While I think we've all settled on Cory Doctorow's concept, I really wish it wasn't called "enshittification". It's hard to take the phenomenon seriously when I sound like I'm just being edgy saying it aloud. There's something to keeping the term as a vulgar word, in that PR people working for companies actively engaging in it can't find a way to turn it around and own the definition, but "enshittification" could still use a little rebrand.
I dislike the word and I also feel like we're already at the point where everything people don't like is just lazily called "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.
> If you expect corporations or government to just Do The Right Thing
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".)
>Over time, and in groups, people can only be expected to operate based on the incentives and disincentives that are presented to them
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.
gottorf speaks true when he says:">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.<"
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).
> 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.
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.
Endoparasitism is more difficult to say, but that's what's actually going on.
Parasitoids are parasites that corrupt a host, eventually resulting in its death. Endoparasitism is where the parasitoid infects and lives inside the host.
Enshittification usually leads to death of the host too. It can just take a while. The stronger the host the longer it takes. People all just move on to the new best thing until it gets enough attention that the parasites start sniffing around
> 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.
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.
> Enshittification is a response to the idea the capitalism optimizes for the consumer
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.
I guess the point I was hoping to make, was that blaming "capitalism" isn't helpful, and seems like a very common and counterproductive emerging zeitgeist. It's like blaming organized religion for all the ills of our past. In both cases, it's blaming the system, for human nature itself. You can destroy the system, but you'll still be left with the same forces of humanity, as ever.
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.
capitalism can be offset by regulation or just taxation.
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.
A feature that was considered a key component of how libraries knew there was interest in a title existed. Then the feature was removed and a worse version was put behind an extra paywall. (Note that libraries are already paying for this product.)
Note that again, libraries are already paying for the product. This is not "free."
Why does this comment deserve downvotes? It demonstrates perfectly what the parent comment was joking about and makes it clear that it's also just a joke.
My hypothesis is that everyone here is at least intelligent enough to understand it's a joke, but they downvote it because either they feel it's a low quality / low effort joke, they don't get the reference, or because that style of humor makes them feel uncomfortable.
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.
It at least conveys that there's an active process going on, which implies that somebody is INTENTIONALLY turning something into shit. That's important. It's true that it doesn't do a good job of conveying the exact process it means.
I wouldn't say that qualification of it being a process necesarily communicates intentionality, and I don't think any of the uses I have seen exclude it from being a process.
Enshittification is only possible because a vast majority of users will tolerate the abuse with a smile and continue to feed from the hand that slaps them across the face. They will do that because they are genuinely, in the truest sense of the word, addicts. The withdrawal symptoms may be nothing like those of alcohol, nicotine, opiates, or benzodiazepines, but they are no less addicts because of that fact.
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.
>My comment directly addresses the naming concerns of the parent comment.
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.
"Rent seeking" has an existing meaning that has little overlap with general enshitification.
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.
renaming of tech companies is an interesting phenomenon, but I don't think it's connected to how the Internet develops new slang that may or may not be crude.
Completely agree. It makes it hard to have a serious conversation when the popular term sounds like it's something that a 13-year-old came up with.
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.
I disagree. To me the piece is about enshittification as Doctorow defined it. It's not just a UX change that the author doesn't like but rather a UX change designed to gain short-term profits for its investors at the expense of its users (both readers and librarires).
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.
>a UX change designed to gain short-term profits for its investors at the expense of its users (both readers and librarires).
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.
> 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
> 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.
You didn't finish reading the article. The feature change was paired with a change to OverDrive's pricing structure in which access to reader data (i.e. who wants what books) now costs additional money.
Cory Doctorow is the king of cringe and always has been, which makes it super hard to take his thinking seriously despite the many times he's been right.
But maybe it requires people who are that shrill and eyeroll-inducing to change things?
Cory is kind of the Jello Biafra[1] of technology. If you go back and listen to some of Jello's older spoken word albums... damn. The guy is right, a lot. Also extreme and definitely not for mainstream audiences -- which is unfortunate because those audiences really need to hear his message.
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.
In case this is unclear: This is not an insult in any way. I have a lot of respect for Cory and Jello. They are, however, only for certain audiences and rely a lot on shock value and stylings that go over well with those audiences and work against them with others.
Oh I think the role of the 'jester' is super-important; humor (and music!) is an incredible carrier medium for cultural commentary. And I hate tone policing.
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.
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.
I'm not going to re-litigate every single one of Doctorow's many good and awful arguments.
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.
I mean, if someone has been right multiple times maybe you should take them seriously despite them not being cool enough for you in some sort of nebulous way...
Well that's why your name here is helpfulmandrill and not John Doe, age 23 working at MegaCorp graduated from Acedemia University. There's a certain separation from "reality" that the internet affords itself, to some degree.
Literally just not gratuitiously using a swear word in the central concept you're trying to spread. That's the biggest first step, which alone would accomplish a lot.
It's not even the swear word, I'm very fond of calling bullshit on things to make my point bluntly.
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.
Gonna step aside from the root convo for a second here...
>... 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.
They all have different connotations by convention, as does all vocabulary.
"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.
