https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

The above arrangement is in effect because of the virus.

Happy holidays.

David

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Sorry about your problems, Barbara. I’m going to see if Kobo will offer an explanation. Very possibly, this has nothing to do with KKR, but one would think that support activities could be carried on by employees working at home to stay safe during the virus. In fairness to KKR, wouldn’t it make sense for its OverDrive service to work with as many machines as possible? And isn’t the Kobo support number intended for activities beyond those related to OverDrive? Still, I have no idea what might be going on behind the scenes. Ideally, Kobo can enlighten us.

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That too, among the other obvious things.

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Happy New Year, Michael.

As for Trump not hiding anything, that’s great to know. I assume that he and Mitch McConnell will now go for a Senate hearing with unlimited access to witnesses and documents. More seriously, we’ll agree to disagree on that one.

In regard to OverDrive, it’ll be interesting to see if it survives long-term in its present form. There are some really nice, dedicated people there (even if I don’t agree with everything the company does). I’m just hoping that scads of OverDrive staffers don’t lose their jobs.

I agree with you on the valuable service that groups like Project Gutenberg have provided. I myself donated The Silicon Jungle and NetWorld—-both originally published commercially—to PG. But volunteer groups are no replacements for full-strength national digital library systems or, for that matter, brick-and-mortar libraries.

David

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I remember Watergate well, and it was obvious to me from the start that Nixon had something to hide, even though in the end it proved to be little. It was a rogue operation that tapped the phone of a DNC secretary whose only significance was that she arranged call girls for visiting Democrats from the hinterlands. That’s all.

Read Deep State Target if you want to worry. Various federal agencies, particularly the FBI, conspired with foreign spy agencies to create ‘events’ that would create the illusion that there was a Trump/Putin conspiracy. That’s why an investigation costing millions turned up nothing. There was nothing. Take Watergate and multiply it by a million and you have what happened during Election 2016. People deep within our government conspired to fix an election.

Trump has displayed no evidence of hiding anything and it’s not hard to see why. It’s totally absurd that a billionaire would need to make a deal with Putin to get about $200,000 in campaign funding. It was Obama whose anemic foreign policies were great for Russia and Trump’s that have been a disaster for Russian expansionism. Russia is heavily dependent on oil exports for money. By encouraging fracking and pipelines, Trump hurt Putin in the worst possible way. If Putin had blackmail on Trump, it’d be out by now.

It is also absurd anyone with a scrap of sense would hire Russian hackers to shape U.S. politics. Both being Russian and being hackers means they know nothing about us. Besides, Hillary spent about $2 billion and had the best campaign advisers that money could buy. It did her no good. Given the Russia probably has copies of all her private server State Department emails, she is the one at risk of blackmail.

And does anyone with a scrape of sense think that Trump’s tax records have anything to hide? He can afford the best tax advisors on the planet and those returns were filed in heavily Democratic NYC and NY state. If he’d done anything illegal, the records would have leaked and he’d have been prosecuted.
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As for this buyout, I’m hardly surprised. The entire ebook process has been a disaster from the start. The ePub standard is grossly inadequate. The major publishers haven’t been given a reason to sign on. The press never covered the fact that Amazon was backrolling the feds in their attack on Apple and the major publishers. Amazon dominates the ebook market. Librarians signed up with a business that could be sold out rather than forming their own non-profit. The list goes on.

When it comes to ebooks, almost everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. That is everything except the marvelous volunteer organizations giving us public domain ebooks and audiobooks. That delights me.

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Exactly, Jen. We’re talking about marketer-created limitations, not tech ones. Shame on OverDrive for not serving public library patrons better in this respect with Libby (in general a good app).

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Like Trump, KKR apparently has something to hide—beyond the purchase price.

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