The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries
karawynn.substack.com
karawynn.substack.com
slumping into the melt
reversion to the mean and nasty
californication
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'
I think that's an illusion. Proponents of capitalism and privatisation will argue that things go bad because of the goverment policy, not because of rent seeking and privatization.
You really can't sum up history in a single word, it's prone to disinterpretation.
Why does this particular word have to "Sum up History"??
I think you are correct, that left and right think that 'shit' is happening and it is because of the other side.
One blames Government, and One blames Capitalism, thought I'd say both are wrong, or over-simplified. But both agree things are 'shit'.
So guess we need even finer grained definitions of 'shit'. like:
"EnCapitaShitification"
and
"EnGoveShitification"
But also, I don't think it is a new phenomenon. Capitalism always seeks to extract all resources that are available to it; that's the systemic nature of it. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes (as when it does to human attention, and other stuff, in general when it happens in the extreme) it's a bad thing.
Kinda like with fire. It's akin to conning a new word for forest fires caused by climate change, which would connect the dots with climate. People who haven't connected the dots already are unlikely to do so with the new word either.
That is good point.
But now, I'm trying to think of the word we already have for this? Just using the word "Capitalisms" is too broad, really encapsulates too much. What is the word for the end state of "Capitalism", or what it drives towards?
If you have ever read Moloch By Scott Alexander, I think that is the same 'jist' of what we are trying to get at with "enshitification".
But at the moment, I am having hard time thinking of an existing word that already means this.
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.
But maybe it requires people who are that shrill and eyeroll-inducing to change things?
It's a meme created by a fringe nerd blogger, primarily taken up by nerds on the internet, that no one else cares about.
It's not a scientific term, legal term or term of art, nor is it needed to describe some novel process. It's just a buzzword people like to use because it contains the word "shit."
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.
I just think Cory Doctorow should grow the hell up. I've been reading his stuff for like, what, almost two decades now(!).
Edgelords were fun up through the mid-2000s and then the rest of us grew up, realized shock value was for teenage boys, and learned to prefer well-constructed and thoughtful arguments over angst and vitriol.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-b... is one I'm reading now. It's clearly, bluntly stated (good, makes it hard to avoid) and cites lots of examples.
He doesn't seem to go for shock value (to me.) That said, the term 'enshittification' is not shocking to me because of the swearword; I think we're all used to calling things BS, for example. I don't use terms like that at work, or at home, but that's personal taste in communication; it's not shocking and sometimes they are the most accurate and succinct terms.
What I can say is that I can't say "enshittification" on a quarterly earnings call – y'know, to audiences with the power and authority to affect actual change.
That's the whole point of the root comment.
>... swear word...
I know that what I'm about to say doesn't necessarily apply to every vulgar word (eg, racial slang) given historical context, but specific to the word "shit", what's the difference between "shit" and "crap" or "poop"? Personally, I've struggled to understand why certain "swear words" are still considered as such, when the use of them is no different than their non-swear counterparts (eg, heck for hell, screw you for fuck you, dang/darn for damn, etc.). I'd be curious to see what other people think about this.
"Shit" is a swear word; the other two aren't. That's all there is to it, it's convention. The same as "red" means red and doesn't mean blue.
But all three would be inappropriate as economics terminology. Using a smelly bodily function as an economics metaphor is simply gratuitous and unprofessional.
>But all three would be inappropriate as economics terminology. Using a smelly bodily function as an economics metaphor is simply gratuitous and unprofessional.
Why?
And it is absolutely not used the same way as "shoot". It carries a great deal of additional meaning. The entire purpose of swear words is to not be appropriate for polite conversation. Otherwise we wouldn't have them.
> Why?
Because it's unpleasant to come across gratuitously offensive things like smelly bodily functions. If I'm reading an article about economics and business policy, I don't want to be interrupted by something unpleasant that is totally unconnected to the subject at hand. I don't want a close-up photo of a pimple being popped either, as a gratuitous visual analogy for how resources are extracted from an economy. Does that satisfy you?
It's on that point that we, and I'd imagine the GP as well, strongly disagree.
