Downloadable media

I had used netlibrary a good deal before so I decided to try out overdrive instead. It was fairly easy to get to the titles, but I was struck by how few there were as of now, at least in the ebook format. It looks like there are only a couple of dozen titles and they are fairly random titles. The actual downloading and checkout was not too difficult, but all the different downloading and software requirements will make it difficult for some of patrons who not very tech savvy to use. I have experience using this technology and I found netlibrary very difficult to use when I first tried it several months ago. I gave up after a while and did not try again for a few months since it kept saying my software was not installed correctly. These services also tend to assume that patrons will be downloading this onto their own computers, but a lot of people want to use the public computers as their main computer and download straight to their phones or MP3 players.

I think our younger patrons might be more interested in the music since I have had several teenage patrons ask me about it. I have also had older patrons ask me lots of questions about the audio books and ebooks. I am hoping the new MP3 format becomes the standard since my main frustration helping these patrons was that the files would not play on their MP3 players and the hassle of them downloading new software onto their computers.