5 ms·

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

by yaky 3y ago

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.

brodouevencode 3y ago
> 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?
- helpfulmandrill 3y ago
  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.
  - brodouevencode 3y ago
    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.)
    - helpfulmandrill 3y ago
      > 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?
      - brodouevencode 3y ago
        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.
        phyllistine 3y ago
        You're right, we should 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.
- matwood 3y ago
  > Why aren't more companies coming into this space if it's so lucrative? https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-ebook-economy/ https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-eboo... The publishers and libraries end up trapping themselves with DRM and other requirements that make it hard for other platforms to come in.
  - brodouevencode 3y ago
    Is that an economic problem or a regulatory problem?
- pipo234 3y ago
  > 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?
  - polygamous_bat 3y ago
    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.
- yaky 3y ago
  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.
zbirkenbuel 3y ago
As someone perpetually thrown off by Libby's UI it'd be awesome to learn more about that. Is it a blog post anywhere or just inside knowledge?
- yaky 3y ago
  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 (!)
tgv 3y ago
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.
stinkytaco 3y ago
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.
- UtopiaPunk 3y ago
  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.
  - stinkytaco 3y ago
    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.
    - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
      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.
cxr 3y ago
> 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.

by yaky 3y ago

brodouevencode 3y ago

> 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?

helpfulmandrill 3y ago
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.
- brodouevencode 3y ago
  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.)
  - helpfulmandrill 3y ago
    > 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?
    - brodouevencode 3y ago
      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.
      - phyllistine 3y ago
        You're right, we should 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.
matwood 3y ago
> Why aren't more companies coming into this space if it's so lucrative? https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-ebook-economy/ https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-eboo... The publishers and libraries end up trapping themselves with DRM and other requirements that make it hard for other platforms to come in.
- brodouevencode 3y ago
  Is that an economic problem or a regulatory problem?
pipo234 3y ago
> 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?
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  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.
yaky 3y ago
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.

zbirkenbuel 3y ago

As someone perpetually thrown off by Libby's UI it'd be awesome to learn more about that. Is it a blog post anywhere or just inside knowledge?

yaky 3y ago
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 (!)

tgv 3y ago

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.

stinkytaco 3y ago

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.

UtopiaPunk 3y ago
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.
- stinkytaco 3y ago
  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.
  - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
    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.

cxr 3y ago

> 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.