Can i borrow that new yorker

Rakuten, the maker of the Kobo e-reader, bought OverDrive for more than four hundred million dollars, in Last year, it sold the company to K. In the first days of the lockdown, the N. In response, it limited readers to three checkouts and three waitlist requests at a time, and it shifted almost all of its multimillion-dollar acquisitions budget to digital content.

By the end of March, seventy-four per cent of U. But, during the lockdown, I spent nearly every day wandering my neighborhood in a mask and headphones, listening to audiobooks. I wanted to hear a human voice and feel the passing of time; Libby became a lifeline. As a dual citizen of the Brooklyn Public Library and the N. I did what previously had been unthinkable and spent a hundred and eighty dollars on a Kobo. I read more books in than I had in years.

The burst in digital borrowing has helped many readers, but it has also accelerated an unsettling trend. Books, like music and movies and TV shows, are increasingly something that libraries and readers do not own but, rather, access temporarily, from corporations that do. The company that became OverDrive began, in the mid-eighties, as a document-digitizing firm, in a suburb of Cleveland.

Potash and his wife, Loree, an academic librarian, had both gone to law school at night, and their early clients were law firms that needed help digitizing large volumes of paperwork. Eventually, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich a precursor to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hired the young company to digitize reference books, and other publishers followed. In the two-thousands, OverDrive helped publishers set up online stores and sold e-books directly to consumers through its own marketplace.

The company also persuaded a few presses to license their e-books to libraries. At the time, the six largest publishers tended to sell their goods through online retailers, such as Amazon, which released its e-reader, the Kindle, in As soon as one reader returned an e-book, a second reader could check it out, and so on, with no expiration date.

Digital books, which could in theory be duplicated for free by any librarian with a computer, would still have waiting lists. In , HarperCollins introduced a new lending model that was capped at twenty-six checkouts, after which a library would need to purchase the book again.

Publishers soon introduced other variations, from two-year licenses to copies that multiple readers could use at one time, which boosted their revenue and allowed libraries to buy different kinds of books in different ways. For a classic work, which readers were likely to check out steadily for years to come, a library might purchase a handful of expensive perpetual licenses.

With a flashy best-seller, which could be expected to lose steam over time, the library might buy a large number of cheaper licenses that would expire relatively quickly. During nationwide racial-justice protests in the summer of , the N. During the past decade, publishers and booksellers have consolidated at a rapid pace, leaving a smaller number of companies with a greater degree of influence over what and how we read.

In , the U. Department of Justice accused Apple of conspiring with publishers to increase the prices of consumer e-books, and Apple later agreed to pay four hundred and fifty million dollars in settlement. In , the six largest publishers became five when Penguin merged with Random House. Libraries now pay OverDrive and its peers for a wide range of digital services, from negotiating prices with publishers to managing an increasingly complex system of digital rights.

Alan Inouye, the senior public-policy director at the American Library Association, told me that consolidation could reduce competition and potentially drive the cost of library e-books even higher. Amazon did not make its own e-books available to libraries until May, when it announced a deal with the Digital Public Library of America.

To illustrate the economics of e-book lending, the N. Hold on—I can get the steamer thing when I come over to use the convection oven. Guess what? For a trade, you can borrow my wok. You can probably get the black crusty stuff in the bottom off with a Brillo pad or a knife or something. Guess what else? You can have my garlic roaster, too—not to borrow; to keep. Can I borrow your lawnmower? Just the machine, not the guy. Can I have your beach house? People do that.

I read about it in the paper. Can I borrow some of your frequent-flier miles to get to the beach? JetBlue is running a promotion, so it costs only a couple of hundred thousand miles to fly there. The offer expires in about three minutes, so get back to me right away, O. Do you know about Kickstarter? You should!