OverDrive is terrible and discriminatory

So I've got a sick kid, and he wanted to listen to Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. I pop over to the Boston Public Library which has an extensive collection of audio books, and ho! I'm in luck. They have it and it's available. I check it out, click the Download button, it downloads, and then I get this:



Yeah, I had seen that the file was a WMA file but since it said iPod as well, I thought I might be able to do it, oh my gosh, FROM MY MAC. But no. Turns out Overdrive discriminates against you if you have a Mac. I love libraries, but BPL: this is terrible.

Frustrated, but as yet undaunted, I fire up Parallels, so I can run Windows, download a brand new version of the Overdrive Media Console for Windows, which presumably supports said file type. Sign into BPL again, and download the book again. I struggle for a bit because it wants to open it up in the Mac version of the console, even though we have already seen that that won't work.

Finally, I get it to open up in the Windows version of the Overdrive Media Console, and I get this:



Yeah, I couldn't read it either. All I can think is, boy, it's a good thing I have a kind of wide screen monitor. Can you believe that?

With some trepidation, I click OK. I go back to the Overdrive Media Console on Windows and, as instructed, click Tools > Windows > Windows Media Player Security Upgrade. I get another big, wide error:



I say OK again, even though it's practically impossible to read.

Yet another window pops up and tells me that more DRM security files are going to be sent to who knows where to keep track of this audio file. For pity's sake.



I say OK again. In for an inch, in for a mile. And get this for my troubles:



Now, if you believe there's a server somewhere handling this that has ever been available, I've got a bridge to sell you. It's ridiculous. Ridiculous that Overdrive and the BPL treat me like a thief, ridiculous that I can't borrow books from the library as a Mac user, ridiculous that Overdrive makes me update a program I downloaded today, makes me jump through various incomprehensible hoops to do so, wastes an hour of my time, and at the very end says, "Oh, too bad, we don't care enough to make the process actually work."

Overdrive, you do a terrible disservice to libraries and book lovers. BPL, I love you, and I have continually advocated paying more taxes that should go to support what you do, but Overdrive does not serve me and it makes you look terrible.

Bookle, an EPUB reader for Mac

TidBITS and Peter Lewis have teamed up to fill an aching void in ebookland: an EPUB reader for the Mac—not the iPad, but the Mac. It's called Bookle, and it's really nice. You drag your DRM-free EPUB files to the Dock icon to load them into Bookle, and then start reading. Navigation is particularly fine with a trackpad, where you can swipe from chapter to chapter, and then scroll up and down for the contents of each.

I think what I love so much about the swiping is that it is almost like leafing through a print book. It feels right.



I can see Bookle being particularly helpful for proofreading ebooks before they're published since it's based on the same WebKit that iBooks is. The only significant differences I found between Bookle's representation of my books and iBooks' was that Bookle doesn't shrink images to fit the viewport, like iBooks does. That said, I haven't done enough tests to illustrate that point conclusively, but I have noticed it with covers, for example.



It doesn't do Fixed Layout (at least not properly), and it doesn't have Search, and you can't write notes or add Bookmarks, but given the fact that Apple may release their own desktop ereader app at any moment, I was impressed that they did all they could. You can vote for your preferred additions on Bookle UserVoice Forum.