It's just about understanding cultural context in order to legitimatize your point. I feel like Doctorow would have learned that by now.
no particular reason, and honestly it being a swear is the least intrusive part of this. As mentioned before, "enpoopification" or "encrapification" don't solve the problem. "poop" is not a swear but is something to avoid talking about in 95% of professional settings.
>Why?
because poop is gross and in general to be avoided talking about where possible? I don't even think this is a cultural thing. Is there any country where you can leave the bathroom and say "Damn I just took a huge shit" in formal company?
that goes for any bodily waste as well. Sweat, mucus, urine. Feces just happens to be the most messy, unhygienic, and smelly of them all.
In this case, it wouldn't really be better if it were "encrapification" or "enpoopification." IMO the problem with the term, aside from "shit" being a word you can't say on television, is that it's juvenile.
i really wish your message met my standards, so i am just going to put my fingers in my ears until it does.
..hyperbole aside..
semantics are important, but only when definitions need to be clear.
anything else is just darma battles for the sake of darma battles, and avoiding the discussion.
This is one of those "you can be right, or you can be successful" situations. Everybody can rally behind "enshittification" and make it super-easy for the actual message to be dismissed, or we could find a term that doesn't sound like it was coined by an edgelord.
The folks who are won over / have adopted "enshittification" aren't the audience that needs winning over. So what language and messaging is going to work for that next group that might actually turn the tide?
it's the combination of a swear word with the pomposity of en____ification. I get that Doctorow is trying to make a point about tech marketing as posturing about intellectuality of effort and nobility of purpose, while actually producing shit for easy money.
But what works as a clever inside joke among friends limits it for a wider audience, and makes anyone saying it sound like a snarky nerd trying too hard to be clever. This is a good way to get (metaphorically) stuffed in a locker, ie to have your valid concerns ignored and mocked.
if we're still relying on social media like Reddit and Twitter to spread the word organically, perhaps.
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 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.
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.
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.
Do you have any friends who are companies?
Its all people, all the way down.
They don't need to be. They are automata with emergent behavior independent from the individual humans comprising them - paperclip maximizers in a very literal sense. The overly-simplistic "corporate decisions are just human decisions" take entirely ignores corporate policies, material interests, and countless other drivers of corporate decisionmaking with zero dependence on any particular actual human.
And those policies came from...?
And those material interests relate to...?
...the ether? Jesus Christ? The "Invisible Hand"? The void?
Those policies were written by people at the direction of people to be given to people to do because some people are interested in achieving that goal.
And those policies continue to be in effect long after any of their authors or beneficiaries have left or otherwise ceased to be authors or beneficiaries - as highlighted in the part of my comment immediately following that which you quoted.
People being involved at one point says nothing about their continued involvement or about the eventual autonomy of the thing with which they were once involved - just like how any person's decisionmaking is independent from that of one's constituent cells, and from one's parents and their constituent cells. The interests of the creation can and do diverge from the interests of the creators.
Your argument is like saying "we've already solved biology -- it's physics all the way down!" Except, it's not. The information-processing and entropy-generating capacities of biological organisms surpasses those that would be expected from a purely physical perspective.
Specifically in the case of companies, they're generally deliberately organized such that specific humans in the leadership/ownership are not individually responsible for decisions, otherwise it would be easier to pierce the corporate veil and/or claim violation of fiduciary responsibility. Hence diffuse responsibility, meetings and meeting minutes, reams of pages justifying decisions, etc - what we commonly know as "bureaucracy", with a life of its own. Each human-reasoning-unit only focuses on some very small part of the company's behavior, adds their own personal incentives to not rock the boat, and then rolls the shit downhill.
So no, it doesn't sense to pigeonhole company behavior as just "human behavior", especially when individual humans in the system often would very much like to choose differently, but for all the incentives lined up against them.
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.)
For instance, Apple tends to drive how mobile phones look and what external features they have even if their changes are objective steps backwards in functionality. People generally liked headphone jacks, but not enough to cut themselves off from flagship devices. There is no way to make an apples-to-apples comparison since usually there are never two devices whose literal only difference is the specific feature under discussion.
What was this supposed to say?
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.
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.
Ah yes, the enshittification of "enshittification". Definitely did not see that one coming.
