot.com/blog/dead-click/
Some real fraction of users really will stop using a feature if you add a single additional click between it and them.
Personally I prefer knowing right away if a title is available or not from the search page instead of thinking I might be able to get it right away only to find out when I get into it that its not available. So yeah, I prefer to hide those under the advanced search instead of having a search result with hundreds of items of which only a dozen or so are actually consumable immediately. It was super annoying having to wade through tons of results which I couldn't even access anyways, and its not like requesting it would make it available in minutes.
Imagine searching a store front for some item like a shirt. You get thousands of results, practically every shirt ever made. In the old app, you have to step into each individual result to see if its actually for sale or not or you can click a button and maybe someday they might consider stocking it for you. Is this not a dead click?
Which one is more of a dead click, going into an item page expecting to access it but not being able to access it, or just not seeing it in the default view? In the end the result is the same, the user couldn't just hop into the book.
If dead clicks are to be avoided, the Libby is miles ahead of Overdrive. I've had many hundreds more dead clicks in Overdrive than I had in Libby, and I've used Libby way more than Overdrive.
Have you actually used these platforms? If not, are you really going to tell someone who actually uses these platforms every day what their experience is actually like while you've never used it?
I don't see how its an omissions when it does exist.
Omitting the third way (e-readers) is weird.
I'm probably an outlier, compared to others in this thread but I've recently started engaging more with my public library...both physically and digitally (using the apps / websites referenced in the article). Since Reddit and other social media companies did their thing, I started to use my time to read books and magazines...so I have really started to appreciate my public library as a source for gaining knowledge.
Maybe I'm just in an unfortunate area of the US but I've noticed a lack of desire to support public libraries from 'leaders'. Recently, one of my county's council members suggested we should close public library locations as a means to save money to give more money to our police departments. Then the county mayor signed some memorandum saying that public libraries couldn't prevent people from bring loaded weapons in to the library. The latter is especially egregious considering his own office building forbids people from entering with loaded weapons.
Maybe you could ask the library how you can support them. The library system in my area seems to be a little healthier, but I know they depend on a community organization called "Friends of the [city name] Library." The library also holds little fundraisers from time-to-time. Mine is having a used book sale soon, for example.
Libraries are amazing and nobody better try to hurt my library! :)
Then, when I got set up with a home, I stopped going to libraries so much, and my card expired. I went back just a couple of years ago, and by that time, my personal situation had changed in a few other ways. For one, I have a good Android mobile device. I also have a little SanDisk Clip Jam MP3 player.
I was browsing the library's music collection, and I guess it was in the app, Libby or OverDrive or whatever they offer. And I went up to the tech support desk and I asked if they had any DRM-free music that I could load on my MP3 player. And the tech support lady said that if it didn't have DRM, they couldn't take it back when my loan period expired. And I said "oh, right."
So I browsed the books on Libby and I may or may not have ventured to install the app, but I could tell at that time that it was an odious way to treat library patrons. To tell us that we had to load some commercial app on our device to get eBooks, rather than compatibility with some existing, popular eReader at least, or just give us the ePub or PDF. But I suppose that that market space has been ceded to the online Internet Archive type places, now. My father makes great use of Hathi Trust and he has repeatedly recommended it to me.
Personally, I don't care how old a book or work is. I subscribe to Sturgeon's Law, and so it's best to pick and choose from works that have withstood the test of time, you know, unless I want a book on Cybersecurity, or programming Python or something.
So while I have renewed my library card, and I stay in good standing and I like the other kinds of stuff that is on offer at my public library, I will not be playing footsie with Libby, and I guess currently that the best way to use my library is a backup Site B for my WFH, when my apartment is unavailable for some reason.
I don't understand this - isn't a popular eReader also commercial? If you had to log into Kindle to get the book, would that be better?
Edit: And for epubs, if the devices doesn't have the capability ootb (e.g Hisense phones) themeselves, there is e.g open-source, really well done, KOReader :3
Given libraries traditionally worked because books are not (easily) replicable, and so selling a library a book didn't mean a drop in sales particularly, how do you keep the same situation with open digital formats? How do you make the publishing economics work, outside of schemes such as Amazon's Kindle Unlimited?
Book Publishers largely are the ones to lose out in digital publishing. The only thing they have left to offer is connections for distribution. And since most of their costs were associated with the production and distribution of a material book, most of those costs disappear too. Cory Doctorow has asserted in the past that the biggest issue any author has is discovery - do people actually know the work I wrote exists?