"Red" means red, and not blue, by definition. "Shit" means "an exclamation of disgust, anger, or annoyance" by definition, but there's nothing that defines it as a swear word. Culturally, we view it as one, despite the fact that the way it is used, and it's meaning, is exactly the same as "crap", or "shoot". Why should we continue to put that word on some kind of "oh my gosh please don't say it" pedestal rather than just treating it as the same thing?
>But all three would be inappropriate as economics terminology. Using a smelly bodily function as an economics metaphor is simply gratuitous and unprofessional.
Merriam-Webster literally has a "vulgar" tag next to each definition. But conventional usage precedes dictionary usage, and it's shared convention that "shit" is a swear word, regardless of how a dictionary classifies things.
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?
All of this is based on the unsupported assumption that purity of vocabulary is some sort of virtue to strive for and that other speakers are responsible for protecting the listener from their subjective, personal hangups by adopting some subset of listeners preferred standard for language.
It's on that point that we, and I'd imagine the GP as well, strongly disagree.
Nonsense. You don't order pineapple on your pizza in Italy, you don't leave your dog's shit in your neighbor's yard, and you don't curse when you're trying to convince the investors, boards, and executives – the people with the real power to stop enshittification.
It's just about understanding cultural context in order to legitimatize your point. I feel like Doctorow would have learned that by now.
>Why should we continue to put that word on some kind of "oh my gosh please don't say it" pedestal rather than just treating it as the same thing?
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.
George Carlin has a lot to say on that topic... well, had.
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.
It is indeed a common tactic to focus on the terminology rather than the message, which is why it's so frustrating when someone you largely agree with chooses terminology that makes it so easy to do.
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?
The premise that using this tryhard meme word will actually change things is silly. All it will do is make these conversations frustratingly annoying until the meme falls out of favor.
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."
I think that "extractivization" may be a more descriptive possibility. I.e. we are describing a phenomenon whereby a platform is changed from a strategy of increasing its user base to one of extracting value from its userbase.
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.
Different - the objective of EEE is to kill an opponent. The objective of PSS is to maximize the profitability of a product at the expense of the customer. It's really nothing new, this is how every business works - but this force is supposed to be tempered by the existence of competitors, who will take your customers away if you drop the quality of your products too low. In monopoly scenarios, there is nothing to stop a runaway squeeze.
All the corporations accused of acting this way are network-effect quasi-monopolies. That's the root cause.
Agreed. Doctorow is a smart guy and I agree with the underlying argument, but he's also using a neologism to build his personal brand, a tactic straight out of marketing.
Please no. We need to stamp out this notion of 'vulgarity' and normalize this vocabulary. People cower behind being offended by fictional incantations that supposedly anger nonexistent deities. We need to stop allowing people being offended by trivial things.
No one is cowering in offense by "enshittification," nor is anyone afraid that using the word will bring the wrath of deities.
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.
It's not being edgy, that is literally the root of what makes vulgarity vulgarity. That and the bodily functions stuff. The former is fictional and the latter is natural. Oh no god is going to ruin our harvest because I asked him to damn everything. People being offended by 'shit' is stupid.
Monopoly pricing is problematic, but it doesn't make anything inherently worse. Price is important but not a problem with the product itself. It doesn't make the product "shitty". That's a different but connected thing.
It's bad in the sense that it indicates artificially restricted output such that either fewer people can participate in the market or that people have to do with less than what a competitive market would allow.
Rent seeking by itself no longer seems to be enough to garner any sort of regulatory action in the US.
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.
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.
First of all, I am arguing against the notion that it will "be immediately clear" from the word.
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.
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.
IMO it seems like an immature name for an immature way of thinking about the world.
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.”
>How did mobile phones, a huge market with huge investment, avoid “enshittification”?
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.
This is the sort of missing the forest trees people are talking about.
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.)
Marketing and industry trends play a part in this. There is a big difference between "nobody cares about X at all" and "nobody cares about X enough, in isolation, to base their entire purchasing decision on it"
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.
Pretty sure my iPhone isn't spying on me so Apple can extract more value.
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.
I sometimes use my Sony noise-cancelling headphones for calls, and the sound quality is amazing. BUT: Bluetooth lag makes music-making apps unworkable.
I miss the days where I could forget to charge my plastic nokia for 5 days, drop it out a 3rd story window onto concrete and have it run over by a car and there _might_ be a scratch on it while I T9'd out a message without looking. On the other hand I can wear a watch that could out-compete a desktop computer I had in the 90's.
> How did mobile phones, a huge market with huge investment, avoid “enshittification”?
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.
Yeah but companies aren't thinking entities themselves; the decisions "a company" makes is just the decisions of the leadership (a group of people) of the company. The end results are then the actions carried out by the people of that company following the decisions of the leadership.
This is like explaining a whole person's behavior by focusing on the behavior of individual brain cells. In reality, there is emergent behavior between those two levels of complexity that means the behavior of the organism is different than the behavior of its parts.
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.
> Yeah but companies aren't thinking entities themselves
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.
> corporate policies, material interests, and countless other drivers of corporate decisionmaking
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.
> 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.
Companies inherit quasi-cognitive abilities not merely from the people they make up, but the structures of their interactions, particularly power structures. This creates something emergent that wasn't there before.
