<story><title>The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries</title><url>https://karawynn.substack.com/p/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yaky</author><text>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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stinkytaco</author><text>This is interesting to hear. I&amp;#x27;ve always found that Overdrive does live up to its reputation of being a library focused company. The books aren&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s how this is supposed to work, right? They make money, we serve our customers. None of that seems sinister so I&amp;#x27;m curious what else is going on behind the scenes.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries</title><url>https://karawynn.substack.com/p/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yaky</author><text>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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tgv</author><text>Like ProQuest and its subsidiaries. They exploit public and academic libraries, largely because they have almost a monopoly, and it&amp;#x27;s very costly to extract the data and import it in another platform.</text></comment>