Once you've crossed that barrier, if you ask people to pay for your work many of them will. Even if you don't prevent them from freely replicating your work.
Nov.el in emacs or aldiko in android for instance.
The idea of getting an epub from the library and reading it within emacs sounds quite nice BTW :)
I think their definition of popular could differ from yours and be something like "more than 50 people use it" rather than "more than 50,000 people use it".
I don't think that is feasible, do you?
It seems my strategy of defaulting to gender neutral pronouns no longer has a 100% success rate and may need modified.
You really ought to “play footsie” with Libby; it’s a fantastic app that enables more people to have access to your library’s content than before.
Kind of insane to me that someone like you who knows the value of a resource like the library wants to restrict how people are able to engage with the content and therefore restrict who has access.
Are you sure? Went through UNO (University of Nebraska Omaha) catalog last week only to find that half (or more) of their offerings that hit my search results were online-only.
also drm-free media because i grew up with copying stuff from libraies (books, cassette tapes, cds, vhs ...) and imho this is still a big requirement.
I don't get this point- Libby makes it super easy to load up a book on my Kindle.
You can cover most of your materials that way. No sense in paying $$$$ for shit DRM crap that's not even a sale.
Sometimes I visit the stacks and peek at books, and I've checked some out. Books are great because you can open up an exercise/yoga book and set it down, and you can see it while you're working out, and the book passively shows you exactly the page you want to see, for as long as I'm looking at it.
There are reference librarians working the desk all day. And they know how to find everything! They seldom serve me a sponsored link! One guy even brought up the subject of Tor/Onion networks!
I enjoyed browsing for DVDs and music in the library, too. My library even offers seeds, that patrons can "check out" (we never need to return them) and we can start to grow a vegetable or herb garden.
There are classes, workshops, and special interest groups. The librarians and volunteers will teach you how to use an iPhone from scratch, or they will teach you how to search online databases and use the Advanced Options.
I can't get those perks on an app, or a website. But I can access the Internet in the library. I can use a public computer, I can bring my Chromebook, I can use my smartphone. There's a charging station right there.
I think this is actually one of the main causes / attack vectors for enshittification, and the reason it'll never be stopped. No one says "no" to upper middle class women, ever, in the U.S. at least. And why would you? They constitute most of consumer spending.
Libby is available as a website and offers ePubs or PDFs. It also supports many popular e-readers and can automatically deliver titles to some Kobos and all Kindles.
My highschool library didn't carry any Chilton car repair manuals. I asked about that once because I had a rapidly decaying, hand-me-down Ford Pinto. The librarian laughed and suggested I was attending the wrong high school for those books.
I am bothered by the trend towards fewer physical books and pushing people towards digital copies — there's no substitute for physical browsing as a discovery process.
What they’re doing is more like banning all Ford Chilton car manuals from Autozones.
https://www.gale.com/c/chilton-library
Scroll down, click "Access through your library >>", get wrenching.
Between culture-war politics and people's disgust at the homeless using libraries as shelters (as if that was the libraries' fault, and not the fault of societies refusing to care about the homeless) I really despair for the future of libraries as cultural centers. Because books aside, that's really what they are.
It's not surprising libraries are turning to stores and apps for funding when the people either don't care or are actively hostile to them.
Meanwhile, you now have censorship at the internet backbone level, with ISPs arbitrarily, unilaterally deciding to stop routing traffic to legal websites, and there's been little outcry: https://twitter.com/IncogNetLLC/status/1685359845505957888
A smart child raised by parents who fear and censor media contrary to their ideology or morality is a child whose future has been stolen. It is a theft from society as well.
Why is the dumbest parent allowed to circumscribe the smartest child?
There is a need to curate.
Because space is limited, every library can't be some billion square foot Library of Alexandria. Choices have to be made.
Guess the argument is around who 'chooses' and 'what'.
But I would say that not carrying 'Chilton' as an example of why they shouldn't, say, have 'To Call A Mockingbird', as also disingenuous.
Your "graphic oral sex" is also a red-herring.
Something to get the right-leaning parents fired up to go storm the school board.
>'Stop taping my kids eyes open and making my precious little boy view porn (let him sneak it from his dads stash or online like a decent boy should).'
"Nobody has banned books" -> Literal Book Banning https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbook...
Has a list of banned books and some of the reasons.