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.
I see nothing wrong, stupid or edgy with the word enshittification. It's clever, sure, but in a good and fittingly crude way that still captures how much of modern tech and platforms, and so many other things get worse.
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.
Who's your audience? The internet or corporate/government?
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.
Yes yes, except Cory Doctorow, despite some flaws with his arguments, also does go quite deep into explaining just why enshittification happens. He doesn't simply spray forth so-called nasty lingo for the sake of drama.
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.
Sure, but that doesn't matter in this context. His goal clearly isn't to perform a call to action to companies, because a writer like him should know that companies are already hesitant to listen (which is part of the point of the article) and his language choice gives them yet another way out.
>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.
Somehow it reminds me of the people (that also can be found here) that decries that a programming language is "horrible", "unusable", "a mess" because of some esoteric detail. Its just ends up as a too strong description of what people are talking about. Language needs some nuances.
I love the word, it gave name to a concept we have all been noticing more and more frequently. It's an awful concept that we all hate so the vulgarity is appropriate. It's also a lot less vulgar that the greedy capitalists that keep trashing online communities enjoyed by millions or billions of people for the profits of a greedy few.
Appropriate online, where this term will remain if people don't actually care to enact change. Good luck starting an actual movement when every media will censor the word you're bannering around.
"rent seeking behavior" isn't as fun to say, and people get confused by the term "rent" and think it has to do with their landlord (though it certainly can)
I think we need more than Decay.
Because the entire process is also optimizing. It isn't just falling apart like decay, it is being optimized towards a goal that we consider bad.
That doesn't describe the process. We're not talking about the privatization of a previously public space, it is closer to a long running bait-and-switch con.
If the telephone were invented today, we'd be listening to ads instead of ringing tones.
To me, enshittification seems like privatization of human attention. It's true it wasn't considered public good, because it wasn't considered to be an economic good at all, but is that relevant?
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.
It's more than privatization, although that's related. A service which began as a private one, like Google, but gets worse for the reasons Google has gotten worse, would be appropriately labeled enshittification, I think.
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.
Complaining about the degradation of the public realm, while simulatanously degrading the vernacular. There's all kinds of vulgar words we could turn into edgy verbs, but I hope we don't.
The pearl clutching over which words people use and “degrading the vernacular” is embarrassing. It’s just a word. Words change, languages change, there is no pristine noble ideal language to pursue or maintain here.
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.
This applies quite well to the article itself too. I don’t disagree with the base concept, but reading “I need books like I need air” and being reminded that the author is a Socialist Who Hates America five times in a few pages is so eye-rolling
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.
I worked at OverDrive. The stark contrast between the sugary-sweet facade of “helping the libraries and readers” and the ridiculous amounts of money the company makes from these same libraries is quite depressing.
Much of their profits come from charging 30%+ on top of publishers’ prices (which are already high for libraries). This plays into their hand very well - publishers get the blame for prices, yet OverDrive still benefits from it.
As for Libby’s bad UI - it was made by a single very opinionated person.
This is interesting to hear. I've always found that Overdrive does live up to its reputation of being a library focused company. The books aren't cheaper on Cloudlibrary or Axis360 and Overdrive offers the best user experience by a mile, even with all the warts on Libby. They are generally responsive to issues and supportive of concerns (they provided us a ton of data related to the McMillan boycott, for example). That may be in their self interest, but that's how this is supposed to work, right? They make money, we serve our customers. None of that seems sinister so I'm curious what else is going on behind the scenes.
I don't doubt they have good customer service - that's a way to grow and retain customers (in context of the article). However, the prices you are seeing are probably similar to internet/cable provider situation - there are three providers with approximately the same package, one is probably the best, but all three are overcharging you anyway, because neither has an incentive to reduce the price.
> 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 mean, that's the status quo under capitalism. But a huge reason I love libraries is that they are this amazing exception to the capitalist status quo in America. It's so refreshing to be in a space where no one is try get me to buy something.
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.
Do you expect authors or publishers to operate without a profit motive? I think I understand what you're getting at, but in any library model someone is getting paid. We buy books from the same wholesalers that serve book stores and subscribe to magazines that review them and catalog them with software we license (or if you're using open source you often have a support contract). It seems somewhat arbitrary to single out Overdrive as the ones who should go non-profit here. Overdrive provides a service that they charge for; that, in and of itself seems pretty standard, which is why I'm curious what else is going on.
Well, I'm practically some flavor of communist and would like to see all of society organized in a fundamentally different way :)
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.
What you are suggesting does exist, at least partially. SimplyE is the largest open platform I can think of, but it does work by leveraging partnerships with traditional vendors like Overdrive. There's also Ebooks Minnesota and likely similar platforms in other states, though those are often run using proprietary platforms even if they contain open access material. There's also Internet Archive and Open Library, but both have been in some trouble. One I'm unfamiliar with was also mentioned in the original article.
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.
Like ProQuest and its subsidiaries. They exploit public and academic libraries, largely because they have almost a monopoly, and it's very costly to extract the data and import it in another platform.
> The stark contrast between the sugary-sweet facade of “helping the libraries and readers” and the ridiculous amounts of money the company makes from these same libraries is quite depressing.
