It took a lot of money control from the publishers and third party vendors libraries force people to use for digital lending. Those vendors can force users to create accounts, collect reading history and personal data, push ads, and sell lender's data to publishers and others. It also let publishers restrict what titles were available, remotely censor content, or remove titles whenever they wanted.
The IA was creating their own scans which limited the control publishers had and cut out much of that data collection/ad pushing. It was a better deal for readers, but it was a worse deal for publishers and advertisers.
I still don’t think that is true, because it assumes people that used the IA library would have used anything else (something that’s not their local library which is also free), and I just don’t think that is true.
I didn’t suddenly stop buying books on amazon when I could get them from the IA, the people who used it were the ones that could afford those books from Amazon in the first place.
Of course, me ‘thinking’ something is no guarantee, but I don’t have the numbers to say one way or another.
It took a lot of money control from the publishers and third party vendors libraries force people to use for digital lending. Those vendors can force users to create accounts, collect reading history and personal data, push ads, and sell lender's data to publishers and others. It also let publishers restrict what titles were available, remotely censor content, or remove titles whenever they wanted.
The IA was creating their own scans which limited the control publishers had and cut out much of that data collection/ad pushing. It was a better deal for readers, but it was a worse deal for publishers and advertisers.