Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
. . . it works out as a way to punish the poor, disabled, and overworked people who are most reliant on libraries for access to books.
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The disabled are covered by homebound library services. As for the poor, there probably are some people living in poverty, on this board, who are obvious exceptions, but the poor disproportionately lack eReaders, and tend to use the library for purposes that require physical presence anyway, such as getting on a computer to apply for a job.
As for the overworked, you have me there. That's an excellent point.
Right now, in the US, the only big publisher that thoroughly cooperates with Overdrive seems to be the biggest, Random House. It's not that I want Random House to start requiring physical presence. It's that anything from Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, etc. would be better than the nothing we have now. I don't want to give them the impression that starting to cooperate a little with Overdrive would give them worse publicity than they now experience staying out.
As I have learned in this thread,
publishers already sent up a physical presence trial balloon in October, and got a lot of negative feedback about this being a war on libraries and so forth. And, since then, nothing good has happened in terms of more publishers cooperating with Overdrive.