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.
Just first-hand experience. I haven’t used Libby for years, but I do recall it had multiple counter-intuitive “features”, such as theme and language not having a selector (relying on the OS), and that to enable email notifications, you first have to disable the app’s push notifications on the OS level (!)
> stark contrast between the sugary-sweet facade of “helping the libraries and readers” and the ridiculous amounts of money the company makes from these same libraries is quite depressing
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?
> 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?
I think it's been proven beyond doubt that free market evangelists will happily drown while claiming if climate change was such a problem free market would have fixed it already.
It doesn't matter if its overdrive's fault or not. If we don't like the direction of travel as a society, we need to find ways of countering this tendency. It isn't about labelling certain companies as evil, its about appropriately regulating companies in general.
It's a small (but admittedly growing) minority that find this to be a problem.
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.)
> why begrudge anyone for offering a product or service that someone wanted at a price both parties considered fair?
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?
Then that's a problem with the dysfunctional laws and not the company, UNLESS the company is using those dysfunctional laws to enable their market capture. Do you know if Overdrive is doing this? If so then it's fair to criticize their market capture because it was done with the power of the state (point of a gun). If they are not it's obviously some sort of derangement.
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.
AFAIK OverDrive has quite a bit of vertical integration - they provide the app for end-users, the hosting for books and audiobooks, and a marketplace platform for libraries to purchase publishers' offerings (which probably involved many contracts with publishers). By having all of this and being one the first on the niche market, competing with them would be difficult.
I'm a librarian and while I sympathize with some of the arguments here, they are not arguments I can explain to the public. No one cares, and they shouldn't have to. They should be able to read everything from James Patterson to Thomas Piketty and not have to think about it and Libby is pretty good at enabling that. Alternative platform exist, but none of them are as good. Libby works on a lot of devices and Overdrive works with Amazon for people who own a Kindle. More people check out e-books and fewer check out physical books every year; the pubic wants what it wants and right or not Overdrive is the best way to get them that.
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.
Does a library have no duty of preservation or archival? Surely "what the public wants" cannot be the only driving factor, right?
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?
> Does a library have no duty of preservation or archival? Surely "what the public wants" cannot be the only driving factor, right?
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.
>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.
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.
I think this is a problem specific to your library. A very quick check shows the average age of our collection to be about 6 years (at my small to midsized urban library). That's extremely rough because new editions of classics will show a much more recent copyright date than an average person would consider them, so a collection can still be seen to skew much older than the data suggests. However, it's still dominated by recent titles, especially of popular literature. Technical books are harder for me to comment on because at a public library, that's generally out of our domain. We try to keep up on the popular series for tech stuff like "Learn Visually" or "Dummies", but the circulation or those dwindles as either fewer people need them or are more likely to use the internet for solving their problems. Depending on your needs, you might see if your library has a subscription to O'Reilly books or similar platform for your area of interest.
Public libraries have no such duty, no. Outside of the largest systems, most aren't fit to do this in a way that would materially achieve the goal of preserving anything, either in terms of space, equipment, or expertise.
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.
The library of congress has a duty of archival, but public libraries are there as a service to the public. So, what the public wants from them is actually the only driving factor.
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
This whole blog post is misunderstanding after misunderstanding it's almost hilarious.
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.
You are thoroughly missing the point, although, to be fair, the author obfuscates it with the rant about shitty UI.
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.
Yeah but I can't really trust the rest of their deep analysis when they didn't even know the extremely basic fact libbyapp.com exists.
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?
How can I trust they even bothered to actually track down real experts when they didn't bother figuring out basic facts?
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!
Your comment isn't sharing anything I didn't already know.
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?
What you've done it taken a small, irrelevant detail and used it to ignore the entire rest of the article, including interviews with librarians who talk about how much worse the new request system is.
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.
> 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
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.
So if I write an article about astrophysics but start off with the idea that we're all on a flat earth on the back of a giant turtle you'll continue trusting the rest of the document?
The whole round earth thing is just a basic thing I missed!
I don't really trust anything to start so it's not that. But so many people say "I stopped reading at X", which means they're betting they will not be improved by anything at all that follows in the article.
Flat Earthers aren't wrong about everything, after all.
I see that Overdrive is taking away a nice feature. What the author is missing is the comparison with physical books, which never had this feature. You want to recommend the library get a book? You fill out the form they have. That process still works regardless of the format.
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.
> What the author is missing is the comparison with physical books, which never had this feature. You want to recommend the library get a book? You fill out the form they have. That process still works regardless of the format.
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).
> 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!
You are being facetious. Libraries used to be able to do this and this is exactly how it was working until relatively recently (I received a notification earlier this year as someone who submitted requests for digital books in the past).
> 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).
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.
Where did they say one has to install the app? They use the web interface exclusively and the feature that went missing was a web interface feature. . .
> “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.
> ...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.
I don’t really see the point of applying rigorous ontology to a blog post.
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.
Who said hiding titles not currently available is a dead click?
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?
Yes, I’ve used Libby and OverDrive at various points. It’s pretty hard to avoid them if one frequents a library at all. Since, you know, the whole monopoly thing.
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.