Apart from being obnoxious and immature, "enshittification" doesn't communicate any concept beyond "something turning into shit." Being both vague and emotionally charged, semantic drift is inevitable.
/s
Parasitoids are parasites that corrupt a host, eventually resulting in its death. Endoparasitism is where the parasitoid infects and lives inside the host.
Note that again, libraries are already paying for the product. This is not "free."
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".)
This.
Everyone should serve a stint as an officer in their condominium's homeowners' association or neighborhood association so they begin to understand.
(I want to underscore that the described behavior is not limited to capitalists, although one might at first suspect so).
No, this is missing the core reason due to believing in an inherent order or that implementing the "right" incentives is the solution.
The real core is that humans are sometimes irrational. This irrational behavior is why economists are regularly wrong (on both macro and micro scales, from recessions to struggling to understand why an incentive/disincentive is ineffective when it should from all other testing), and the core as to why groups can't stick to Do The Right Thing.
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.
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.
I don't think the problems we're seeing are limited to capitalistic nations.
In any case, my understanding of the philosophical foundation of capitalism, wasn't that it relied on optimization or altruism toward consumers at all. Rather, that it structured incentives so that consumers would benefit from the selfish pursuits of industry.
Pointing out the failings of that system is easy. What's difficult is proposing a system that's better, and has a chance of working with human nature as it is, rather than as we wish it to be.
We don't really have any non-capitalist nations. Maybe NK or Cuba, but I don't think that was what you were thinking of.
China's economy is certainly driven by market forces, even though it is steered at the top by a dictatorship.
> Rather, that it structured incentives so that consumers would benefit from the selfish pursuits of industry.
Yes, and enshittification is the result of those incentives not actually being aligned in practice.
You seem to be rebutting me by saying the same thing.
And we need to be very careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because, capitalism has had some very profound and positive outcomes for humanity. So, by all means, let's improve incentives, and punish corruption where we find it. But let's do it with a scalpel, not a machete -- lest the patient die on the operating table.
kind of problematic that capitalism is seen as all-or-nothing. then there's nothing that can ever be done about it. i'm starting to see the perceived problem with calling out enshittification now.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
I read your comment 3 times; at no point does it sound like it addresses
>It's hard to take the phenomenon seriously when I sound like I'm just being edgy saying it aloud.
You just talk about the meaning of the word and companiies involved. And leave a foot note of
>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 doesn't really address the issue. I wish we simply called it "rent seeking", an existing concept that can connect to other industries easily.
To be a "rent seeking" business is to be a business that is dependent on handouts made from the government with the taxpayers' money, with a business model that is otherwise less competitive, or uncompetitive altogether.
For example, see: every single business operated by Elon Musk post-Paypal.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/we-have-entered-the-self-loa...
BigVirtuousTech is now BVT!
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.
Not everything has to be jargon.
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.
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.
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.
I understand why the blogger chose his words. His goal isn't to propose change at Google. He wants views and the internet loves crudeness, free from the shackles of reality.
But Attention is only one ingredient. And the way this is framed it will stay as some crude internet lingo and nothing more. Which is fine for a blogger, because they got the attention desired and will simply make more blogs.
If your goal is simply to rant on the internet, the term is perfect. If you want this to spread to larger and larger news and around corporate meetings, we already shot ourselves in the feet.
And again, enshittification is a very real phenomenon. It's pervasive on the internet and sometimes it seems that at least half the comment threads on this site veer off into lamenting it each day, so I don't see the problem with naming it crudely so that a nice, simple, rude word can summarize this very real thing that so many here and elsewhere make their daily bread in expanding.
>I don't see the problem with naming it crudely so that a nice, simple, rude word can summarize this very real thing that so many here and elsewhere make their daily bread in expanding.
I already laid out the problem:
>If your goal is simply to rant on the internet, the term is perfect. If you want this to spread to larger and larger news and around corporate meetings, we already shot ourselves in the feet.
I guess in this case you are the former. Which is fine. But I personally sought a larger scale change. Tired of arguing over the internet to no effect.
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?
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.)
