Do I make myself angry by reading this before, during, or after my upcoming vacation?
The early draft I read (and gave highly critical feedback on) was riddled with bad, ill-informed takes on things that could have easily been researched rather than relying on anonymous interviews, and I've gotten the impression it wasn't significantly tightened up afterwards. ☹️
https://nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-ebook-economy/
☝🏽 Listening to this on my run, I can't tell how much was tweaked, but it's still overly reliant on opinionated interviews without any fact-checking. It presents naive overviews of the music industry, ebook production and distribution, and how public libraries actually work, while frequently conflating the Internet Archive and traditional public libraries.
Bizarrely, it even manages to create several moments of sympathy for publishers?!? 😐
Related-ish: Edge's Read Aloud feature is surprisingly good. It mispronounces the occasional word and can't distinguish footnotes and sidebars from the main text, but it's definitely good enough for most nonfiction that publishers are understandably leery of letting ebook platforms automatically enable it vs. producing and selling professional audiobooks.
@CozyCatastrophe Finished (re)reading it and I think they tightened up the conclusions from the draft but it's still an overall dud. There was a strong IA thread in the draft that's much softer now, probably because they lost the trial so definitively.
I suspect a full rebuttal will only come if it gets any traction, but I can't imagine who will be talking it up because it doesn't really add anything new to the conversation. I was tempted and may weigh in at some point.
Guy LeCharles Gonzalez (MOVED)
Sara