Cruel and Unusual Geography Dept

"I am Youssef, an 18-year-old young man, and my dreams and hopes vanished in an instant. My family’s house in Khan Yunis was destroyed, and I found myself and my family living in a displacement camp in Deir al-Balah, under the scorching sun, inside a tent swaying in the wind. I wake up every morning to the sounds of waves crashing on the shore, but they no longer mean anything to me—they only remind me of the freedom we lost and the life we once had..."

Hello everyone! As of writing this, Youssef is at $3,877 out of his EXTREMELY ACHIEVABLE $15,000 goal. He has only gotten eight don@tions in the past day. Youssef is asking for $15,000 to support himself and his family, mainly for medicine, shelter, and food, which are hellishly scarce as a manifestation of Israel's genocide. He is only 18 and he is responsible for his family's SURVIVAL. Please take the time to read Youssef's own words on his GFM page, as well as on his tumblr account, @yousefjehad3 . Read them, stare at them, process them. Let them truly sink in. Then, go to his fundr@iser and DON@TE. Every single coin you can spare counts, because everyone's small contributions will snowball into a massive one. None of these fundr@isers reached their goal because of one loaded don0r. It was always a group effort.

And, whether or not you're able to d0nate - SHARE, with your family, your friends, your groupchats, your tumblr followers, so that someone who can will have the chance to see it! If you are on Tumblr, you are able to reblog.

Don't ever think your contributions are useless. They provide material help and are expressions of care during impossibly dire times. Palestinians quantifiably cannot afford your apathy.

Youssef's GFM is vetted. He is shown on line 255 on the Vetted Gaza Evacuation Fundr@iser List by @/el-shab-hussein and @/nabulsi.

Write the worst fucking version you possibly can and stick it in a folder and forget it for a month or two before you look at it again. You know what you have now?

A first draft. And with enough time to think some new thoughts about it, you'll soon end up with a better, second draft! And eventually, you'll end up with something you'd be perfectly okay with letting other people read!

You'll never believe this process works no matter how many times you do it, but it totally does. You just have to drag your brain kicking and screaming to that blank page and get the bones down first.

They have already begun making it worse/less usable and they have a chokepoint monopoly on the delivery method of ebooks borrowed from public libraries in the US.

A fun thing about capitalism is that rich people can buy something a lot of people love and depend on, and then destroy it for fun and profit, and there’s not really anything we can do about it.

first of all, Overdrive absolutely has a monopoly and they are absolutely price-gouging libraries. ebook licenses cost on average $60 per copy, and they often come with a limited number of uses or a year-long license or other strings. (ask me how long we can circulate a $15 physical book! because it's more than a year.) but that has been happening since WELL before KKR bought them out. i'm not here to cape for KKR, but the person to get mad at here is (primarily) the virtual monopoly. (and also the publishers, who generally set the T&C that their books are sold with.)

BUT. i did read the entire Medium post linked, but I think a number of the concerns are coming from a place of genuine but misinformed concern.

Deep Search is a new (and separate!) feature rolled out this spring-- it lets you search across multiple libraries, if you have more than one library card. It's actually a huge improvement to how searching used to work, where you used to have to search each library card separately. It's entirely unrelated to the Notify Me feature, which I do think is a definite downgrade, and Overdrive has been frustratingly opaque with us about the reasons for the change. (I will say that many library networks didn't ever offer the ability to suggest books via Libby/Overdrive-- purchase requests were an opt-in feature.) I don't doubt that there are profit-driven reasons for that change, but I also think that in general Libby is more usable these days than it's ever been. and it's been 3 years since the KKR buyout!

Relatedly, the Libby app was first released in 2017. It was meant to be a big improvement over the pretty clunky Overdrive app, and in most respects it was– except that it didn't offer screenreader functionality. This was a huge misstep on Overdrive's part, and they should have had screenreader support built in from the gate. But THAT is why Overdrive the app was only shut down in May of this year– they needed to get screenreaders up and running in Libby (which they did in fall of 2021) before they could begin to sundown the Overdrive app. And honestly, I'm glad they got rid of the old app! It doesn't make sense to have two apps with the same functionality. It's confusing for patrons, and it's hard for librarians to support multiple apps (ask me how much I love when someone calls in and says "the library app isn't working" and I have to ask which of five separate apps it could be.)

Again, Overdrive absolutely should have taken less than four years to get screenreaders working in Libby. Accessibility should have been a feature from the start, and I still find it frustrating that there's no built-in autoscroll for people with mobility issues. But honestly, keeping the old app running for a while and gradually sunsetting it is good user support-- it gives users time to transition slowly and helps librarians have lots of lead time to warn patrons about the change. And frankly, none of this has anything to do with KKR, which bought Overdrive three years after Libby was released!

I am absolutely not caping for KKR. I'm deeply concerned about venture capital in general, and I think KKR in particular's purchase of S&S is a real fucking bad thing! I literally left my last job bc a VC buyout led to burnout and an RSI so bad I had to get major surgery. I don't want capital in publishing! But I also don't want people to panic about a series of arguments that don't accurately represent the situation on the ground.

I see an article like this and frankly, I see what feels like well-intentioned fear-mongering. Libraries are dealing with a LOT of shit right now. We are underfunded and often overworked. We are the place people go for help with every section of our failing bureaucracy. Also, a lot of people are calling us pedophiles for providing kids with queer books! What we really do not need is a lot of people calling us in a panic with misinformed concerns about Overdrive-- believe me, we know better than anyone the places in which it fails (mostly, charging us through the nose, which again it has been doing for waaaay longer than KKR was involved.)

So where do we go from here? Continue to support and advocate for your local library. (You don't need to stop using Libby. In fact, the more users we have, the better we're able to negotiate better pricing. If Libby really does enshittify, THEN we'll figure out what to do-- libraries are pretty good at figuring out how to make a lot happen with a little when we need to.)

If you're able to, consider checking out physical books! They're a lot cheaper for us to provide, and plus you get to talk to a librarian or staff member while you do so. (Or you can use self-checkout, if you don't want to talk to anyone. I get it!) If you want to purchase a book that's not in the library's catalog– ebook or otherwise– look on the library's website for a purchase request form, or ask a librarian where to find that form.

Maybe I just wasn’t in need of it yet but when I was going through a hard time I decided to try again and I think I read Reaper Man and fell in love with DEATH, and then because I mostly read whatever is available at the time on Libby I grabbed one of the Witches books and decided that I wanted to BE Granny Weatherwax when I grew up (ha) but in fact was 80% Nanny Ogg and 20% Magrat (no complaints, and I’m Granny when the situation calls for it) and so I read every single Witches book. I’ve been hooked ever since.

I didn’t think I’d love any of the characters more than the witches and thought hey, people love the City Watch books but different strokes for different folks, I’m sure they’re still lovely, I just won’t love them as much and I was SO wrong because Pseudopolis Yard and Ankh Morpork feel like home and I’d kill for Vimes and Carrot and Angua and Vetinari and Colon and Nobbs and all the rest. I love them. I’m reading that series in order and just finished Jingo (my favorite so far) and I’m waiting for The Fifth Elephant to be available. I cannot wait.