Because in the context of our quite dysfunctional laws around copyright, competition, DRM etc., this isn't a remotely adequate description of what's going on?
I find the tendency to make private companies and people - those who are playing fair - the bad guys in these scenarios extremely abhorrent. Let's fix the laws.
The companies actions under the ownership of KKR should not be considered 'playing fair', and some corporate buyout laws should be changed to disallow this behavior, maybe by enforcing the anti monopoly protections that the US has on the books. Alternatively, we could make DRM illegal to make the market more competitive.
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.
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?
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.
But that's not helpful, and I think it's not what you're asking. To answer your question pragmatically, no, of course I do not "expect authors or publishers to operate without a profit motive." I think art is very important, and under a capitalist society, I want artists and (to a lesser extent) publishers to get paid to they can buy food and have a nice place to live.
Public libraries themselves do not work on a profit model, though. Libraries buy books, but libraries themselves are not profit-driven. They do not sell a service, and instead receive money through other ways. Rather than understanding Overdrive/Libby as a product to be bought by libraries (analogous to physical books), I would rather see Overdrive/Libby/something-else to be understood as a service that is offered by the library (analagous to the librarian checking out books). The service would have to be owned by a different kind of entity, maybe some kind of non-profit that is beholden to libraries, or some kind of federal government entity. And the service would need a different funding model (one more similar to how libraries are funded, or one more similar to how inter-state or federal projects are funded).
Perhaps you disagree, that's fine, but I hope I've articulated my position reasonably well.
I'll say that given my experience in identifying and spending funds for nebulous projects like software or service improvements, I'm not optimistic. It's easy to buy a bulldozer and shop and get the best price and then show you have a bulldozer. That's much harder to do for software and it's why so many government platforms seem to suck and why I think Overdrive will be comfortable at the top for a while. I'd like a world where libraries had control over the electronic content they purchase, but people will migrate to easy and we have to follow them there.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
Overdrive and Libby are two apps from the same company.
That company, Overdrive, has a monopoly and makes money charging libraries money to provide a service to that library's patrons for free.
The author is asking me to trust them about their research they did about some pricing change related to moving towards the Libby platform. They mention new subscriptions for libraries without actually sharing any of the actual pricing. Overdrive is going away, so whatever they were paying for Overdrive will go to $0.
These numbers are entirely made up and not in line with whatever they were paying, just showing an example of how this whole argument of a new subscription doesn't necessarily mean things are radically more expensive. So say Overdrive cost the library $100. Now there's this new platform Libby, which while in development and not feature-complete with Overdrive was just tacked on free or whatever. Now the Overdrive platform is being deprecated and will cease soon, so they announce the pricing structures for Libby, $75. Oh no, what used to be $100 is now $175, what an increase! Oh wait, we forgot, Overdrive is going away, so in the end the costs are actually only $75.
When the author can't track down the full story that Libby is available as a website it really reduces the trust I have that they actually figured out what the pricing models are as Overdrive goes away and Libby replaces it. I question if the author and their sources were even fully aware that Overdrive is fully going away soon, as that was only announced a few months ago. They never once actually shared "This was what the costs were with Overdrive, here is what the costs will be when its just Libby."
Maybe the overall costs are going up! I don't know either way. I definitely don't have deep insights on exactly how the pricing models worked in the past nor in the future as I have never worked for a library. It wouldn't surprise me that costs would go up in a period with somewhat high inflation. It would almost be news if the price didn't go up. In the end though, I can't really trust someone who didn't bother researching the first basic and easily verifiable facts they bring up in their writing.
Once again, if someone writes a post talking about specifics about NASA but starts off talking about how the moon landing was faked, would you trust the rest of their "trust me" writing?
You don't engage at all with the deeper underlying issue: we have a monopoly, owned by a notoriously unscrupulous private equity firm that holds control over the future of libraries.
Do you see how stupid it is to nitpick the article for not having access to pricing data, when the real concern here should be that the pricing is not publicly available?
The author freely admits they are not a professional journalist and what you are doing is gatekeeping that seems to serve no other purpose than to suppress a story that should be getting far more attention than it is. If you're concerned that other facts in this essay are off, (and they may well be, this is a solo essayist, not a professional journalist with a fact checker) then give them and hand, check other facts and send the author the information they missed.
