By Gene Wilburn
For some years now I’ve been using Overdrive Media Player as my ebook reader and audiobook player for books and audiobooks borrowed from the public library. Overdrive is on my iPad, my MacBook, and my wife’s iPad. Between us we must have listened to or read several hundred borrowed library books. We like and enjoy Overdrive and, for our purposes, it’s an ideal library companion.
Recently, though, we learned that Overdrive (the company, based in Cleveland, Ohio) is replacing Overdrive Media Player with a different client app called Libby. In fact, they’re set to pull the plug on Overdrive Media Player by February, 2023. It’s no longer available in the various App Stores. Given that we’re now living on borrowed time, we added Libby to our tablets and laptops to get used to it, preparing ourselves to leave the Overdrive app forever.
It’s a truism in the software world that users don’t generally like changes to their interfaces, or having to switch to a different product. Word users balked at the “ribbon menus” of later versions of Word, and few Word users have switched to Google Docs or LibreOffice Writer. When you’re comfortable with an app, changes are painful. And so it was as we moved to using Libby.
The Overdrive interface is clean, neat, and tidy.
Whereas Libby is expansive, not as neat, and very chatty.
Of course beauty, being in the eye of the beholder, means that what one user likes, another wouldn’t. You can never please everyone, but on the whole I can move into Libby without overt trauma. Almost.
However, I’ve found two flaws in Libby.
Libby Doesn’t Allow You to Copy Text
I must say I was shocked when I discovered that you can’t copy and paste text from ebooks in Libby. This is something I do a lot in Overdrive, copying passages to my Notes app for research purposes, or quoting an opening line or paragraph when talking about an interesting book on Facebook. This, for me, is a serious deficiency.
Libby Doesn’t Support More Than One User Per Library Account
The reason why this might be a problem is simply this: Sometimes family members share the same Library card. For example, my wife and I live in the city of Mississauga, Ontario, adjacent to the city of Toronto. We each have a Mississauga Public Library borrowing card, but having previously lived in Toronto, we missed the larger selection of resources from the Toronto Public Library system. This we solved by purchasing a single extramural reader’s card for TPL. At a cost of over $100 per year, we didn’t feel we could each could afford one, so we share a single library account.
When we use Overdrive, we can each download books and ebooks from the library and our borrowings don’t get confused. If we’re reading the same book or listening to the same audiobook, our individual Overdrive apps keep our position locations discrete, which is great because we obviously don’t read or listen to the same book at the same pace.
Libby synchronizes its bookshelf automatically across devices, meaning that our separate reading locations get updated to whoever is farther along in the reading or listening. Then if one of us returns to a previous location, it resets it for the other one. Relocating your place, especially in an audiobook, is a painful experience.
Unfortunately, there is no setup mode in Libby that allows you to turn off synchronization, making it work more like Overdrive.
Better Font Sizing in Libby
Aside from those two problems, Libby is pleasant to use and, like Overdrive, allows you to choose your reading font, size it for your eyes, and choose between white, sepia, or black backgrounds. Black is especially good for reading at night. Both offer a timer to switch off your audiobook after a certain number of minutes, say 60 minutes, which is a godsend if you fall asleep while listening. You don’t have as far to backtrack.
One thing that has bugged me for years about Overdrive is its too-coarse adjustments of font size. I frequently hit that condition where the font is ether too small, or too large, with no steps in between. Libby has much finer font size adjustments. I can always seem to find that just-right “Goldilocks” font size when I’m reading on Libby, which gives Libby the edge for me on ebooks.
Looking Ahead
For the most part, I don’t anticipate great difficulty adjusting from Overdrive to Libby. I still prefer the clean, terse Overdrive user interface, but Libby is easy to use and is probably a better interface for new library users.
Overdrive (the company) only needs to fix two deficiencies: The ability to copy text from ebooks, and the option to turn off synchronization. If they can do that, I’ll give Libby full marks. Until then, it’s an app that just misses being great.
Gene Wilburn is a Canadian writer, photographer, and retired IT specialist..