Elsewhere, although I couldn't find the article they categorized the different reasons, and scenarios such as "explicit graphic examples of oral sex" were not a thing. In that categorization there were some banned for sexual content, but it was a tiny tiny fraction, like a fraction of a percent.
That sort of idea is commonly used as justification in the larger wedge of "protecting the children". But if you look at what is actually banned and the reasons (or even if the banned book has been read by the people banning at all), it's pretty clear that's not actually what this is about.
I'd be interested in what libraries are like in Japan since their first sale copyright doctrine is totally different from the US and most of the rest of the world.
Maybe the Seattle Public Library (SPL) is that way, but the King County Library System (KCLS) is not. The eBook selections are great, and I never have to pay for periodicals like The Economist or The New Yorker as they have unlimited digital rentals.
[1] https://libguides.ala.org/librarystatistics/largest-public-l...
[2] https://www.courierherald.com/news/king-county-library-syste...
Presumably you and/or others in the community are paying for such subscriptions, it's just done through property taxes.
Even our local library (part of a small local 'shared independent library systems') really has to focus on kids, movies, and other media.
However, you can still get quite a bit of good stuff if you want via interlibrary loan and on DVD and CD.
It's also bringing us, the parents, back into the library again. I sometimes go to the library for a kids book, but then I check out something for myself to read. I've frankly falled out of the loop of reading fiction (and I had no idea how to find things I think I'd like), and it's been a nice way to build up a reading habit again.
I'd also been using the Libby app for audiobooks for a while, which is topical.
Now I get to be on HN and see every day that no, my worst beliefs were true, this really is how you saw us.
There's a cute walkthrough video here showing some of the facilities on offer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9JZYmZTmns
It's not the main library of the city, but it is very central, and I have good memories of taking our toddler there, not to mention having hungout since then.
The wikipedia page shows some nice images, and I'm pretty sure the building has featured on hacker news in the past too!
This sounds interesting but I couldn't discover what you mean in 30 seconds of googling. Explanation/source?
There were weird games around VHS recordings of designed-for-rental being sold at $250/ea back in the 1980s, with the intended market being video rental shops charging $5/rental and doing 100 rentals to recoup their cost, before a few months/years later the prices for the movie dropped to $20-50 for individual users to buy. Video games usually were expensive up front for hot titles and cheaper later, but rental was a smaller fraction of the market -- with prerecorded video cassettes, rental was the primary market for new releases.
Japan has never (well, since 1868 and probably later -- not sure of when this originated) had this, so a product couldn't be resold. This probably lowers the initial price of some media somewhat (since the author/publisher can depend on future sales, vs. secondary market), but unclear how much of an impact it really has.
(This is all my memory from ~2000 when I ran an offshore datahaven and was at a Billboard music industry conference as they were trying to kill Napster; I assume things haven't changed that much except for the proliferation of subscription services, but it's possible laws have changed too.)
It’s super cool how I, person in the middle of the country, can check out a book from the Bronx public library, for a total cost of like $50/yr.
How is that shitty, exactly?
This does not seem to have been the case; it meant a building in the shape of the Athenian Basilica.
Those that remain open are often turned into community hubs which while sounding nice on paper don't always sound nice in reality with screaming kids and zumba classes, etc; the end result of often being a rather rather un-library-like ambience.
Shhhhh!
The app however has been outsourced to "BorrowBox" (https://www.borrowbox.com/) which is meh, but I can't exactly blame them for not wanting to create and maintain their own app.
It's great to see the Palace Project mentioned as an alternative in this post! I'm one of the developers working on Palace. The idea behind the project is to create a single app that aggregates all of a library's digital content and makes it readily available to library patrons.
If anyone here is interested in it, all our code is open source: https://github.com/thepalaceproject.
On the page with the search results, there is a "Make a recommendation" link after the results which goes to a page which has all the expected fields - the book ISBN, my name, my home library, etc., etc.
Maybe this is a better version than the author has seen? This is not using an app, which I don't know why you would want to do anyway.
It's sad. I feel conflicted because I don't really want them near me but I understand they have no where else to go. I don't get how the library because a homeless shelter but it's probably not somewhere I'd take a child.
Unhoused people come to libraries because it's one of the last places that they're not being told to "get out". They want to be there probably for the same reason any of us do. Compared to a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen, that is mostly a room full of beds or tables, a library is a relief.
