Enshittification of Libby & Overdrive. This was long time coming. This deserves attention and we need more independent libraries.

Pulling the background link here to save people some clicks: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/

With a few quotes to highlight the frustrating situation:

That’s because OverDrive, a private corporation, has a monopoly on managing the availability and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks for government-funded public libraries in North America. (I looked for exact current numbers, but turns out that would require the time and resources of a professional journalist.¹ Best I could do: as of December 2019, OverDrive controlled digital lending for “more than 95% of public libraries in the US and Canada”.²)

Emphasis added.

Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR. [...] The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong. [...] Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.

[...]

And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America.

Emphasis added.

I am shocked! Shocked!

But also not surprised in the least.

This is probably one of the easiest things to come up with competitors for. You literally just display text. That's something the Internet has been doing since its inception. The engineering is not hard. It's time for a library consortium to design a competing platform.