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Ernie Smith

@wiredfire I think IA pushed the edges of the program a little too hard during the pandemic but the idea of checking out digital forms of physical books is how things should work. It’s infuriating that it does not

8 comments
Wiredfire

@ernie absolutely, it’s maddening. In a similar way I have a stack of physical books but I just don’t read them, I always pick up the Kobo instead. There is no legal route for me to simply format-shift them to digital. Of course there are plenty of routes I could go to furnish myself with digital copies, but still.

Wiredfire

@ernie There was a service that tried to do this for a while, you had to write a message in the book and send photo as evidence and it used that to determine one book = one ebook. Naturally publishers hated this idea and the whole thing fell apart fairly quickly 😠

Jessamyn

@wiredfire @ernie I have never heard of that "write a message in the book to prove ownership" thing and as a librarian who has also worked at Open Library, I am very curious, Do you remember what it was called?

Wiredfire

@jessamyn @ernie it was called “Shelfie”. All gone and burried now but this is an article that touches on how it worked from the end user point of view:

time.com/4146187/shelfie-app-f

Dana McFarland

@wiredfire @jessamyn @ernie I remember some mystification and discussion about names on the tp verso when examples of these started surfacing as discards. There were other apps that worked the same way.
adweek.com/galleycat/take-a-sh

Dana McFarland

@wiredfire @jessamyn @ernie iirc there was also at least one case of a library reporting that they had this strange form of vandalism occur, where a name would be found on the tp verso.
That would seem not very well thought through.

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