> I don’t believe I ever told you how to feel about your UX with these
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?
OverDrive is also integrated with many e-Readers, which seems like a weird omission as it is the best way to read ebooks in my opinion. I personally cant imagine reading a book on a smartphone.
Libby also supports delivery to many e-Readers which support Adobe Digital Editions. Books checked out in Libby will be available to Kobo devices with Overdrive sync if available in Overdrive.
I don't see how its an omissions when it does exist.
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! :)
I used to spend a lot of time in libraries when I was homeless, and I owe a large part of my safety and shelter to libraries. I read many books back then, like a lot of Larry Niven, and all the Harry Potter novels. I haunted academic libraries and public libraries alike. I used the computers, I watched music videos, I played MUDs and checked my email.
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.
> 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
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?
Kobo, Onyx, and more e-ink devices, I never had to install any app.
Even if I bought it on Amazon, I can deDRM it with ease (bless Calibre and deDRM tools), and then go on my own merry way, with cute e-readers, and actually owning the file.
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
Understood - thanks. I think I managed to pick a side issue rather than a core issue. I think this is my real question:
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?
Publishers have historically viewed a library copy as a threat of patrons who would have otherwise purchased their product. The economics of publishing itself are transformed with digital formats. There is (virtually) no material cost. Replication is immediate and easy. Transportation is (again, virtually) free.
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.
Yes, indeed - that's the conundrum I'm posing. Why should a publisher promote a book, or pay an advance for a book, that might sell very few copies in a world of free and peer to peer distribution?
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.
epub is an open format and there are many open source epub reader.
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".
This comment reeks of entitlement; literally everything you could do before is still possible at your local library. You can still check out physical copies of anything you like, now additionally you can also check out digital copies.
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.
> You can still check out physical copies of anything you like
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.
I suspect most/all of those offerings are as a result of specific grants or agreements between libraries or even Overdrive itself, that would not have existed absent a digital method of distribution.
> 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
I don't get this point- Libby makes it super easy to load up a book on my Kindle.
You know, I prefer to patronize my local public library. I'm not a voracious consumer of media, except maybe for YouTube. Downloading torrents all day is not how I roll. Part of the joy of a library is the physical experience of walking in there and being in an environment that's conducive to browsing and learning and expanding my horizons. It's about being around my neighbors, people in my town, families and people my age. These days, there's a café in my library, so I purchase a bite to eat, hang out with the free WiFi, do what I want.
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.
Safety was one of the first learning experiences I persevered through when I spent a little bit of time on the streets (very little). Shared company with quite a few homicidal psycho killer-looking characters on the dirty dog (greyhound), so I fully support the idea that libraries can be havens for people trying to survive homelessness. But libraries are also major hub for upper middle class women like my wife, and they want access to systems that fit into their worlds. And their worlds revolve around mobile (I waffle between graphene OS and flip phones). Libraries will cater towards this class of user over people like myself or you. But I wouldn't label that "enshittification". That's a superficial and shallow minded view of the organic library network in the US.
> ... for upper middle class women like my wife, and they want access to systems that fit into their worlds. And their worlds revolve around mobile ...
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.
In the case of my library, using Overdrive you can still checkout a book as an ePub. It has to clear the Adobe DRM solution, but you get an ePub you can read on virtually any eReader made in the last 20 years. Libby is a specific App, and I think Overdrive as a company really really wants you to use that, instead of just downloading the ePub, but you do have an option.
> 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.
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.
The confusion between libraries, especially school libraries, not carrying certain books, and censorship or "book banning" is disingenuous and hyperbolic. All libraries curate, every single one. In particular, school and specialized libraries "censor" based on what is appropriate for their audience.
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.
They’re not banning books that are not aligned with the audience, like banning Chilton car manuals from high schools. They weren’t there in the first place because they’re not aligned to the audience and we’re curated away.
What they’re doing is more like banning all Ford Chilton car manuals from Autozones.
Doubly so because half the country is attacking public libraries for spreading "woke" or "transgender" propaganda. I remember a recent story about a city that voted to defund their public library entirely for that reason.
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.
The pearl-clutching over "book banning" is ridiculous. It's parents not wanting schools exposing their children (i.e., minors) to certain materials the parents think is inappropriate. And these supposedly "banned" books are still readily available to adults from Amazon, B&N, and (usually) regular libraries. Why is this such a big deal?
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
The big deal is the cowardice and ignorance of these parents.
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?
Likewise, school libraries should not include books with explicit graphic examples of oral sex. The whole "To Kill a Mockingbird" has been a red herring. Nobody has banned books. They just want to remove books that do not have value... and they have.
Don't think pictures of Greek Statues count as "graphic oral sex".
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).'
> Don't think pictures of Greek Statues count as "graphic oral sex".
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...)
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".
Pictures of Greek Statues were banned in Schools in Florida. (related because it was in a book). (thought, to be fair, not-banned-banned, needed a release form) So maybe this is inflammatory, but think I can mention it because it was national news.
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'.
Romeo and Juliet, required freshman high school reading.
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.
"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."
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.
"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.”
Coming? This seems like it happened already in every place I've visited. We don't even have public libraries here in Puerto Rico, but in SF, Seattle, etc. they are largely...not targeted at people looking to read/borrow books.
