TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

eBabel horrors at the Casa Grande library—and a few solutions

By David Rothman

Jeff Scott bought new Sony Readers, Zunes, iPods and Sansas for the Casa Grande Library in Arizona.

Guess what. None worked with his library’s new OverDrive service. Just a $30 MP3 player (audio), along with a Dell Axim X51v PDA (e-books) that he’d purchased earlier for his job.

In Bricks, OverDrive and the scary things I found out about myself while using e-books, Jeff says he was “most frustrated’ over the Sony Reader’s inability to work with OverDrive. He does note that PDA-phone combos using Windows Mobile can get along with OverDrive’s e-book service (via Mobi software?). And quite sensibly, he suggests that libraries think about mobile phone users, who, as Michael Harris has pointed out here, vastly outnumber people with E Ink devices.

Jeff’s done a great job of adjusting to e-reading on his PDA, and I suspect many others will learn to adjust to phone-PDA combos, too. Nice going, Jeff! And thanks very much for your interesting post. Now here are just a few things on my laundry list for e-book nirvana for libraries, so your e-reading life and your patrons’ will be happier:

• A successful adaptation of Adobe Digital Editions for the Sony Reader PRS-505—with the .epub standard format included, not just capabilities for encrypted PDF. .Epub will display better on small-screened machines like the Sony Reader.
• Use of .epub by library vendors. Hello OverDrive? Is that in your plans, as I’d hope it would be—with IDPF Prez Steve Potash being CEO of your company. If nothing else, Adobe files suitable for the Sony should be available. Are any announcements on the way? So far, your Media Formats page is the same old, same old. The claim on the OverDrive format page that Adobe can be “enjoyed” on PDAs is a little misleading, given the struggles that many handheld owners have with this format.
• Library-fit software that can run on OLPC XOs here in the States; maybe adapted Mobipocket? No, I doubt that OLPC would turn down mass orders. As much as I hate DRM, I hope that OLPC will be a little flexible here in the interest of making the XO useful as a full-serve library machine. The XO is more durable and a lot less expensive than the Kindle and the Sony Reader, not to mention that it’s a full-service computer, not just an e-reader.
• In a related vein, Amazon’s letting Kindles read encrypted Mobipocket from OverDrive and other library-related sources.

If I were Jeff, I’d team up with other Arizona librarians and tell OverDrive, Amazon/Mobi, Adobe and other vendors, “We are your market and potential market. Your job is to adapt to us and our patrons, not the other way around. If you don’t have a solution, then press your vendors for one.”

Ideally he can e-mail this TeleRead post around to encourage the state’s librarians to speak up in unison. Meanwhile, not to beat up on OverDrive unfairly; in usability on handhelds, it’s far ahead of NetLibrary, and, as Jeff points out, Apple’s DRM hasn’t made OverDrive’s job easier.

Finally I’ll conclude with more thoughts from Jeff on DRM/eBabel: “If I buy a book or a music CD, I own those items. I can let my friends borrow my stuff and I can use it wherever I want. If I want to purchase a digital version of the same, I am restricted on where I can play it and I can’t share it. It feels like I don’t really own the items I buy. It is very frustrating. It is further frustrating that on all of these devices, I can’t really do what I want with them. The only thing that consistently worked with OverDrive was a Dell Axim (or anything with Windows Mobile), or an unsophisticated device, like most PDAs, phones, or cheapie mp3 players. As far as using the content I want on these sophisticated and popular devices, these devices may as well be a pile of bricks.”

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