After making a how to video about Overdrive, I have test driven the platform for several weeks now. I am disappointed. This service has the potential to be absolutely ideal for e-content but the developers have too many glitches to work out on the mobile platform before I can continue to speak highly of it. Even connected to wifi and having full service, I have experienced buffering and skipping to random chapters that was very frustrating because it made the service useless. I was also not able to download any audiobook titles so that I could use another mobile application to listen to them. I got angry that my library was paying Overdrive to provide titles and it was not following through on something it claimed to be able to do. I have not experienced any of these problems on the web from a laptop however. The ebook half of the service works great on both device types, but it is the audiobooks that I love best and cannot get to function on mobile.
The only up and coming competitor to Overdrive is 3M and their Cloud Library. This service platform is already available at the San Diego Public Library. One great distinguishing feature 3M offers is a tool to write notes and bookmark them to any page. 3M looks competitive with respect to ebooks but, unfortunately for me, the audiobooks are lacking immensely. My experience shares similarities with the results of a study conducted by Xianjin Zha for the Journal of Librarianship & Information Science. Zha collected surveys from 306 diverse university students and concluded that “The data distribution suggests that there are more users who think digital libraries are both easy to use and useful whereas mobile digital libraries are neither easy to use nor useful. The mean comparison of ease of use and usefulness shows that web digital libraries significantly exceed mobile digital libraries.” One other service worth mentioning is boopsie.com. Boopsie prides itself on being the one stop mobile platform for everything a public or academic library patron will need. These benefits include ILS Integration giving patrons the ability to manage their accounts including placing holds and renewals, catalog searching, calendar of events, social tools and even claim to be able to customize anything else a library might need. I hope that Boopsie seizes an opportunity to use their capital to compete with Overdrive because one private company having the lionshare of a national service is never good.
The only up and coming competitor to Overdrive is 3M and their Cloud Library. This service platform is already available at the San Diego Public Library. One great distinguishing feature 3M offers is a tool to write notes and bookmark them to any page. 3M looks competitive with respect to ebooks but, unfortunately for me, the audiobooks are lacking immensely. My experience shares similarities with the results of a study conducted by Xianjin Zha for the Journal of Librarianship & Information Science. Zha collected surveys from 306 diverse university students and concluded that “The data distribution suggests that there are more users who think digital libraries are both easy to use and useful whereas mobile digital libraries are neither easy to use nor useful. The mean comparison of ease of use and usefulness shows that web digital libraries significantly exceed mobile digital libraries.” One other service worth mentioning is boopsie.com. Boopsie prides itself on being the one stop mobile platform for everything a public or academic library patron will need. These benefits include ILS Integration giving patrons the ability to manage their accounts including placing holds and renewals, catalog searching, calendar of events, social tools and even claim to be able to customize anything else a library might need. I hope that Boopsie seizes an opportunity to use their capital to compete with Overdrive because one private company having the lionshare of a national service is never good.
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