It's Happening: OverDrive's Amplify Sells Reading Analytics to Publishers

Full disclosure: I worked for OverDrive from 2008 to 2011, and I've spent over a year on a research piece about library vendors. Everything I'm working on has receipts and will be linked. But this can't wait for the polished version. You deserve to know what's happening right now, in plain sight.

On May 18, the Monday before Memorial Day, Steve Potash ran a sponsored spotlight in Publishers Weekly to soft-pitch OverDrive's new product, Amplify.

Here's what Amplify is, per their own announcement:

"a new layer of post-acquisition performance data drawn from hundreds of millions of monthly reading sessions across Libby and Sora."

Read that again.

Hundreds of millions of monthly reading sessions. Across Libby and Sora.

They're finally saying the quiet part out loud. They ARE collecting reading analytics, and now they're selling them to publishers, for a price, generating revenue you will never see.

And notice where OverDrive's CEO chose to say all this. A paid sponsored spotlight in Publishers Weekly.

Publisher trade press, publisher audience, publisher pitch.

I went looking for the library version of this announcement, the blog post, the Marketplace email, the heads-up to the 80,000 libraries and schools feeding this thing. I can't find one.

Weird, their library blog is book lists and award nominees.

I get it, Amplify is a product for publishers, so pitch it to publishers, fine.

But your patrons are the ones generating every data point in it.

And the people whose readers built this dataset weren't in the room.

No announcement you'd see. No heads-up.

You find out the same way I did, by reading the publisher trades.

That's the sneaky part.

Not that he said it in PW.

That he is offering to sell your readers' behavior and didn't think you needed to know.

Will it include PII? Probably not. They're not that dumb. It'll be aggregated, anonymized, packaged up nice. Doesn't matter. The data is still scraped from individual reading sessions, yours and your patrons'.

Anonymized is not the same as okay.

And here's the part that gets me...

In 2015, right after Rakuten bought OverDrive, someone asked Potash point blank how he'd protect patron privacy. His answer: reader choices are opt-in, readers can stay anonymous, and OverDrive had a track record of "respecting patron and reader privacy." (American Libraries, March 2015.)

Okay. So explain how that squares with selling publishers a map of where your readers slow down, stop, and quit. Anonymized or not, "we respect reader privacy" and "we sell your readers' behavior" do not live in the same house.

He didn't break a signed contract.

He broke the pitch.

The whole thing he sold libraries on.

No consent. No opt-out. No content-cost offset. Just publishers paying to see how their titles perform with your readers, so they can optimize, optimize, optimize. Authors are going to love this.

So to be clear: OverDrive bought ad space in Publishers Weekly to sell aggregated reading behavior from 80,000 libraries and schools to publishers, for money.

Why does this matter?

Libraries are getting gutted by budget cuts, and OverDrive looked at that and saw an opening. Sure, it's a business, it has a bottom line. But that bottom line belongs to KKR and private equity. Not us. None of this comes back to our communities. It goes to Wall Street. And it makes me furious.

This is personal. I took the GRE twice, paid for an MLIS completely out of pocket while working 50-plus hours a week at OverDrive. I became a librarian to help people get to digital materials they couldn't otherwise reach, and to do it privately. Limiting access is one thing. Taking someone's privacy is another. You do not need to know when a patron stopped reading, dropped a bookmark, or highlighted a word. You never had that before and you were doing just fine.

Reader, I'll leave you with this:

"OverDrive Amplify is a bet that making demand visible — who's reading, where they stop, which markets are quietly growing — is the next step in the same work."

Unbelievable.

— The Unhinged.