Overdrive- From Episode 279

posted in: IOS Reviews by Garth


I will have to start to make you pay for an App soon but this week it’s another free one. Overdrive is a portal to your local library. It allows you to download ePub or Audio books to your iPhone or iPad.

The content is wrapped in DRM like the toy car at  the pass the parcel game when my son turned 6. Despite this the app works and it actually makes it pretty easy to manage your content.

It seems they’ve done everything possible to make the lending of bits like the lending of an actual dead tree book. A particular library will only have the rights to certain books and they will have a limited number of copies of that book which you can borrow for a set time.

Some people get really annoyed with this sort of artificial restrictions but I just enjoy the free books. Well they are free for me, God knows how much my local council is paying for me to have free books. Hmm maybe I could get annoyed. Then again they always did have to pay for the books in the past.  But it’s not the past anymore so why are we still living with this sort of thing…

Okay, I will leave that argument for you to have with yourself. One tip to get around the DRM to a degree is to put the audio book on a dumb MP3 player. This sort of device doesn’t know when your 2 weeks borrowing time is up and you can keep it on the device for as long as you like.

There are other restrictions that I haven’t mentioned yet but maybe I will leave those up to you to find 🙂 I know I’m not really selling the App at the moment but actually I do like it. I have read a few good books from my library on it. Books that I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise.

If you’re a little too tight to subscribe to Audible then give it a go. There won’t be anywhere near the number of books available but they will be free.

Garth

@garth_hum

 

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