As a former librarian I wish a very friendly Fuck You and Die to book publishers. They are the scum of the Earth.

They hate libraries. Did you know that they induce artificial scarcity by making libraries pay for each digital copy of a book? Despite ebooks being infinitely replicable, they make libraries pay for more than one copy at a time. Publishers deliberately force a limit on the supply of digital library books to extort more money out of libraries for popular titles.

In addition, publishers lobbied (in the UK) to make library ebooks only work through their apps on mobile and PC, and not compatible with any Kindle/Kobo/etc so people wouldn’t get a good experience. There is a cartel — made primarily of a company called Overdrive. Their app is absolute buggy dogshit. A far cry from the breezy and simple interface of an e-reader.

But it gets worse. Original proposals from the publishers wanted it so that service users could only download ebooks while physically in the library, thus negating the convenience of them!

Despite ebooks being cheaper to produce than a traditional book and infinitely reproducable, Overdrive will sometimes charge more for an ebook than a supplier would charge for the equivalent physical copy.

Publishers would have lobbied against the invention of public libraries if they could. And take it from me — public libraries are one of the few open spaces left on this planet where one can just exist at without needing to pay for anything.

@yassie_j yassie was a librarian? I will join the cult immediatly!

Also... Thank you really really much yassie for this post. I knew most of this but did not know that the situation in the UK is that fucking dire when it comes to lending E-Books.

In Germany we have Onleihe, which is actually quite nice. Lots of devices have an app for it (my pocketbook comes with it pre-installed) and lots of libraries do their lending over it.

I mean there is still the unfortunate need for an adobe account (DRM grrr). But yeah I get why they need that. Gotta appease those corpo overlords.

We also have that lending limit based on the either the physical books a library posesses of anything or how many digital licenses they have. I dunno how these contracts are in detail but likely more than favorable to publishers.

You what I really about big publishers. How they really to hide behind the artists when it comes to regulation but also treat them not well after all. I am generalizing a lot I know. They are great publishers out there doing their best to be fair. But big ones with big successful names?/Yeah I dunno.

I love books and I love to own them. So I don't use libraries often. But they so valuable to society and culture!

I do buy most of my E-Books either DRM-free (thanks german publishers!) or on kobo and crack them open.

Court rulings publishers: hold my beer.