A small detail that takes like 30 seconds to confirm if true or not that takes up like a quarter of their whole article.
> what you are doing is gatekeeping
About a quarter of their article is about this basic fact that takes almost zero effort to confirm or deny. Its not some deep hidden detail. I don't understand why you feel they need to hire a fact checker to figure out that libbyapp.com exists. I didn't realize expecting people to do more research than "ask random people on Mastodon" is gatekeeping journalism. Which this is all this essay is, someone shared their experiences misunderstanding how the new app works and then quoted a few random, unconfirmed sources off Mastodon.
And when you actually go look at their sources, it really begins to call in to question other premises of the story. The first person the author is quoting later says "I 'm not in the pipeline of ordering [from the old system]...or examining requests that were there" and other statements suggesting they never really directly used the library's side to Overdrive so they didn't really know what the old system was like. Hard to say the new system is worse than the old when you never really used the old one!
And then the librarian who wrote "this change is a real downgrade", their reason for why its a downgrade didn't make this blog post. Why not? Maybe because the reason why they felt that way was "For one, there is no way for libraries to see which patron clicked Notify Me for which title." Good! I don't necessarily want librarians to know "John Smith wants a copy of whatever", all they should know is that someone wants that book.
Then that whole idea that a library needs a subscription to see what was requested is also another misunderstanding. That Advantage program is only for libraries participating in a consortia, as the consortia is a shared pool of books. The Advantage program allows libraries participating in a consortia to have their own private Patron's Only section as well. But the author makes it sound like the only way for a library to know what books are being requested is by the Advantage program, which by their own sources isn't true!
> If you're concerned that other facts in this essay are off...then give them and hand, check other facts and send the author the information they missed.
I mean they pretty much just need to go to Overdrive's website and actually read the Mastodon toots (or whatever they're called) next to the ones they quoted and a number of their points will be shown to be incorrect. I'm not doing any more digging than what they already did and things that are very easily public information and I'm finding tons of glaring holes in their blog post.
> Do you see how stupid it is to nitpick the article for not having access to pricing data, when the real concern here should be that the pricing is not publicly available?
If their real concern was that we should have access to pricing data they should have actually included such a concept in their post, because they pretty much never do other than state libraries need to buy an Advantage subscription, which isn't true. Practically all of their post was about how they had to install the Libby app instead of using a website, that it took them a bit to understand how the "Notify Me" tag works despite there being help articles about it and the platform explaining it in the app, and then massively taking people on Mastodon out of context and leaving out key elements of their statements of if the new system is better or worse than the old and why.
It did make it into the blog post, it's literally the rest of the paragraph after that quote. I guess I can ignore everything else you're saying the to criticize the blog post because you made this one mistake.
> But the author makes it sound like the only way for a library to know what books are being requested is by the Advantage program, which by their own sources isn't true!
No, the author explicitly mention that the new change, read the paragraph above the paragraph where the Advantage Program is described.
> If their real concern was that we should have access to pricing data they should have actually included such a concept in their post, because they pretty much never do other than state libraries need to buy an Advantage subscription, which isn't true.
No the real concern, which you conveniently repeatedly fail to address, is that this is a monopoly, owned by a notoriously unscrupulous private equity firm, that holds the future of library patronage in its hands.
At this point, you're not adding any value to the discussion. You're just incorrectly nitpicking the article when you haven't bothered to read it closely enough to do so with any accuracy.
The whole round earth thing is just a basic thing I missed!
Flat Earthers aren't wrong about everything, after all.
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.
But the feature still exists, so this is just untrue.
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).
If its not in the catalog requesting it from the library isn't really doing anything for you but give you false hope of it appearing. Wouldn't you rather know your request isn't going to be fruitful ahead of time instead of thinking your request is doing something when its just going straight into the bin?
And, can you really blame the library from not wanting to have to maintain two lists of digital requests, especially since those digital requests will probably be delivered through Libby and requesting through Libby will actually notify you when its available, and let you know if its an actually requestable title?