In the same way internet search is broken by affiliate links heavy, contentless websites looking for easy money, good books end up hidden behind all this huge wall of easy money personal development bullshit.
Why do we need libraries?
Just go online.
Just use such and such open source app.
Just use such and such free online source.
-> There are too many homeless. Libraries don't 'feel' safe.
If you are homeless how do you go on-line????
Let me clue you in.
There are homeless people in libraries -> IN ORDER TO GO ONLINE.
If you are homeless you don't have a computer.
-> In todays world how do you get a job, to be come, 'un-homeless', without going ONLINE.
-> How do you access any services without going ONLINE. You are homeless, you aren't driving to wherever you need to get to since you can't go to their website. Many physical locations have closed, 'just use their web-site'. How?
-> SO, LIBRARIES HAVE A LOT OF HOMELESS PEOPLE USING LIBRARY COMPUTER'S, BECAUSE, WAIT FOR IT, 'THEY ARE HOMELESS'. THIS IS LITERALY THE ONLY OPTION FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE.
I hate reading on an LCD. I'll settle on eInk but that's still settling.
Give me a paper bound book anyday of the week. The only benefit an ebook has is for academic texts so I can quickly Ctrl+f for reference only. If I have to sit there and digest large quantities of text, I need a dead tree product.
And it's a bloody shame that this method of print is dying.
Libraries didn't cause the downfall of the area they are in. LOL.
Why blame the library. I'm sure if the library started sweeping away the homeless, there would be just as much outcry at their callousness.
We've got a library out here where the employees can get trained in adminstering Narcan because people frequently overdose at or around the library. I don't blame the library, but at this point, I don't even think it should be called a library any more. It's a temporary homeless shelter during daytime hours.
Many employers offer this now, and at many concert venues, there are tables where they will train you and send you home with Narcan. You have to be sheltered at this point to believe narcan training is unique to libraries.
This doesn't make any sense. Keeping the feature around doesn't cost them any money, so it's unlikely they removed it as some sort of cost cutting strategy. The "sell customer data" angle is also unconvincing. They can do all of that while keeping the "recommend" feature. It's unclear how removing it, or forcing users to use the "notify" feature benefits them.
> In order to get that information — which until May was freely available — *each library now has to pay a separate fee for an “Advantage” account. And if they then purchase a book and want to share it with their consortium members, as before? Well, that requires an “Advantage Plus”* account (and presumably a higher fee
And honestly, I can see some of the reason for the DRM with good faith arguments on how it could completely erode a few markets. I don't necessarily agree with them, but I can't dismiss them out of hand, either.
Anyway, reminds me that I need to support my libraries more.
Public libraries are not monolithic; they’re operated differently depending on where they are, and all are trying to navigate ebooks—which, by the way, make up only a small fraction of patron demand. Libraries also serve many functions besides lending books.
Public libraries are not being ‘enshittified’. They are more popular than ever (in the US, anyway), and ebooks are just another area where they’re navigating as best they can to offer patrons options.
Although they were probably a drop in the ocean, in the UK at least.
People do vote for levies to pay for libraries, and libraries are still built. The places with the best libraries willingly pay a lot for them.
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik
Like, not just "Do you support continued funding of public libraries", or even "Do you think public libraries could be introduced today", but an actual reality check of how much their actions align with their actual preferences. I wouldn't be surprised if people would actually admit to hypothetically opposing something they are in favour of in practice.
The best and largest libraries in the history of the world are being built and expanded right now on the internet, with free and unlimited access for everybody.
People generally prefer free market solutions to problems because commons solutions like public libraries only work when there is sufficient social cohesion. Libraries work if people respect them. They do not work if people treat them like homeless shelters.
Public libraries will disappear if their management continues to be dominated by far-left ideologues who prioritise being "inclusive" over having a safe, enjoyable and quiet environment.
Of course it becomes known that a library doesn't mind the patronage of the homeless and disenfranchised, then people begin to abuse the hospitality. People try to shower and shave and brush their teeth in the restrooms. People drag in half a shopping cart's worth of bags and personal belongings, and camp out with a pillow and blanket. People deface or steal books, DVDs, and other materials. People have mental health crises in front of the other staff and patrons. Of course these disruptions are not the sole purview of the homeless.
But they cause security to be tightened, and big signs that prohibit lots of stuff are posted, and the collection dwindles to whatever nobody wanted to steal. Man, I've really felt the pinch there. COVID-19 did libraries a favor in this regard, because they had a plausible excuse to flush anyone and everyone out of the building and off the premises, and do a great reset of the whole situation.
