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Originally Posted by eschwartz;3248609
Meanwhile, OverDrive will continue to impartially offer a catalog full of all BPH-published ebooks (and continue to mostly discriminate against Indie books), under the terms and prices agreed to by the publishers, and libraries will continue to be able to buy whatever ebooks they choose, without any filtering.
What does it matter who runs the infrastructure? You realize libraries for a long time have been paying corporations to run their backend and frontend? Whether it is their webhost or the vendor who provides the cataloging software (BiblioCommons, Polaris, etc.) it is and always has been corporations who do things for money, that provide public services the tools necessary to do their job.
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Note, too, that as part of their infrastructure contract operation, Overdrive lets libraries upload and distribute ebooks they own and can legally lend out:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/0...ebook-catalog/
...like the ebooks from Joe Konrath's Ebooks are Forever library ebook sales business...
Or public domain ebooks from Gutenberg and elsewhere.
Sounds like the concern is more that, since Overdrive is so much more competent than its wannabe rivals, it might at some distant point in the future turn eee-vile... Not that they are actually doing anything terribly bad now but that someday they might.
Some people lose sleep over things like that, I hear.