this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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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.)