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.
The library as a third place has nothing to do with enshitification. It's simply libraries meeting the needs of their users. I dont know the US numbers but many places the loan numbers of books has never been higher, while there has never been more culture and activities in the physical library. This fantasy of the library as a silent crypt for book storage is trite and tired, most often touted by non-users.
I am in the Seattle area and I disagree. King County Library system is one of the top circulating library systems in the entire country.
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.
Yeah, I specifically meant the SPL Central location (I lived in Redmond, but didn't know about anything except SPL itself, and the two times I visited SPL were quite unpleasant so I gave up; I did like the online resources, but they're just enough of a hassle to use vs. buying things directly that I didn't keep using them.). I want this stuff to exist, especially for children and people who are on limited budgets (I used public libraries extensively as a child; 5-10 books/week from the local/suburban library, discovered interlibrary loan, etc.), but certainly wouldn't leave even a 12 year old unattended at SPL.
I was at Seattle Central Library twice recently and the only problem I had with it was I thought the aluminum flooring was noisy in places. Other than that, it was a very pleasant visit: bright, quiet, staff were engaging.
Yes, I thought similar things. Libraries stopped being great for readers a decade+ ago. I think it’s less from nefarious corporate actors and more from the fact that reading culture has either shifted to more advanced platforms or evaporated entirely.
As a new parent who has to watch their finances fairly closely, the children's programs at our local library is amazing. It's great to have a free activity to take our little kiddo to where they can interact with other kids. While we're there, we check out a board-book or two to take home.
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.
My library is across the street from a half-way house, and now it's just filled with methheads transitioning back to their normal scams. When I'm looking for some place to work or read and be comfortable in my surroundings, it's the last place I think of going.
It's funny I used to be in and out of homelessness and on and off bad addictions for years and I spent a lot of time in libraries. I spent a lot of effort telling myself people didn't really think things like this about me, it was just my own shame and insecurity and negativity, people don't really even think of other people that much.
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.
Oh heck yeah, the scam artists, and petty thieves all of whom will do anything for their next fix, are unshockingly looked down upon.
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?
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!
Wow. I wonder to what degree that's designed for Helsinki residents vs. visitors (from elsewhere in Finland or beyond) -- since it's located next to a few other tourist-centric places. I'd absolutely visit when in Helsinki, especially in the winter.
Not a lawyer nor even current on this, but from what I remember:
In most of the world, if you sell a book or other physical media, the original manufacturer can't put meaningful restrictions on your resale of that product. This is a bit different with e-books, audiobooks, some kind of cloud software, etc., and to a great degree a lot of SAAS and software licensing as subscription vs. product is contributing to the demise of software resale. You can't resell Steam games or other stuff linked to your game; you used to have a pretty robust market for renting or second-hand selling movies on physical media, video games, etc.
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.)
This is because the point of a library has changed a lot recently. My mom is a librarian and has talked a lot about how a lot of library engagement now is as a community space. It has internet access, you don't have to pay to be there, and can provide a lot of programs for free or reduced cost. As people are changing their habits, libraries are trying to follow them.
Oh the irony of talking about enshittification whilst using Substack, which has 9 browser cookies, 4 javascript trackers (that I could count) and a frustratingly annoying modal that scrolls into view when you read a couple of paragraphs. Do these dark patterns actually work to monetise a blogger's content?
I signed up for ~5 libraries in the US that allow nonlocal registrations, and as a result my Libby account has access to an absurdly large selection of books.
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.
You know how "basilica" meant a public building in Roman times, and the word came to mean "Christian building"? This is what's going to happen to libraries. In 50 years people will use it meaning "homeless shelter". Some older guy will explain that a long time ago, people used to go there to read physical books.
In the UK we have seen libraries falling like dominos in the "austerity" (post financial crash bank-welfare) era to pay for the failures of the bankers.
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.
My library is thankfully still pretty good, but it has been re-branded as a "Discovery Centre" whatever that means. Normally has a good selection of books, helpful staff and they even put on a regular schedule of kids nursery rhyme classes which are good fun for the little ones!
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.
> Alternative platforms already exist: one promising place to start might be the Palace Project and the associated Palace Marketplace.
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.
This doesn't address the main point about charging the library for access to clients' recommendations, but, at least in my library's version of Overdrive, it is perfectly easy to recommend a book acquisition to my local library.
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.
Coincidentally I have been working from a public library this week. The majority of patrons are homeless. Many are physically disabled. Some are mentally ill and yell at random at nothing.
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.
Libraries are a fairly unique kind of institution in society. It's community owned, so you're not going to throw someone out for not buying something. It's sheltered, and probably climate-controlled, so you're out of the elements. There's something to do (computers, books, activities).
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.
my local library is the same, it's very large but right in downtown. Filled to teh brim with crazy people. When my family wants to go to the library we drive 45min to a suburb and it's a completely different experience. Night/day doesn't even begin describe the difference. People like to complain/rant about suburbs but they do have their perks.
The whole writing industry in general is exposed to enshittification. Most books selling well nowadays are "personnal development" title written by the writing equivalent to a snake oil salesman / charlatan.
