This is probably one of the easiest things to come up with competitors for. You literally just display text. That’s something the Internet has been doing since its inception. The engineering is not hard. It’s time for a library consortium to design a competing platform.
They could probably hire a team of software engineers to make it in six months at a cost of less than a million dollars. Definitely doable for any large library system willing to invest the money. They can then sell the software to other library systems or give it away/release it as free software if they are generous
The problem is never on the tech end, assuming you wanted to make a good platform. That’s probably a 400-level CS class project, especially if you’re only dealing with a single library system that doesn’t have multi-million-user-scale and five-nines reliability needs.
The pitfalls are 99% about the business relationships and having to pre-enshittify the system to service them-- getting the publishers to trust the platform will enforce DRM and related random shitty deals (i. e. that ebooks have to be retired after n loans, as though they wear out like a paperback). I’d expect there’s virtually no trust for a new player.
What’s needed is mandatory licensing. The libraries and their software dev partners decide what terms they want, they get a standard price card, and the publishers have to eat it.
There are also hosting concerns and costs, but basically, yeah. This isn’t a hard technical problem. There are even pre-written dev libraries for reading epub books, like this one for Flutter.
(Source: Am software developer. Could probably write a PoC for this in a few weeks.)
With a few quotes to highlight the frustrating situation:
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.^1^ Best I could do: as of December 2019, OverDrive controlled digital lending for “more than 95% of public libraries in the US and Canada”.^2^)
Emphasis added.
Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR. […] 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. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.
[…]
And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America.
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