Imagine going to a restaurant where they didn't have a menu you just asked the server for food and maybe eventually they'll show up sometime with food for you without ever telling you if they could even serve that dish. Somehow you'd prefer this model!
> If its not in the catalog requesting it from the library isn't really doing anything for you but give you false hope of it appearing.
That's precisely the point. If it's not in the catalog, there has to be a way to request it to be added (assuming the publisher allows that), but right now there is no even a mechanism to do this, as there is no competition and the full control is on the Libby side to include or not include an item (without libraries having any say in it).
> without libraries having any say in it
You're assuming the libraries ever had a say in what Overdrive's catalog was. I can't imagine they ever did.
Some libraries probably presented a UI suggesting they could do it as their own combined catalog probably wasn't synced to whatever Overdrive's library was. But you're then assuming your request for a book that wasn't in the Overdrive library actually got to the point of notifying Overdrive, which is yet to be shown either way.
I doubt it did anything more than have a librarian check if the book was in the Overdrive catalog, and if not they probably just closed the ticket. And right now this idea has just as much evidence as yours.
Edit: Just saw my library does the same. Sad.
> “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 believe I ever told you how to feel about your UX with these. . . hmm, I guess “products”? If we’re not calling them apps.
You kind of did, by bringing up the idea of dark patterns and dead clicks you were absolutely critiquing the UI.
> If we’re not calling them apps
You're being quite obtuse about this. The author clearly felt Libby was only consumable as an installed app on a mobile device. You argue "Where did they say one has to install the app?" while completely ignoring the "Disgruntled, I downloaded Libby" and all the other times where they expressed Overdrive is a website while Libby is an app. Like, sure, one could call both "apps", but one big point the author was making was that Libby was something they had to install, as in, a mobile app delivered through an app store with potentially more permissions than just a web page on their browser or not consumable on their desktop/laptop/other device.
I don't get how you're continuing to argue like the author didn't think they needed to install the app, when they literally wrote "Disgruntled, I downloaded Libby..." Can you really not acknowledge the author was confused and didn't know Libby was available as a website? You honestly can't see that in their writing?
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?
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.
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.
They (and their authors) can exist in a system where people pay $10 for a book, instead of $0 for a book. Digitally enabled libraries are a tricky spanner in the works for them, so they create a walled garden app that simulates lending.
Thinking a little creatively, a simple modern alternative for digital lending might be a building with some nice chairs and coffee and 5k e-readers with a Kindle Unlimited (or library equivalent) subscription on them, and anyone can walk in. Then library services can also issue a fleet of them to people who sit below a certain income level.
I don't get this point- Libby makes it super easy to load up a book on my Kindle.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These books were not banned.
They were removed from libraries.
You can still legally get copies of them from any number of booksellers.
Making something harder to get doesn't make it illegal. It doesn't mean it is banned. It doesn't mean you can incur legal problems for owning it.
If you have money you can have knowledge.
If you are poor, so sorry, no knowledge for you. Go pick some crops.
Actually, kind of what we have now.
Ezekiel 23:19-21
"There she had longed for her lovers. Their private parts seemed as big as those of donkeys. And their flow of semen appeared to be as much as that of horses. You longed for the time when you first became impure in Egypt. That was when you allowed your breasts to be kissed. And you permitted your young breasts to be touched.”
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...
Act 1 scene 1:
.... SAMPSON ’Tis true, and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall. Therefore I will push Montague’s men from the wall and thrust his maids to the wall.
GREGORY The quarrel is between our masters and us their men.
SAMPSON ’Tis all one. I will show myself a tyrant. When I have fought with the men, I will be civil with the maids; I will cut off their heads.
GREGORY The heads of the maids?
SAMPSON Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads. Take it in what sense thou wilt.
GREGORY They must take it in sense that feel it.
SAMPSON Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and ’tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.
--------------------
This is straight up "this is how I'd rape women from the "enemy's side". But yet, no howls from ANYONE about Shakespeare. Even though he was writing to what amount to "Days of Our Lives", or an episode of Jerry Springer, he's viewed as some enlightened literary artform.
