Is it? Calibre with deDRM is a must for me. I love Overdrive but cannot imagine to stick to the forced regime of lending periods and random waiting times. I also typically read multiple (sometimes dozens of) non-fiction books in parallel, plus one or two fiction. That just wouldn’t work at all with digital lending.

It's the only way that works with digital lending! If you want to always have something available to read you need to be steadily queuing up books, but then they come in at a semi-random time so you have to jump between books depending on lending periods / length / interest to get through everything you have checked out before they get returned.

This is really sad. You're just pirating books. At least go use a pirate website and don't ruin libraries for the rest of us.

We will no longer have public goods if the public abuses them.

I love the idea of OverDrive but I've yet to have success with it. Either the book I'm interested in isn't available or it's unavailable for weeks. I don't have a ton of time to read or to drop what I am reading when something becomes available, so I usually just wind up buying the book if I'm really excited about it.

Granted, my library is not part of a major city's system but it's also not what I'd call a small one. I'd be curious to know how NYC or Chicago compare, as those are where people I know have had very positive experiences with these options.

What works for me with overdrive is using holds and then when it comes available, if I'm not ready to read I let someone skip ahead of me. That way I'm still next in line but it gives me a few days until someone else finishes the book and then it pings me again.

If you read one book a quarter then yeah it’s not for you. If you read one book a week you can queue up fifty good books and wait for that one to come available at some point in the year.

I used to do that but then like 10 books would come available at the same time and I'd feel all this pressure to read them as fast as possible.

In the end I gave up and just download now.

Just Pirate stuff on Annas Archive. Jumping through these ridiculous hoops for less than a floppy disk of data is just a humiliation ritual.

Authors should get paid for their work, though. Publishers, too, to be honest (they also do a lot of work and usually run on thin margins).

Waiting in line in a library app is annoying, but the waiting signals demand, which drives the library to buy more copies to circulate.

If you care about the author, navigate to their website and buy a book directly from them, or a tshirt or something. Then they'll actually get paid, unlike from a library loan, or the scraps that Amazon gives them (unless the author depends on Amazon's print on demand for all prints of their books in which case, I guess buy it from Amazon).

Yup.

In order for the writer not to starve, we must bypass the zillionaires.

Send pennies directly to the artist and work for a just society.

I'd prefer a complete bypass of the enshittified economy. Replaced with a system that doesn't trust that people with absolute power won't turn into narcissist cunts.

We've seen this waterfall of a system in communism, capitalism and more recently technofeodalism so one would think the logical solution would be to replace it with a grassroots up system.

> I'd prefer a complete bypass of the enshittified economy. Replaced with a system that doesn't trust that people with absolute power won't turn into narcissist cunts.

I've been running a co-op for about 4 years now and I really want to expand the model since it seems to be working really well. Turns out giving everyone in the company ownership and an equal say in what we do with our profits (including simply redistributing it to everyone) results in ridiculously hard working people. I'm trying to leverage this into making our own internal product development happen but am kinda stuck coming up with ideas.

Anyway someone interviewed me recently and was asking, "why don't more companies form as co-ops? What's the hidden downsides?" I was surprised that there was this suspicion that there must be some sneaky hidden downside, when in fact co-ops are more sustainable, have lower turnover, higher profit per person, and happier employees. There's no actual downside, it's literally all upsides - oh, except for the fact that there's no way to get obscenely rich as the owner of a co-op. That's it, that's the entire reason. People with capital start companies so they can exploit labor to get even more capital, and only people with capital have enough time and money to start companies, so thus there's not many co-ops.

> replace it with a grassroots up system.

This is basically how Marx wrote about Communism, and how Kropotkin wrote about Anarchist Communism. There have been many... interpretations... of their work in practice. Spanish anarchist syndicalism actually worked remarkably well, they had nearly their entire economy syndicalized before they were betrayed by the communists and then killed en masse by the fascists.

> Waiting in line in a library app is annoying, but the waiting signals demand, which drives the library to buy more copies to circulate.

This is not true for digital libraries. They do not "buy more copies" to circulate. They don't physically send you an USB Stick with a copy of the book and you send that back without making a copy. They can send everyone "in line" as many copies as they want. Whats the size of an ebook these days? 1MB? How many trillion copies could you make in a day?

You have to wait in line to hopefully someday maybe be allowed to read a copy of a book while meta torrents a petabyte of books for their AI usage. This is nothing but a humiliation ritual.

> They do not "buy more copies" to circulate.

That is exactly how ebook licenses for libraries work.

No, that is not how ebook licenses work. They buy more LICENSES not more COPIES.

Huh cool, we don't have any such large online libraries in Europe. Some countries or regions have some small online repos but it's a real PITA to get working as they all use Adobe drm.

I used to buy on kindle but since they made it much harder to break drm I just pirate now. I'm not paying for content I don't get to own.

I have an account with Berlin libraries and they offer both Libby and Overdrive (and some others) with a fairly large catalog. There is deDRM for calibre, and a command line tool called Knock which does not require Adobe software to remove the DRM.

Ah nice we don't have anything like that here.

But I don't think I will go back from what I'm doing now. It took a lot to get me to leave Amazon, but the DRM thing and also lately the larger amount of books "not available in your country or region" has just made me give up on the industry.

I will buy books now only if they are available to buy without DRM, and if they are not I will just pirate them.