As the saying goes, it only took them twenty years — and Steam’s creators have finally realized what a monstrosity their Library Sharing was. Originally, it was meant as a way to let your family (or friends) play your games. But it was implemented in the most ass-backwards way imaginable. Sure, you could make your games available to your family, but the moment you started playing anything yourself, your entire library became unavailable to everyone else. So let’s say you’ve got 400 games in your personal library and you let your kids play them. Your son launches Game A and is happily playing, and then you come home from work and decide to play too — Game B. And suddenly your son gets kicked out of Game A because “the owner is back.” Even though you’re playing a different game. Why on earth can’t he just keep playing the first one?
Nobody ever understood why this feature was introduced in such a dumb way, because its value was extremely low. Mobile platforms introduced the idea of a family. Streaming services like Netflix let an entire household watch content under one family subscription. But game platforms held out until the bitter end.
And finally, on March 18, 2024, Steam launched proper Family Groups in beta. What does that mean? You can now create a family group and add up to five family members (six total: the creator plus five members). Everyone’s personal libraries are merged into a single shared family game library: no matter which family member owns a game, it becomes available to all members of the family group. Steam explained this feature in detail in an announcement and in answers to frequently asked questions. I’ll focus here on the most interesting points.
Well, I’m a brave guy, so I’ve already got Windows 11 installed on my computer. In fact, this is the very first time in my life that I’ve upgraded Windows from an old version to a new one “on the fly,” rather than doing a clean installation.
There is a concept known as affiliate (referral) programs. In short: you promote a store’s products, and in return, the store gives you a percentage of each sale. It’s generally beneficial for everyone: the store gains new customers thanks to advertising on external platforms, and the authors of popular resources get a small cut from the stores if their readers decide to make a purchase. Moreover, this is highly advantageous for stores (from my non-professional point of view). In most cases, when you pay for advertising, you spend money without any guarantee of getting it back. But here, you essentially receive free advertising and only pay a small percentage of the actual revenue generated by the user. Furthermore, as a store, you typically pay for a single purchase, but the buyer might stay and become a long-term customer. For subsequent purchases, you almost never pay anyone. Additionally, there’s the well-known factor of the first purchase—it’s much harder to convince someone to make their first purchase, but if they’re satisfied, the likelihood of a second purchase increases significantly.
As a devoted bookworm, I’ve always kept an eye on the development of online book sales. I witnessed the rise and growth of ozon.ru, and I even had a small hand in the creation of the Belarusian oz.by when it launched. From then on, I simply followed the market’s evolution.
As soon as such stores started offering affiliate programs, I signed up to test them out. This was especially advantageous when I was regularly writing the ” The Notes of Glitch the Hamster” series (the namesake of this blog), which reviewed all the latest sci-fi releases on the Russian-speaking market. Back then, I included links to books directly in my reviews, using my affiliate ID. I wouldn’t say I earned a lot, but I did manage to buy a few books (considering that getting books from Russian ozon to Belarus at the time wasn’t exactly easy).
CD Projekt continues to develop its GOG service, which began as a store for selling classic, DRM-free games. In my observation, it hasn’t managed to win the platform war against Steam, but they recently made an excellent move. Forget the platform war; they’ve chosen to target the numerous launchers from different platforms and essentially become a single aggregator for your gaming library. Steam has long been connectable via a plugin, but official integration first came with Xbox Store and now with Steam’s growing competitor, the Epic Games Store.
I fully support this initiative because they haven’t just consolidated a game library in one place; they’ve also maximized the functionality of each platform they can integrate with—friends, statuses, achievements…
They’ve even added a rating system and filtering features. With this, they are gradually moving into a different territory, suddenly competing with game databases like rawg.io and igdb.com.
I read a lot on my tablet. I also have a Kindle, but the tablet is always with me, and carrying two devices makes no sense at all. So, over time, the tablet became my main tool for reading (in addition to its other important functions). I mostly read books in PDF (some books require layout preservation) or, for the most part, in EPUB/FB2. These are two formats that are quite similar in terms of their philosophy.
I’ve tried a ton of different reading apps, and I’ve purchased at least five in addition to the native iBooks. But I still haven’t found the perfect option for myself. That’s why I periodically switch between different apps.
The closest to ideal for me is KyBook. In fact, I liked the first version more than the current KyBook 2. The new version, in my opinion, is overloaded, which affects basic functionality, requiring too many extra steps. However, the first version had occasional rendering glitches, and now the author is no longer developing it. Nevertheless, it still has its undeniable advantages:
It’s almost universal: it supports all the formats I need—PDF, EPUB, and FB2.
It displays pages when viewing the table of contents (which helps me gauge the length of chapters).
It can show footnotes on the same page, meaning the footnote text pops up above the main text instead of redirecting to the end of the book, as most readers do. This is incredibly convenient because you don’t lose your place and can see the context immediately. However, it seems to only work for FB2.
It natively supports an English-Russian dictionary (which is sometimes very useful), with translations popping up in the same way above the text. And it works in all three formats.
Although a bit clunky, it keeps a history of the last few books (which is handy since I often read several books in parallel).
It allows you to create a folder structure for better organization of your library (though I have to admit, the new version makes this very inconvenient. The old version did it better because the new one introduced the concepts of “Books” and “Files.” Folders only work for files, while some other functions only work for books. It’s incredibly frustrating).
It displays the current progress, the number of pages in the book, and the remaining pages in the chapter. Although it only shows progress as a percentage on the “recently read” tab, it’s not a big deal since I don’t need that feature often.
It allows for scrolling through PDFs (not just page flipping) and provides zooming options. Plus, it can convert PDFs to sepia.
There are other features, but they’re less essential.
Unfortunately, the program has its downsides. Rendering glitches occur from time to time, where all the paragraphs merge together, including the headings. Sadly, I haven’t been able to fix this. And this leads to the second downside: the developer, who used to be very responsive, has recently been slower to reply to user questions, often redirecting people to the FAQ, which, by the way, is very superficial and doesn’t answer more complex questions. Plus, it often seems like the developer takes many questions personally, which makes for an overall unpleasant experience. I can understand that on a human level sometimes, but after all, it’s the customers and buyers asking.
The second contender is Marvin. An excellent reader. I bought both the second and third versions (both had free versions, but there are also premium ones). When compared to KyBook, here are the differences:
It only supports EPUB.
It doesn’t display page numbers in the table of contents (or I couldn’t find this feature).
It supports either system dictionaries, transferring to Lingvo (which requires purchasing the dictionaries separately), or using a web lookup. However, this is still inconvenient since it can’t display an English-Russian translation directly above the text, and jumping to another app is less comfortable (the web option isn’t ideal either: it’s inconvenient and requires internet, which isn’t always available).
It can’t show in-text footnotes. But to be fair, I haven’t seen any other reader, including foreign ones, that does this either.
And then there’s the third option: the native iBooks. In terms of features, it’s the most limited. It displays PDFs only in the original color scheme, with no scrolling (just page-by-page flipping). Most of KyBook’s advantages for EPUB are also missing.
There are other apps, but they’re also quite limited or outdated. So, I mostly stick with KyBook, but when its minor flaws or the interface issues in the new version become too annoying, I switch to Marvin or iBooks.
What do you use for reading? What features are essential to you when reading?
