The most stupefying thing came across the Twitter transom recently in response to a New York Times piece on the apparent rise of subscription services for pretty much anything you can think of, including furniture and clothing–although Tom Haverford did the latter years ago.
Is there a model for renting books? Not a library. Something a bit more modern with a great and easy experience, but not a kindle reader.
Unsurprisingly, most everyone responded that, in fact, what you want is a library.
It escaped me, what they were saying, until someone suggested that by “a great and easy experience” they probably meant they wanted books shipped to them at home. This was described to me as perhaps thinking of themselves as “too busy to actually go to the library”, but that only made me wonder if it wasn’t at least a little bit that they saw libraries as for lesser people.
This would-be book renter, of course, was from the tech industry, although in the fields of public and analyst relations. Tech people seem to think that anything and everything simply must be “disrupted”—especially, I guess, if it keeps them from the great unwashed.
The sorts of people they might have to suffer when trying to hail a taxi or, god forbid, ride public transit.
Anything and everything must be monetized in ever newer ways, and these ways always seem be at the expense of critical democratic things like labor rights or providing government services.
Just use your public libraries. After all, you’re already paying the nominal rental fees.