As Cory Doctorow points out at Boing Boing, Leonard Richardson is not just a talented writer (Constellation Games, his 2012 SF debut novel from Candlemark, is showing no signs of slowing down) but also a major innovator and force for good: his software has given wings to public libraries by making e-books far easier to access.

Here’s Cory’s enthusiastic opening, and he knows whereof he speaks:

“Leonard Richardson isn’t just the author of Constellation Games, one of the best debut novels I ever read and certainly one of the best books I read in 2013; he’s also an extremely talented free/open source server-software developer who has been working for the New York Public Library on a software project that liberates every part of the electronic book lending system from any kind of proprietary lock-in, and, in the process, made reading library ebooks one trillion times better.”

Read the entire Boing Boing article, with a detailed explanation of the software innovation by Leonard himself, here.