Also, the "free market solution" would have been to just let the libraries offer ebooks on their site. Digital distribution gutted libraries' ability to provide their core service, because now they need permission and licensing to do so. Homeless people using libraries as makeshift shelters isn't new, you just never noticed it back when everyone was using libraries.
It is very, very easy to check that this isn't true.
Capitalism was described and critiqued as such since the mid-1800s. The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, is certainly no older than "the idea that there could even exist something other than capitalism".
Very few public libraries in the US are older than this, and the era of 'robber barons' took place after this (1860 or 1870 to 1900 or 1910).
It's disappointing that there are people who think that "far-left ideologues" have anything to do with the decline of public libraries.
When you can just download a book for free, or if you want to pay, have it shipped from Amazon, what is the point of the library? Between piracy and online ordering, there isn't really much space for libraries as places with books as they offer value only to exceptionally moral poor people.
I used to be someone who hit my checkout limit from the library. I haven't been in over a decade now to checkout a book.
Libraries are amazing places for children, and their parents.
As an aside, I have to also give kudos to my local school district, which has some kind of arrangement with the public library system to give library cards to all elementary students. This not only gives them lending privileges, but also the ability to take advantage of all of the other library system's partnerships and discounts.
Libraries are still great, but it probably depends a lot on where you live, and what you expect from one.
I buy books. I underline, etc. But I do know ppl who prefer the library, which is 100x better than not reading at all.
Libraries worked for me until perhaps high school, back then. Now they definitely wouldn't.
Now there simply isn't any computer or math section anymore in the library. There's some leftover books but every month there's less. If you can't afford an ipad (ironically the only practical e-reader for zlib imho), you can't read books. Luckily an air will do, but still.
Time-shifting is a false meme to manufacture blame, just like identity theft.
Read books for free. It's fine. Give them to your friends. It's also fine.
Sidestep all this nonsense. Stop giving money to organizations that ship DRM unless you want more shitty DRM.
Copyright is about the right to make copies. It's right there in the name.
Piracy creates new copies. Lending an existing copy for which someone has paid the copy-right holder, does not.
You are free to ignore bad laws. Read books for free. It's fine. It's what libraries are for, and it's what the internet is for.
The idea of "copies" is irrelevant. If 100 people in parallel all have a file of book on their tablet simultaneously and read it for free or 100 people all serially check out the same single physical instance from a lending library and read it for free the effect (and amount paid to the copyright holder) are precisely the same.
Not sure what the end game is. This feels like more than capitalism to me. I feel intentionality in this suppression of knowledge and information.
Once the free/cheap books and open web are gone, where will you seek the truth?
Enshittification has less to do with capitalism, and more to do with users' willingness to put up with bad platforms and products (overused aphorism aside). People who attribute the decay of products to capitalism have a hard time looking over the wall outside of their sandbox to potentials they have yet to know or realize.
Market capture cannot exist without regulatory capture in free markets.
Then there's the inertia, which can be fully expected, and the company's disincentive to make breaking it easy. (GDPR has taken measures to address this but nothing similar exists in the US nation-wide but that's for data only.) The cost to move must be sufficiently low in order to break that inertia. In nature you'll see Pareto distributions all around, so it's almost as if this phenomenon is to be expected. But that doesn't mean it cannot be done.
On a long enough timeline every product dies, and their lifespans are getting shorter and shorter.
Their not bound to any specific hardware or crappy SASS. Publishers & other parties can't retrospectively censor them. They're mine forever.
One of my favorite memories as a child is browsing through my parents bookshelves and picking something to read. I hate to think that's going to disappear.
I'm not sure that advocating for pirating books is going to help that. If you don't buy books and also refuse to use libraries, you're only accelerating the disappearance of books.
It has been vandalised
"...capitalist enshittification."
"...this particular capitalist bait-and-switch playbook..."
"...little socialist oases in the capitalist desert hellscape of twenty-first century America..."
I think you have to be willfully blind to not spot that the author is blaming "capitalism" the economic system for this.
The fact that the author then goes on to single out "vampire capitalism", "venture capitalism" and KRR is really irrelevant in light of all this.
Libraries were never meant to be distributors of pornography. Especially to minors.
There are plenty of outlets that provide free smut. Libraries should not contain materials that make people (especially women) feel attacked.