Anne Arundel County Library's Digital Media Policy - Confusion or Malice?

I signed up for my local library's digital media with a fair amount of anticipation. My stupid illness makes it pretty hard for me to get out and go to the library and when I do go I always end up throwing up in the parking lot. (Thankfully no actual vomiting in the stacks yet.) I like to read tactile books best but I'll settle for a digital book and when it comes to a choice of a digital book or no book, clearly the digital book is the better choice. Audio books are all over the map, some being extremely good (Anansi Boys read by Lenny Henry) and some unlistenable. (Anything by the guys who do the Left Behind series.) So when you take all this into account the digital library for my county and I should go together like green eggs and ham but so far I am not precisely pleased.

Of course you need a library card, that is a given. But you need more than that. You have to sign up for an account and you can only do it at the library. So much for being friendly to those of us who never go out. This is one reason I have been thinking about joining for a year and getting nowhere.

The electronic bounty is divided into two parts. I looked at every single work offered under one name and it was all Cliff Notes and things like Our Friends the Bears. I did not see anything I would find interesting or entertaining.

The second option is more popular work I suppose, offered in OverDrive Media and Adobe Acrobat. The notice says you can't play the audio books on your iPod because of licensing issues. What they really mean is they have made a pact with Microsoft and to maintain the monopoly you can't use your iPod. It looks like you can get away from Microsoft by using the OverDrive but it's all lies. I couldn't even open a file that I checked out until I updated the security in Windows Media Player. Yep, it's the dreaded DRM. Microsoft says that I am getting a higher level of protection by upgrading my DRM (something I didn't want to do but did eventually, fuming the whole time) and they make it sound like I am the one being protected but of course that's not true. I'm the one who is being restricted as to how I can use something that is temporarily mine.

But let's pretend I don't care about that and let's look at how the library handles their digital media.

All items are checked out for 21 days. After that they expire and you can't get them to work anymore. Okay, that is reasonable, I suppose, although if it were a regular book you could renew it up to three times so you are being kind of shorted if you need more time.

The thing that stinks is that you are stuck with the 21 days. I know it doesn't sound bad, but bear with me a moment. You can only have six electronic items out on your card. Why? I have no idea. You can have 99 regular items on your card so that doesn't make any sense to me. Possibly it is because there aren't a whole lot of electronic items at this stage of development. But what does that matter, you ask. Electronic means the entire population of patrons could have the same book out at the same time, right?

Wrong. If you want a popular book you have to put a hold on it. You have to wait until the book is "returned" by everyone in front of you before you can check it out. You can put a hold on an item if you want. I did that with a few audio books and a PDF version of Coraline that promises swoony secret material not available in my home copy. You give them an email address and they email you when the book is ready.

And that's exactly what happened. I got an email telling me the book was in and I had 72 hours to pick it up. Once I log in to the site and put it in my "bookbag" I have 30 minutes to check out and then it will vanish from my account. So I head straight to checkout only to discover I can't get it because I checked out six books already yesterday when I joined. Fine then, I'll return something I checked out and hope that I can check it out again later, although it says you can only download it once maybe they mean per checkout cycle.

But I find I can't return the audio books. They just stay on my computer for 21 days taking up space. I already listened to Catch the Lightning and would be happy to return it but I can't. I just have to wait for it expire. Meanwhile I lose my chances at any books that come off the waiting list. It's frustrating.

I think it's particularly frustrating because it could be so grand and glorious and instead its got crap software with DRM, incomprehensible rules and meaningless hoops to jump through. Maybe some day it will be a thing of beauty, but not today.