What you've done it taken a small, irrelevant detail and used it to ignore the entire rest of the article, including interviews with librarians who talk about how much worse the new request system is.
You don't engage at all with the deeper underlying issue: we have a monopoly, owned by a notoriously unscrupulous private equity firm that holds control over the future of libraries.
Do you see how stupid it is to nitpick the article for not having access to pricing data, when the real concern here should be that the pricing is not publicly available?
The author freely admits they are not a professional journalist and what you are doing is gatekeeping that seems to serve no other purpose than to suppress a story that should be getting far more attention than it is. If you're concerned that other facts in this essay are off, (and they may well be, this is a solo essayist, not a professional journalist with a fact checker) then give them and hand, check other facts and send the author the information they missed.
A small detail that takes like 30 seconds to confirm if true or not that takes up like a quarter of their whole article.
> what you are doing is gatekeeping
About a quarter of their article is about this basic fact that takes almost zero effort to confirm or deny. Its not some deep hidden detail. I don't understand why you feel they need to hire a fact checker to figure out that libbyapp.com exists. I didn't realize expecting people to do more research than "ask random people on Mastodon" is gatekeeping journalism. Which this is all this essay is, someone shared their experiences misunderstanding how the new app works and then quoted a few random, unconfirmed sources off Mastodon.
And when you actually go look at their sources, it really begins to call in to question other premises of the story. The first person the author is quoting later says "I 'm not in the pipeline of ordering [from the old system]...or examining requests that were there" and other statements suggesting they never really directly used the library's side to Overdrive so they didn't really know what the old system was like. Hard to say the new system is worse than the old when you never really used the old one!
And then the librarian who wrote "this change is a real downgrade", their reason for why its a downgrade didn't make this blog post. Why not? Maybe because the reason why they felt that way was "For one, there is no way for libraries to see which patron clicked Notify Me for which title." Good! I don't necessarily want librarians to know "John Smith wants a copy of whatever", all they should know is that someone wants that book.
Then that whole idea that a library needs a subscription to see what was requested is also another misunderstanding. That Advantage program is only for libraries participating in a consortia, as the consortia is a shared pool of books. The Advantage program allows libraries participating in a consortia to have their own private Patron's Only section as well. But the author makes it sound like the only way for a library to know what books are being requested is by the Advantage program, which by their own sources isn't true!
> If you're concerned that other facts in this essay are off...then give them and hand, check other facts and send the author the information they missed.
I mean they pretty much just need to go to Overdrive's website and actually read the Mastodon toots (or whatever they're called) next to the ones they quoted and a number of their points will be shown to be incorrect. I'm not doing any more digging than what they already did and things that are very easily public information and I'm finding tons of glaring holes in their blog post.
> Do you see how stupid it is to nitpick the article for not having access to pricing data, when the real concern here should be that the pricing is not publicly available?
If their real concern was that we should have access to pricing data they should have actually included such a concept in their post, because they pretty much never do other than state libraries need to buy an Advantage subscription, which isn't true. Practically all of their post was about how they had to install the Libby app instead of using a website, that it took them a bit to understand how the "Notify Me" tag works despite there being help articles about it and the platform explaining it in the app, and then massively taking people on Mastodon out of context and leaving out key elements of their statements of if the new system is better or worse than the old and why.
> And then the librarian who wrote "this change is a real downgrade", their reason for why its a downgrade didn't make this blog post. Why not? Maybe because the reason why they felt that way was "For one, there is no way for libraries to see which patron clicked Notify Me for which title." Good! I don't necessarily want librarians to know "John Smith wants a copy of whatever", all they should know is that someone wants that book
It did make it into the blog post, it's literally the rest of the paragraph after that quote. I guess I can ignore everything else you're saying the to criticize the blog post because you made this one mistake.
> But the author makes it sound like the only way for a library to know what books are being requested is by the Advantage program, which by their own sources isn't true!
No, the author explicitly mention that the new change, read the paragraph above the paragraph where the Advantage Program is described.
> If their real concern was that we should have access to pricing data they should have actually included such a concept in their post, because they pretty much never do other than state libraries need to buy an Advantage subscription, which isn't true.
No the real concern, which you conveniently repeatedly fail to address, is that this is a monopoly, owned by a notoriously unscrupulous private equity firm, that holds the future of library patronage in its hands.
At this point, you're not adding any value to the discussion. You're just incorrectly nitpicking the article when you haven't bothered to read it closely enough to do so with any accuracy.
You don't engage at all with the deeper underlying issue: we have a monopoly, owned by a notoriously unscrupulous private equity firm that holds control over the future of libraries.
Do you see how stupid it is to nitpick the article for not having access to pricing data, when the real concern here should be that the pricing is not publicly available?
The author freely admits they are not a professional journalist and what you are doing is gatekeeping that seems to serve no other purpose than to suppress a story that should be getting far more attention than it is. If you're concerned that other facts in this essay are off, (and they may well be, this is a solo essayist, not a professional journalist with a fact checker) then give them and hand, check other facts and send the author the information they missed.