Bits and Bobs and Asset Strippers in Libraries

I’ve been away on holiday in York.  It was very grey and rained a lot of the time. But I stayed in a hotel in a very central location and I enjoyed myself anyway.  One day I went up onto the city walls, using the stairs at the medieval gateway named Mickelgate Bar.  I walked around a section, and came down in front of the Yorkshire Museum, from where the photograph at the end was taken.

Various items came to my attention while I was away.  Naturally I ignored them.  Only a fool picks up email while on holiday.  Burnout is a real risk for people of our sort, so we really must take our holidays.  Likewise if you wrote to me, pardon my failure to respond.

But here’s a couple of them.

The first of these was a set of Unicode fonts for Old Slavonic.  Here’s a screen grab of the website, sci.ponomar.net/fonts:

By coincidence I also learned of the Brill fonts.  These are commercial fonts, designed by that publishing house to give a common appearance to their books.  They are of interest because they implement a lot of odd characters useful to manuscript researchers.  They are free for non-commercial use.

I also managed to get banned from Twitter for a week.  Once more onto the naughty step, dear friends.  It’s about the third time now, in each case because I made an off-the-cuff humorous reply to something which their censor-bot didn’t like.  So I have ended up browsing my old Mastodon account instead. I was also able to create a Bluesky account, although I have yet to work out how to feed my posts there.  Twitter gets a lot of bad press these days, but most of this seems to be politically motivated.  All the same I’m rather in favour of dispersing social media among more than one site, to be honest.

But in the process I came across a truly interesting and perceptive article by Cory Doctorow on just why sites like Facebook, Google, Amazon, are getting steadily worse and worse to use.  It appeared in January, but was reposted in Wired, and it clearly struck a chord with others.  It is unfortunate that the author gave it a coarse title: Tiktok’s enshittification.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Recommended.

We might think that this process will not affect the world of academia.  But we would be wrong. For this very morning I found another article, by Karawynn Long, on how precisely the same process is now affecting public libraries in the US and Canada: The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries: Global investment vampires have positioned themselves to suck our libraries dry.

Ignore the first four paragraphs.  The next few summarise the Doctorow article.  But then… it gets interesting.

Well, if you use a public library in the United States or Canada, and you ever access their ebooks or audiobooks, you’re almost certainly familiar with the OverDrive platform or its mobile app Libby.  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 saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR…

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.

“In the popular imagination, private equity is often portrayed as a vulture, or some other scavenger that feasts on the sick and dying,” writes Hannah Levintova in Mother Jones. “But the bulk of the work done by modern-day private equity firms is not to finish off sick companies, but rather to stalk and gut the healthy ones.”

Calling them “vampire capitalists” would be more accurate.

Enshittified platforms are not an accidental outcome; they are just one of the inevitable dessicated corpses the vampires leave behind.

And these vampire capitalists currently have a chokehold on the digital catalogs of the public library systems of North America.

Again, if you can wade through the article, it will be enlightening.  The term “enshittification” seems to have caught on, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it starts to shape policy.

Anyway, enough about boring stuff.  Here’s my photograph of the splendour of York Minster!