this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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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.
If it isn't hard, do it! I sure wouldn't know how.
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.)