Mushrooms and libraries good, capitalism and big publishers bad. Library apps questionable?

[bluelander]

Doing quite a bit better today. Spent some quality time with my spouse last night, which I needed. Had to sacrifice some sleep to get some rest, but it was worth it.

It's been raining for like the last two weeks, and mushrooms are popping up everywhere. They're mostly the plain white puffball variety, but it's still neat. I almost never see mushrooms at all, and never in this quantity.

I like how they appear in neat lines, like groups of little extraterrestrial tourists seeing the sights. I can see why they have a much bigger cultural footprint cultural in damp climates like England and Japan, because they're quite a sight when they pop up in large formations. They're a really interesting form of life. I keep meaning to read that mushroom book everyone recommends. In fact, I'm going to check and see if the library has the audiobook

several seconds later

There's one copy available on the Libby app but it's in use, so I placed a hold. Nice! It's rare that I go looking for a specific book and they actually have it. It says there's a two week wait, but it's okay. If the mushrooms can wait for a period of sufficient wetness, I can wait for this.

I saw a discussion recently about all the lawsuits being filed against the internet archive. There was the Hachette suit they lost, and now apparently every major music label is suing them for their collection of digitized 78RPM records. Their collection preserves a lot of stuff that's gone out of copyright that one wouldn't be able to hear anywhere else, but it also has a lot of artists whose back catalogs are being exploited by the labels and "intellectual property" holders. I don't see how any of these cases have merit, but it's very disheartening.

Anyway, the cultural assault on physical libraries came up, and I'm seeing a lot of people say that you should never use apps like Libby and Overdrive because the contracts are so punitively expensive compared to physical media, but I don't know if this is true? I'm pretty sure every actual librarian I've seen express an opinion on the subject says any use of services offered by libraries helps them, because demonstrating use is how they get funding. I do understand the argument that Libby/Overdrive is owned by a for-profit investment firm and is subject to the same cancerous deterioration as every capitalist scheme (I'm familiar with the Cory Doctorow-coined term) but it seems to me that if they turn the screws, the libraries will stop using it. They're not getting rid of physical media, they're using the tools that are available to make media accessible to more people. It would suck if that goes away, but I don't see it being an existential threat to libraries. I'm inclined to trust the librarians on this one.

In my case, work and the state of our public transit system are too burdensome for me to get to the library during opening hours, so learning about these apps has been a godsend. I'm a patron of the library for the first time in years, and I expect there are a lot of people in a similar boat. Surely getting more people to use the library can only be good? They (used to?) have bookmobiles to help people in remote areas get access to books, that's an expense that wasn't strictly necessary but helped make books accessible to more people. I think the apps are a modern extension of that. Yeah there needs to be a version of this that's not controlled by a corporation, but I think telling people not to use them is unhelpful at best.

I do think it's beneficial to encourage people to check out physical items in addition to using the apps if it's at all feasible. In fact, I just looked up my local library hours, and while they do close at 5 or 6 most days, they're open until 8:30 on Mondays. I might start making an effort to make a weekly library trip. I'd be interested in checking out their physical audiobook selection.

I do actually have a CD/Cassette player next to my desk at work. I assume it belonged to a previous employee and just became property of the office. On rare days that I work alone, holidays and the occasional Saturday or Sunday, I like to plug my phone into the line input and listen to podcasts over the speakers. It's nice to be able to not wear headphones for awhile.

I haven't actually tested the CD and cassette player, but if they work, that'd be a novel way to get more audiobooks into my media diet, although the way my desk is set up there's no elegant way to plug my headphones into it. Maybe I can get one of those little bluetooth transmitters.

Also, the library may have some of those little dedicated audiobook players. They're neat. I mean, they're incredibly wasteful, all of this is, if we didn't live in such a capitalist hellscape the supercomputers we carry in our pockets could have seamless 24/7 access to all the information in the world, but in the context of finding more ways to support libraries, they're interesting. Techmoan did a video about them, which prompted me to pick one up at a library book sale a couple years back and see if they can be hacked. If they can, it would have to be by someone with more skill than me, because it's pretty much just an SOC under a black blob. It didn't occur to me that the library might have books in this format I'd be interested in listening to, or that there would be a reason to go this route instead of checking it out from Libby or pirating it.

Torrenting audiobooks is an exhausting process. Audible's pissed in the pool with their 32kpbs, 22khz 8-bit mp3s that sound like a talkboy being played over shortwave radio, to the extent that it can be difficult to find audobooks in decent quality, especially older ones. Even some of the ones I've got from Libby have been compressed to the point of unlistenabilty. The playaways seem to have pretty decent quality files on them, which makes sense, because bulk 4GB eMMCs cost about a penny, and that's enough to hold just about anything short of the encyclopedia in perfectly acceptable quality.

I focus on audiobooks because practically, the 40 hours a week I need to fill at work is the time I'm most likely to get a lot of reading done. Historically I've listened to more podcasts than audiobooks, but that trend is starting to inverse. A lot of the podcasts I used to love have ended or I've grown tired of them, and a lot of the ones I've started to enjoy more recently have an insufferable number of ads. Even skipping them is starting to take its toll because having to skip ahead and backwards until I find the right spot every few minutes is hell for my focus.

I wish I had an easier time getting into audiobooks. There's a lot of, I dunno what to call it, onboarding anxiety? Like even a short audiobook is 8 hours, and that's a big commitment for an unknown quantity. Fiction is the hardest, I don't know if I'll like the world, the characters, the quality of the writing, the story, or the narrator. If it's sci Fi or fantasy, there will probably be a lot of new words and concepts I need to learn about. If I'm lucky, the book will start off with a strong character moment and get me through the door. If I'm unlucky, it's hours of turgid world building and scene setting and I nope out before I can even meet a character I care about.[^1][^2]

Nonfiction is easier for me, because it's already set in a world I kinda understand, and I can appreciate a deep dive on just about any subject if the writing is good and the author is passionate enough. Like mushrooms! Hey look at that, I brought it back around.

I want to write about the podcast I've been re-listening to instead of trying new books, because it's kind of interesting and kind of embarrassing; and I also wanted to talk about the untimely demise of cohost; but I'm already at 1500 words, so I'll save it. My god, a callback and a tease, it's like I'm some sort of blogger

[^1]: If I'm really unlucky, it's Neal Stephenson's Reamde, a book I spent an audible credit on back in 2011 when I could afford it and listened to for 30 hours before I realized I was bored out of my mind and stopped like 80% of the way through the book, my god someone get that man an editor (please don't use this statement to own me re: the quality of my own writing)

[^2]: now that I think about it, I don't know if the version of markdown used by dreamwidth supports footnotes, I think it's a non-standard feature that happened to be included in bearblog's MD flavor. I hope it is, because those are really fiddly and annoying to do in HTML. I guess I'll see