Convenient, Growth potential, Either a very easy process or fraught with technological pitfalls that will put off the less experienced user.
Some weeks back, I established an Overdrive account for myself (I thought) and downloaded the Overdrive console on my PC in the process of assisting a longtime branch customer who was having "bad luck" on her home PC. I was successful in loading an audio title on my home PC, and transferring that content to her MP3 player. Because she had purchased a player with some sort of proprietary software associated with the vendor (bad move) I did not get it to play, but I could listen to it on my own machine. It was a good exercise as I have been assisting other branch customers with troubleshooting.
I went ahead and explored Overdrive again and what I have experienced in the past still holds true--it's a library without enough copies. Most current nonfiction titles of interest required placing a hold...that is frustrating. But it gets worse. Despite having accessed Overdrive from home before...using the above customer's barcode I could NOT login myself. The "help" was not especially helpful and the problem is not solved....so
I next went to Gutenberg. I located the audio books, selected the texts read by humans, found Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary," went to a download site, and started the process...only to have an error message pop up and crash all Firefox sessions. Yippeee. So I tried again. And again...and again. No luck, not even an error message. I tried using both Firefox and Explorer but had no success. It is ironic--it's so easy and fast and obvious downloading a text copy of a book. I am defeated by the audio format however, for now.
I do not think Gutenberg's Help is particularly self evident or complete. I looked for steps on downloading the audio format and found a lot of distracting techno-talk instead of a set of clearly defined steps that anticipated any difficulties. I did not find what I was looking for, so either I am missing something obvious or a minor tech problem at my end is creating a bigger mess. What a way to end, with a whimper instead of a triumph.
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