• @NateNate60@lemmy.world
      2•1 month ago

      They could probably hire a team of software engineers to make it in six months at a cost of less than a million dollars. Definitely doable for any large library system willing to invest the money. They can then sell the software to other library systems or give it away/release it as free software if they are generous

      • @HakFoo
        13•1 month ago

        The problem is never on the tech end, assuming you wanted to make a good platform. That’s probably a 400-level CS class project, especially if you’re only dealing with a single library system that doesn’t have multi-million-user-scale and five-nines reliability needs.

        The pitfalls are 99% about the business relationships and having to pre-enshittify the system to service them-- getting the publishers to trust the platform will enforce DRM and related random shitty deals (i. e. that ebooks have to be retired after n loans, as though they wear out like a paperback). I’d expect there’s virtually no trust for a new player.

        What’s needed is mandatory licensing. The libraries and their software dev partners decide what terms they want, they get a standard price card, and the publishers have to eat it.

      • @kescusay@lemmy.world
        1•1 month ago

        There are also hosting concerns and costs, but basically, yeah. This isn’t a hard technical problem. There are even pre-written dev libraries for reading epub books, like this one for Flutter.

        (Source: Am software developer. Could probably write a PoC for this in a few weeks.)