Let My EPUBs Go

Lately, I have been finding myself getting increasingly frustrated with the restrictions that are being placed on the content I choose to consume. In the so-called war on piracy, user experience is being sacrificed and I have no choice but to compromise or find workarounds to enjoy my content the way I want to. I will offer e-books as an example here. Music, movies and TV are still problematic, but thanks to streaming services (Spotify, iTunes, Play Music, Netflix, HBO Go) these are not as bad as e-books.

So channeling my inner Lewis Black, here goes:

E-books are easy to carry around to read - I already carry my phone and I can access thousands of them in my cloud library which takes up a tiny amount of physical space in some server farm somewhere. E-books can be synced across devices, so that I don't need to bother with bookmarks to hold my position. This is a god-send when I am feeling especially lazy and will just pick up the nearest device to read - my phone, my tablet or my laptop. That's it! These are the only two things I care about in a reading setup - ease of access and cross-device sync. If the setup has a well-designed display and smooth transitions between pages, that's an added bonus.

I am a member of the Singapore National Library Board, and in addition to the eight items I can check out at a time, I am also entitled to six e-resources. NLB, like tens of thousands of other libraries globally, uses Overdrive, which is the largest collection of e-resources in the world and unfortunately, provides a very poor experience considering my two concerns above.

First, ease of access. I have used Google Play Books for a couple of years now, and I am very happy with the experience. Books are a click away to read on all my devices and I can choose which books to keep locally on my device. Everything works from my Google ID, with virtually no hiccups. 

On the other hand, Overdrive tends to be unnecessarily problematic. First, I need to create an Overdrive ID. Then, I need to add my library into my Overdrive profile and log in using my library ID. On every device, I am logged out of the library system after a certain amount of time, so browsing the catalog requires me to log in again. But wait. Overdrive allows me to use Adobe Digital Editions (ADE: the go-to DRM solution for almost every major e-book publisher) to authorize the books on my computer to read offline. Unfortunately, I use Linux and there isn't any version of ADE that I can use. The only version that I can run under Wine is 1.7, which compared to the current 4.0 version, is positively prehistoric. Okay, so I get ADE installed (creating an Adobe ID) and then try to download a book to my computer that I checked out from the library on my phone.

Computer says no. Apparently because I am authorized in my Overdrive phone app with the Overdrive ID and ADE on my computer with the Adobe ID, the book cannot be read in both places. Oh no no, Overdrive helpfully allows me to authorize ADE with my Overdrive ID, but

Note: These instructions are for ADE 2.0 or newer. We recommend always using the latest version of ADE. You can learn how to install Adobe Digital Editions on your Windows or Mac computer here.

I would if I could! Remember how I cannot use anything beyond ADE 1.7 on Linux? This option goes out of the window. OK, so how about I sign in to the Overdrive app with my Adobe ID? No go.

Note: You may also authorize newer versions (3.2+) of the OverDrive app with an Adobe ID, but you don't need to. When you first launch the OverDrive app, you'll be required to log in with an OverDrive account, which authorizes the app automatically.

In other words, I will be forced to create an Overdrive ID. Worse, because the initial authorization is automatic, I have to deauthorize the app first, then reauthorize with the Adobe ID. Does it work? 

Oh no, I borrowed the book initially when I was authorized with Overdrive, so changing to Adobe voids the authorization, instead of actually reauthorizing it with the new ID like any sane piece of software would do.

Three IDs and I am still nowhere close to reading the book that I want to. OK, so how about I return the book and check it out again? (a.k.a. have you tried turning it off and on again?) Hopefully, this should result in a single authorization and I can finally get access where I want. But! I cannot return a book I checked out with a different authorization if I cannot download it. Why would Overdrive do that? If I am logged into my Overdrive account and my library account, I should be free to check out and return books. I can almost understand DRM restricting what I read, but being locked out of the system for all book transactions is crazy. At this point, my only option is to wait for the book to expire and be automatically returned. 

Of course, if you are familiar with Overdrive, you must be asking why I don't read directly in my browser? After all, that's the only option that Google Play Books offers, so it's a direct equivalent. Well, there are two minor reasons: First, it's a matter of principle. If Overdrive offers a feature, I expect it to work. If I have the option for reading offline via ADE, then I want to be able to use what is advertised. Second, Google Play Books does allow you to get your files offline, either via Takeout for uploaded files or directly for purchased books.

However, the main reason for wanting a different solution for reading e-books is the abysmal cross-device syncing in Overdrive. I have had about a 10% success rate getting a book to correctly sync. This was before the ADE fiasco, so I was moving between phone, tablet and browser.

First, if I check out a book from the library using my Overdrive account, it is not automatically available in my Overdrive account on all my other devices. I am required to log in to the library account to be able to see what books I have checked out. Contrast this with Google Play Books, which helpfully sends a notification to all my devices when I upload or purchase a new book. Tap on the notification and I can start reading immediately.

Second, there seems to be some major bugs in the syncing algorithm. For some reason, it is unable to identify what was the last device I read on. In a few cases, if I started reading on my phone with my last session also on the phone, it offered to put me back to where I was at the start of my last session! At other times, it managed to sync the chapter correctly, but could not get me to the correct page in the chapter. I have never had such an issue with Google Play Books, and the lack of this ability has forced me to look at other alternatives.

Unfortunately, as the publishing industry is mired in such a deep love affair with DRM, there is no easy, viable alternative. I can use a pipeline like Wine+ADE+Calibre+DeDRM plugin, but that goes against the usage rights of the e-book, and I don't want to do that because it will provide short-term justification to the publishers to further clamp down on e-books and charge readers and libraries even more for them.

If you think about it, the concept of e-books being handled as paper books is all wrong. The marginal cost of another e-book is minuscule compared to that of another paper book. Within this premise, the concepts of hold lists, limited copies, delayed online publishing windows can only be justified by publishers trying to squeeze as much money as they can out of this new medium. In fact, according to this article from GigaOm,

...“friction” may decline in the ebook lending transaction as compared to lending print books. From the publisher viewpoint, this friction provides some measure of security. Borrowing a print book from a library involves a nontrivial amount of personal work that often involves two trips-one to pick up the book and one to return it. The online availability of e-books alters this friction calculation, and publishers are concerned that the ready download-ability of library ebooks could have an adverse effect on sales.

In other words, making e-books difficult to access, especially from libraries, is in the interest of the publishing industry. It will probably be some time before there is any meaningful change that comes about; until then I'm going to try to stick to paper books from NLB.