I found a new App recently which is pretty neat.  It’s called Overdrive Media Console.  It’s neat because, I can hook it up to my Library card and get library books delivered digitally.  I am of course, limited to using this app to consume the media due to DRM and the whole “it expires” thing of a Library.

I’m actually not interested in this at all from a text perspective.  I may be in the future but right now, I have a huge backlog of eBooks and Paper Books and whatnot.  I also don’t care to read text on my phone, though I have been doing it on the Kobo App as sort of a test.  What I like is that Overdrive gives me option for Audiobooks. 

I do not buy Audiobooks. They cost too much, for the most part.  Paperbooks I buy in paper or used, eBooks i get on sale or with a coupon.  Audiobooks, I check out CDs from the library.  I probably should just get a subscription to Audible but I have issues with the idea that my books are DRM trapped in a system that may or may not exist in the future.  If Audible were DRM free, I’d be all over it.

I love me some Audiobooks.

Overdrive has Audiobooks, delivered digitally to my phone.  I have a single complaint and one worry.  First off the worry, can I check these books out more than once?  I tested the waters with a book I own and have previous read, Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor.  It has been years since I read it in paper and I kind of felt like rereading it recently.  (Nevermind that I should be instead working on reading more of Haunted by the same author instead).

I did finish the book in the week given, but I wonder if I can recheck it out if I don’t finish within the week.  If I can, it’s not a big deal, though some of the books have a huge waiting list.

My real complaint?

There is very selection available.  I believe there were 190  books available, at least half of which were standard Public Domain books like Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein.  Of the remaining ones, very few were anything I’d ever heard of.  I picked Survivor partially because it was available and I knew what it was.  The only other books I really already wanted to read were the Hunger Games Trilogy books, the first one had a waiting list like 30 people long.  I suspect these rotate around as well, which means those Hunger Games books will probably disappear once the movie drops out of the spotlight.

So, while this is great service, it does have it’s limitations.  Mostly, I find it funny that we have to apply physical limitations of a normal Library to Digital Media in order to allow the thing to exist.