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.
This whole thread is pretty privileged, well off. Perhaps even 'elites'.
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.
The problems of "public-private partnerships" and use of corporate services by government utilities are the perverse incentives and gamification that arrises from greed. This is something a nonprofit or the government should run, not a corporation. Personally, I dislike all DRM virtual checkout bullshit and would rather have either a DRM-free ebook or the physical book. And if no DRM-free ebook exists, I consider buying a copy, scanning it, and releasing it online.
My heart goes out to the author's plight but am I the only one here who abjectly hates ebooks?
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.
Maybe a print shop that turns any digital file you send them into a nice book and sends it to you would be a solution (if printing yourself doesn't get the results)? Do they exist? I know I use a service like this for having art canvases printed.
Public libraries seem heavily romanticized. They aren't the places they once were. The big one in my local city is in an unsavory part of town, with homeless and drug addicts all over, creepy dudes looking at porn inside, with the lovely stench of body odor everywhere. Even the entrance is unnerving, with zombies sleeping on the steps. I wouldn't feel safe letting a child hang out there alone. Which is a major shame, because I spent many hours in libraries as a kid. This isn't hyperbole, just read through some recent google reviews of public libraries. These days, I'd rather browse the ebook catalog online and drive to a nice park or green space to read. I'm sure financial interests are somewhat to blame for the decline of the public library, but the other reasons seem more pressing atm.
Yeah there's a constant background hum of a feeling of danger when at the library. I wouldn't let my kid go to my city library alone. The suburb I grew up in still had a good, clean, safe place to sit and read. My wife and I used to sit there and do our homework together back when we were just dating.
In what way is the commenter "blaming" the library? This is simply the reality, that many libraries are unsafe.
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.
> We've got a library out here where the employees can get trained in adminstering Narcan
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.
i'd argue that the state of public spaces reflects the national status ... whether thats a park or the streets or whatever. i'm just saying that people will start to care less about these places if they're surrendered to anti social behavior.
Oslo wouldn't even crack the top 25 in population based on US cities. As a country, its also way less diverse and 1% of the total population size of the US. Comparing anything in the US to what is done in Nordic countries is generally a losing argument.
City population aside. Looks like a nice modern place, with nice architecture. I'm sure the city has great pride in it. But costly and quick research (reviews, reddit threads) seems to point to it not being a great place to study/do library things. Popular for tours and to have children run around. Cool building though.
It is a reversal. It's relatively loud in there (compared to a US library). Coffee shop levels. But there are study rooms and study areas. And actual books. I'd take that over the library in my town in a second which has half empty shelves and low usage and a vocal contingent calling for it's shuttering.
>I don’t know what KKR’s exact game plan is, although gouging more money from libraries for a reduced feature-set is clearly part of it. I am certainly suspicious of the fact that they appear to be setting up to gather more user data than ever while passing on less of that data to libraries, their ostensible customers.
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.
You want to make sure your base (free) features don't cover all of your user needs, otherwise they will never convert to the next tier of your product.
What's the next tier then? OverDrive premium for libraries? Getting people to buy books on OverDrive rather than lending them? Why would they go with them rather than audible?
> 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
This is why I get so annoyed with Doctorow's bitching about DRM and blaming "Big Tech." Until I see you can get DRM free things from libraries, I'm going to continue to think it is largely the copyright holders demanding these capabilities more so than I think it is a "big tech" company that almost certainly is bound by the same rules in working with the copyright owners.
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.
The tedious ranting aside, this is way off base—and really about ebooks, not libraries.
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.
Like so many nice things, it's a wonder that they even exist at all in the US. Nothing like a library could be built today. The country has become so corrupt and the only solutions that anyone seems to believe could ever work are free market services that commoditize every part of life. The enshittification of the entire country will probably be complete in the next 20 years, as even the most basic infrastructure like roads crumbles, never mind nice things like libraries or trains or clean drinking water.
Well, widespread public libraries mostly exist in the US because of private entities like the Carnegie Library, so I don’t think it’s really that simple. Prior to Carnegie, most libraries were subscription based.
There are a lot of Carnegie-funded libraries in the Dublin area. All of the libraries that I’m familiar with are beautiful buildings and stand out architecturally within their locality.
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
> Nothing like a library could be built today. The country has become so corrupt and the only solutions that anyone seems to believe could ever work are free market services that commoditize every part of life.
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 door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“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.”
With smart lock services requiring hosting and registration and ip-block and cloud IOT expenses, I'm surprised that this isn't happening already to be honest. Also that per token issue fees aren't being assessed by open id or sso providers. They could especially game the system by decreasing the ttl of tokens to smaller durations, and by instituting load-based pricing .
It'd be interesting to run a survey in the US, asking people who are in favour of public libraries in general: "If public libraries had never existed, would you support their creation today?"
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.
Many libraries in the US come from the hypercapitalist era of robber barons. They predate the word "capitalism". They predate the idea that there could even exist something other than capitalism.
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.
Libraries are a valuable resource to the homeless and those who have nowhere else to go. If such people are respectful and treat the library as a library, then nobody will begrudge them an hour's nap or their refuge from midday heat while they read books or use a computer. Homeless people can even sign up for library cards and use them, almost as if they were real patrons.
