Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks—i.e., “digital content.” In New York, Potash met with two clients: the New York Public Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By then, Potash had already heard what he described to me recently as “heart-wrenching stories” from colleagues in China, about neighborhoods that were shut down owing to the coronavirus. He had an inkling that his business might be in for big changes when, toward the end of the week, on March 13th, the N.Y.P.L. closed down and issued a statement: “The responsible thing to do—and the best way to serve our patrons right now—is to help minimize the spread of COVID-19.” The library added, “We will continue to offer access to e-books.”
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books “a lot more expensive, in general, than print books,” Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver’s public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.
When author María Amparo Escandón moved to New York from Los Angeles in 2014, she’d often hear New Yorkers claim L.A. has no weather.
“What do you mean there’s no weather in L.A.?!” she’d exclaim, before countering with the Santa Ana winds, fires, drought and — yes — rain. “It’s not always 72 and sunny.”
I seek out gay bars in every city I visit. In Denver I find myself lighting one cigarette after another at a bright lounge with the writers Vi Khi Nao and Steven Dunn. Vi and I are in town for a reading, the last stop on my book tour. After the event, we pile into Steven’s car and drive towards the highway. The bar’s parking lot is flooded with muddy yellow light. The tarmac empty save a few SUVs with stickers that say “I’d rather be Climbing” and “Who Rescued Who?”
Inside we stand in line at a wide wooden bar flanking a deserted dance floor. Clots of men in khakis and fleece vests lean against mirrored walls and abandoned Plexiglas cages where dancers once writhed under the blue and white lights. I stare up at the motionless disco ball and try to picture the bar as it might’ve looked during its heyday: a fog machine pumping white clouds obscuring a smorgasbord of bodies, bottles, powders sniffed and swallowed on the floor. In this scene, I root through the night with my mouth, awash in blue lights. Every pore an orifice.
First published in 1929, the extended essay by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, advanced the idea that women’s creative liberation could be garnered by securing two things: time and solitude. In material form, Woolf likened time and solitude to a room and independent, financial means. At the center of this landmark feminist essay was the notion that the accumulation of capital equaled liberation and that intellectual freedom was bound with the material. The nuance of this claim about materiality however should not be missed. Indeed, as Woolf concedes, writing itself is material—an embodied practice that is produced in protest of a material lack. Money then not only makes writing possible but also, in turn, makes available a rendering of our world that would otherwise be hidden from us. It is in this seemingly paradoxical space wherein money produces the freedom to write, which in turn makes visible our world, that Jo Hamya situates her troubling debut novel, Three Rooms.
In the end we love the line love cannot cross.
In the end we fall for what we fail.