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With the official announcement of the acquisition of LibraryPass and Comics Plus now public, I can finally address one of the biggest question marks I had coming into 2026: the day job, and what’s next.

tl;dr: Almost six years to the day since I first started freelancing for LibraryPass, when it was just a URL and a landing page with a logo, I’m returning to a freelance role to support the transition to its new owners over the next few months, while figuring out the next step in my own journey.

I’ll have more on what’s up next for me soon (short-term and longer-term?), but for today, this is a slightly different “five things” post for the amazing ride that was the past six years.

“Go with what is. Use what happens.”
—Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

Six years (5.5 full-time) is the longest I’ve ever worked for one company, and I honestly wouldn’t have predicted that back in 2020. While wearing a variety of hats for a startup serving libraries ensured things were never boring, it also meant it would be really difficult for me to narrow my focus into a single role within a larger structure, and not just because I’m known to have strong opinions about the things I really care about.

I’m genuinely excited about the potential for LibraryPass’ core mission (providing equitable access to ebooks) to accelerate with new ownership and additional resources, but after nearly seven years of pushing that particular boulder up the hill (via Panorama Project and LibraryPass), I think it’s time for me to take a break. The downside of being too passionate about your work is that you risk burning out and becoming less effective at it (or too annoying about it), and this might be the perfect moment for a fresh set of eyes.

I’m not going to recount my LibraryPass story yet again (read this and this for that background), but I do want to highlight five things that made helping build it up from scratch — with a bunch of people I didn’t know previously, many of whom I still haven’t met in person, but became cherished colleagues and, I daresay, actual friends — one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.

Five Things: LibraryPass, 2020-2026

_ONE: The Mission

Working for a “mission-driven organization” has its pros and cons, but if the mission is righteous, the pros can offset — or at least minimize — the impact of the cons. Our mission to offer libraries affordable access to ebooks required collaborating with publishers and distributors on alternative licensing models; educating publishers, distributors, and librarians about those models; and doing consistent outreach to publicize the actual value of those models.

While providing equitable access to ebooks helps publishers reach more readers seems like a no-brainer, it remains a controversial point of view in the publishing industry.

It’s a pretty righteous mission, though, and it’s what frequently kept me going during a time when the very existence of libraries and intellectual freedom has been under relentless attack on several different fronts.

__TWO: The Comics

I’m a lifelong comics reader, from 70s spinner racks full of superheroes to the amazing diversity of comics and manga that are available today. It became my primary comfort medium again over the past few years, even more so than gaming, but I also wholeheartedly believe in its literary and educational value, too.

Despite industry coverage and marketing efforts that frequently over-indexes on it, most people don’t actually care about your mission or your business model — they care about what problems you can solve for them. Comics Plus wasn’t the first digital service to offer libraries unlimited, simultaneous access to a large collection of ebooks, but it was the comics themselves — the depth and diversity, and how we intentionally curated and promoted them — that made it interesting to librarians.

“Backlist is frontlist” was one of our core value propositions from the start, and it remains particularly important for comics, which are notorious for not always being easily available to readers — neither in print nor in libraries — while being way too easily available to everyone through piracy.

___THREE: The Publishers

With the exception of some notable genre and interest specialists in trade publishing, most readers don’t know or care who publishes the books they enjoy; they care about the stories and the people who actually created them. Comics have always been an exception, with many publishers having clearly defined brands, and active fanbases as engaged as those of the most popular authors in any genre.

“Library-friendly publishers” was another one of LibraryPass’ core value propositions, highlighting the fact that providing equitable access to ebooks is ultimately a choice librarians have to make, but publishers have to make possible. The publishers who make their comics available on Comics Plus show how much they value libraries in actions rather than just words on stickers at their favorite library conferences.

Over the years, I’ve connected with a wide range of comics professionals who not only “get” libraries, but actively treat them (and by extension, Comics Plus and LibraryPass) like valued partners. It’s often too easy to take broad swipes at “Publishers” for any number of legitimately bad practices, but it’s important to recognize that there are plenty of great individual publishers doing great things for different readers, and most of them unfairly fly under the industry radar because their titles aren’t on the right bestsellers lists.

____FOUR: The Content Generosity

I hate that word: content. It’s reductive, often by design, combining a wide range of initiatives into a generic slurry, but it was part of my title for six years, and I reflexively use it way more than I like. What I didn’t hate was that it represented both the comics we made available to libraries, and the resources we created to support them.

I’ve said many times in the past that the readers’ advisory articles and resources we produced over the last two-plus years in particular, were on par with any professional media organization related to comics or larger library vendors, and that wasn’t hyperbole. I’ve worked with a small group of experienced librarians, educators, and comics professionals who did an amazing job of translating their varied perspectives on comics into useful resources (whether you had Comics Plus or not), and none of that work was part of their primary job descriptions.

After all these years, I still love a good webinar and (somewhat inexplicably) so do many librarians. The few dozen I produced at LibraryPass are among my all-time favorites, and I learned something new during each and every one of them. My two favorite favorites are “How Manga Took Over The World” and “Comics & Manga Readers’ Advisory for Middle Grade & Teens,” both of which were featured sessions for LibraryCon Live in 2022 and 2025, respectively, which was always an annual highlight for me.

The generosity of the librarians, educators, and publishing professionals who shared their expertise with us in myriad ways over the years was partly a reflection of our shared belief in the power of comics and the power of libraries — and calling any of it “content” feels like an insult.

_____FIVE: The People

A shared righteous mission can make a difference — but only if the right people are involved.

I genuinely despise Slack because it’s much worse than email ever was, and it cemented the unspoken expectation that we should always be connected to, and available for, work at all times. Zoom and Meet (but never Teams) are arguably slightly more necessary evils for a fully remote company, but Slack is just pure evil disguised as a necessity. That said, almost any tool can be made useful in the right hands, and I realized over the past several weeks exactly how strong some of the connections I’ve made had become — particularly with colleagues I still haven’t met in person.

We had personal conversations, tough meetings, and even a few “social” events that turned out to be more fun than I ever would have expected, and that’s largely because we had a shared foundation to build from: The Mission. As with any worthwhile endeavor, it’s the people I did the work with that I’ll miss the most.

______BONUS

“I’m the random minor note you hear in major songs.”
—Janelle Monáe, I Like That