Yeah Man, Ban It
Ezekiel 23:19-21
"There she had longed for her lovers. Their private parts seemed as big as those of donkeys. And their flow of semen appeared to be as much as that of horses. You longed for the time when you first became impure in Egypt. That was when you allowed your breasts to be kissed. And you permitted your young breasts to be touched.”
Deuteronomy 22:23-24
“If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry out in the city, and the man, because he has violated his neighbor’s wife. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you.
------ Pretty Harsh - we'll be killing a lot of people to comply with this law. Dead.
Leviticus 20:10
“If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.
---- No Bad Words, or you are Dead.
Leviticus 24:13-14
"Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Bring the one who has cursed outside the camp, and let all who heard him lay their hands on his head; then let all the congregation stone him."
----- Wave the bloody Sheet or, Dead.
And father fined.
Deuteronomy 22:20
"But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, 18and the elders shall take the man and punish him. 19They shall fine him a hundred shekels b of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives. If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, 21 she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you."
------- Women are property, and the Bible lists a price sheet. Rape is just fifty silver shekels. Not dead, but now married because you were raped.
Deuteronomy 28
"If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29he shall pay her father fifty shekels c of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives."
----- Some Sexy Times
Not sure when I saw a greek statue in any school, what does this have to do with anything?
> Something to get the right-leaning parents fired up to go storm the school board.
This is a comment out of ignorance. If you believe people would take time out of their already busy days just because they wanna go to a school board meeting... wait... do you have kids? (I'm guessing you don't...)
> "Nobody has banned books" -> Literal Book Banning https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbook...
Which (again) requires you to redefine the word "banned". You can still get all of these books. They are just not allowed in certain areas. They are still legal. You can still own them. Various private areas and some public places have chosen not to allow them or to carry them.
"Banned or _challenged_". Yeah. Not banned. "Challenged".
There are a lot of school board meeting with some very upset religious yelling. Dozens. Typically these are open to the public, and videos are online. Just search for 'angry school board meeting', they are swamped with religious parents trying to ban things, more than books. To them, they are in a religious war, and do show up at School Board Meetings.
Ownership. Yes. You can still buy things. The government is not 'banning' the selling. But that takes money, which is another form of restriction. It is a way to keep the poor, poor, away from knowledge.
The Country established Libraries to allow the free flow of knowledge so anybody could 'pick themselves up'. Not just for those that already have money.
Think you are missing "Challenged" means someone did want to 'Ban' them. People fought against it, so it simply remained recorded as a 'Challenge'. But if you stop fighting, then they win, and boom, 'Banned', that's how you get 'all-the-bad-things-from-Germany-that-we-can't-mention'.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
What the hell, did you think people who supposed to feel sorry for the person stealing from them, stealing the hours of their life they spent earning those things?
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.
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.)
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.
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!
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.
“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
(h/t Douglas Adams)
Although they were probably a drop in the ocean, in the UK at least.
A local historian recently gave a talk about how the Carnegie Foundation funded the building of public libraries in the early 20th century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku-jU4I0hZ8
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.
It's disappointing that there are people who think that "far-left ideologues" have anything to do with the decline of public libraries.
Similarly there was no word for "the economic system where buyers and sellers of goods and services _aren't_ forbidden from buying and selling those goods and services except from and to the state" until communists turned up and proposed a system with that restriction. We didnt need a word for "an economy where commerce is permissible", in other words, until someone suggested it might be forbidden.
The term capitalism started to be used during the Enlightment in order to describe the new economic system that replaced the one that immediately preceded it, often loosely referred to as feudalism, a system where large land-owners held all the economic power and effectively ruled the lives of their serfs/tenants, and didn’t feel the need to invest their excess wealth into improving the means of production to increase productivity. The merchants, traders and crafts-people had little to no power under this system – at least not until they had their own revolutions.
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).
So-called "capitalism" (a purely propagandistic word) has existed as long as there have existed pairs of persons A and B such that A has some X and B has some Y and A desires Y more than X and B desires X more than Y. The natural thing to do here is exchange X and Y, satisfying both A and B. We didnt need a name for "the economic system where trade is allowed" until a few insane people suggested that all trade should go through a government middleman and lack of consent should be ignored.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It has been vandalised
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.
"...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.