The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries
Global investment vampires have positioned themselves to suck our libraries dry
Global investment vampires have positioned themselves to suck our libraries dry
Let's call out the particular global investment vampire in this story, KKR - Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, because it's the Count Dracula of hedge funds, and also the company that killed Toys 'R' Us:
This whole thing smelled like enshittification to me, so I kept digging, this time into OverDrive itself. Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR.
With that sentence, my audience just divided into two types of people
- the ones who (like me, usually) pay no particular attention to the world of “high finance”, don’t recognize the moniker, and so had zero reaction,
and
- the ones like my friend who happens to be a business journalist at the New York Times, whose reaction as soon as I said “KKR” was the aural equivalent of the Munch scream.
The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong.
Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile.
KKR was the subject of the famous 1989 book (and subsequent movie) Barbarians at the Gate, in which a pair of investigative journalists from the Wall Street Journal detail what one Times reviewer called the “avarice, malice, and egomania” of KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco with “all the suspense of a first-rate thriller”. The ultimate result: KKR’s private equity barons raked in the cash, while thousands of employees were axed and consumer prices of RJR Nabisco products soared.
More recently, KKR teamed up with two other private equity firms to execute a leveraged buyout of Toys ‘R’ Us. They deliberately weighted down the company with a crushing level of debt in order to begin feeding on its profits; they sucked out half a billion dollars as the company staggered along for another dozen years. When Toys ‘R’ Us finally collapsed and died in 2018, the vultures flapped off, unconcerned, leaving 33,000 desperate workers unemployed and without severance.
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.
...and now it's come for your local library.
https://www.kkr.com/our-firm/team
Remember these massive corporations have human faces at the top level. They’re not just some non-corporeal concept.
It never hurts to be informed about these people, such as one of the founders George R. Roberts:
https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/george-r-roberts-house/view/google/
Is it just me, or do all of those faces look AI-generated?
Guillotines, when?
They're definitely among the worst of the worst. It's always surprised me how comparatively sterile their wiki page is. Feels like they've got someone cleaning it up.
I wouldn't be surprised - they have plenty of money to pay someone to keep that page clean.
I also found out after this post that they're in the active process of acquiring Simon and Schuster. Cory Doctorow (aka @pluralistic) has a great writeup on them here.
This is a huge bummer. I wonder if maybe a consortium of some of the biggest library systems in the country could band together and make a platform that they control to use instead. It seems like libby/overdrive is only going to keep getting worse and more predatory.
Something has to be done to regulate these leveraged buyouts too. Providing no real value and then just vandalizing and destroying companies.
This is a very important/good piece. I would really like to ask the writer their feelings on hoopla, which is not mentioned in here.  I thought they were pretty large, but apparently overdrive controls nearly the entire market?
+1 for hoopla. Just discovered it last week at my local library, already on my second audiobook!
I wish hoopla had more ebooks. It seems to be more focused on comics, which is great for comics.
It has a fantastic audiobook selection
+1 for hoopla. Just discovered it last week at my local library, already on my second audiobook!
AFAIK you can't read Hoopla ebooks on Kobo or Kindle eInk eReaders, which makes it useless for reading for me
I use it primarily for comics and audiobooks so yeah, I can see why that would be frustrating if you're wanting to do written word
Looks like the enshittification of op-eds/essays is in full swing here.
The author continually undermines her own points (via parenthesis! Because it’s so quirky!) and repeatedly uses a buzzword that does not apply to the scenario she’s describing.
This isn’t the same process of enshittification that happened to Amazon et al, this is just corporate takeover of our public services, which goes back way further than a few websites. It’s straight-up capitalist cronyism. But I guess that wouldn’t get as many clicks from edgy teenagers who think Cory Doctorow is a literal prophet.
I feel like I'm not reading the same article as you are. Can you share an example of where they undermine their own argument? This seems like a pretty well researched and thought out article.
They clearly state their interpretation of enshitification and it seems to me like a valid generalisation and to be applied correctly.
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 looked for exact current numbers, but turns out that would require the time and resources of a professional journalist.)
We’re reading the same article. you’re allowed to like it, but that doesn’t make it well-researched or even good. i like lots of crap too.
Also what is everybody’s obsession with YoU nEeD tO PrOvIdE eXaMpLeS any time somebody gives their thoughts on an article? It’s fucking childish and entitled behavior.
