Maria Bustillos, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review in September:
US libraries, universities, and bookstores rely for the delivery of books on a small number of very big profit-driven companies, many of them privately held, whose commitment to freedom of expression is at best uncertain. The list includes the Follett Corporation ($2.8 billion in annual revenues), Clarivate ($2.6 billion), EBSCO Industries ($3.1 billion), KKR ($22.7 billion), and Ingram Industries ($2.7 billion). Each of these companies represents a potential chokepoint for books and periodicals. They all exercise near-monopolistic control over a piece of the distribution chain, with the capacity to render whole catalogues of e-books inaccessible to library patrons, or to university students, or online book buyers, at the flick of a switch.
It’s a good piece, centered on the rent-not-own status of ebooks (academic and otherwise). Bustillos writes that “building open-source models to connect publishers and libraries directly is imperative”—yes, indeed.
Bustillos, with others in the Brick House Consortium, has built out a suite of open-source apps to let libraries own their ebooks. They call it BRIET, an homage to the late French librarian Suzanne Briet. Their tagline: “Ebooks, for libraries, for keeps.”
The guerrilla initiative isn’t about open access, nor is it aimed at scholarly publishing. But it’s open infrastructure, community-built and -run. And I see that it was built with the help of Codex, which has me curious (and tentatively hopeful) about other AI-assisted infrastructure making. The big commercial publishers, and their defenders, constantly refer to their deep investments in “technology,” to justify their usurious profits. What if we could mimic their infrastructure out from under them?