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.
We're talking about the functionality of their ebook service. There is no way in hell homeless people sleeping in the library makes the ebook service worse. Please, show me the press release or e-mail where OverDrive said "we're removing title wishlist notifications and selling ourselves to a private capital firm because you're a homeless shelter, not a library."
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.
> Many libraries in the US come from the hypercapitalist era of robber barons. They predate the word "capitalism". They predate the idea that there could even exist something other than capitalism.
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).
The issue is not when MOST public libraries were established but when "public libraries", as a concept, was established.
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.
The word "capitalism" is. The word only needed to be created when there was something to contrast it to. We don't have a word for "the system wherein individuals are considered to exist" because nobody has seriously suggested we don't exist.
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 word only needed to be created when there was something to contrast it to.
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.
The public library as a place to get reading material has less and less purpose anymore.
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.
But on the flip side, I went just last week, with my whole family, and we picked out two large shopping bags of books.
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 am like the author. Before 13 I had read the entire computer section, and maybe half of the math and physics sections. Plus the strips section, which was the only part of the library that very regularly got new stuff. I could not pay for those books with my allowance. I could not pay 1% of their price, and frankly it would have been several hundred dollars per month (because ... well, technical book prices). And this with it being a 70 minute bike ride to the library (I mean I just didn't return from school, which meant it was maybe 20 minutes, then returned in the evening).
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.
Except libraries pay for their books, and those books cannot be copied and distributed in an unlimited manner. Artist deserve to be compensated for their work.
The problem with that is that after 6 months artists invariably choose (through economic necessity, not choice) to deny everyone access to those books forever, which is then enforced through copyright and is just a great loss to everyone.
Only because they have a return address. The idea that reading a book for free in one context is "legal" and reading the same book for free in another context is "illegal" is simply legal fiction invented by congress to prop up an industry. It's not a law of nature and it's not even logically consistent.
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.
Coming enshittification? Seriously? Where has the author been for the past three decades as public libraries have quite literally debased themselves to chase some modicum of appeal to some nebulous concept of modern generations instead of being what they were and should always remain - public resources for knowledge? Where has the author been when libraries started giving more of a crap about politics than the appeal of their own, er, library? When they killed the user experience of their catalogues in the move away from cards and terminals over to sql databases and crappy websites? The user experience of libraries has been going downhill for at least that long, if not longer.
This is a genuinely bizarre point of view. Your nostalgia for the card catalog is shared by approximately nobody, least of all anyone whose job it would be to update and maintain it.
I'm glad to see that the state of modern libraries has caused such illiteracy that you think that the point of the op was about card catalogues, ergo proving my original point.
Well then I'm just confused about what you were talking about if "they killed the user experience of their catalogues in the move away from cards and terminals" doesn't refer to card catalogs....
Your library would very likely love to have both, but the cost of providing eBooks is such that for systems whose budgets are shrinking, it often does mean choosing one over the other. The decision to eliminate a print collection is unfortunate, but often better than hanging onto a decaying rack of books that only serves to signal to users that the library is outdated and obsolete too.
The end goal is for all information to come through government sanctioned media only. A small number of large corporations will be the executors of the will of the government in every part of the economy. The management of all major American corporations and the US government already belongs to the same tribe. Just research the background of the owners of the private equity firm that bought out the library system. They are part of a large family with a strong support system that the average person is not part of. Economic planning under capitalism occurs via decentralized, competitive, and voluntary decisions. The end state we are headed towards will be centralized, uncompetitive, and decisions will be involuntary as there will be no choice.
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.
I think it has everything to do with modern capitalism. The recent playbook is not "make a good product, sell it for more than you make", but more like "give away a product for free until you're a near monopoly, then start turning the screws on your customers". It's hard not to "put up with bad platforms and products" when your family, friends, and sometimes local city services are all using those platforms. And why are they using those platforms? Because they were initially attracted to the platform when it was good - i.e. before it started monetizing like crazy.
For modern capitalism: capitalism as it has manifested, particularly recently, or probably more accurately _redefined_, has been the result of two driving factors: imperfect information (sometimes intentionally, sometimes due to complexity) and regulatory influences. Companies are able to put the screws to their customers because their customers do not know or fully understand the true costs of that gmail account or Prime membership. Even if the result is a monopoly (as defined by today's parlance) there's nothing stopping a competitor from coming in and offering a superior product. The only time this is problem is when the company can use regulations as barriers to entry. However this is often often mislabeled as market capture.
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.
I’ve noticed it has become trendy to yell “capitalism is bad” because monopolies have been allowed to form and fester. It is interesting that the trend is not to point at the regulators who have utterly failed to do their jobs. And it is concerning that the subtext is that we should centralize even more power on the structure that is failing us.
I'm having a child soon, and I'm slowly building up a library of real & e-books for them.
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.
Building a physical bookshelf to display a collection of ebooks has been a dream of mine for a long time. Just waiting for e-ink displays to get larger and cheaper.
> 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.
The author blames it primarily on a single venture capital group, KRR. In fact the article doesn’t mention “capitalism” the economic system at all; only “venture capitalism” and “vampire capitalism”.
