You spend your time wading through dross over and over again.
I've read reviews that complain about the selection available, wait times and so on. Those are problems with the library not the app.
My main problem with the app is that it makes no attempt to make finding books easy. It forces you to wade through pages and pages of romance dross.
Let me search for "not romance". Let me mark books and authors as "Never Show Me this Again". My time is worth something to me, even if it's clearly of no concern to the developers of Libby.
RK
Rose K.
I love listening to the books but hate the wait.
I love listening to the books, but I don't like how long you have to wait for a book. Recently it said a book would be ready soon and I was 1st in line.The next time I checked it said I was 2nd as nd it would be up to 2 weeks wait! This was very frustrating!
CC
Christopher C.
Libby, a Hobson’s choice, use it or don’t
If your local library uses Libby then it really is a Hobson’s choice, use their digital service or not.
Whether you’re using the Libby website or their apps, it all comes down to the same thing. The app is serviceable and on the surface doesn’t look too bad, but it’s ridden with bugs. Books often reload or despite being downloaded won’t load without a network connection.
Beyond the simple act of reading through a book or magazine, most interactions are made needlessly complex and fiddly. There’s far too much hidden UI that takes too many taps and swipes to reach, if you even remember the process in the first place.
There’s too many different pages and the whole thing desperately needs looking at with fresh eyes.
Recently I placed a hold on a book, the book became available, but when I went to borrow it, I was told that someone else had a hold on it – yes, that was me! There was no-one else with a hold on the book, as I could see through a lot more checking in the app.
More recently I have had a brief interaction with ‘customer support’. The support agent told me she was ‘happy to help’, only to then tell me that my little bit of content feedback would be ignored. (Apparently having a book description SCREAMED OUT IN ALL CAPITALS is not only okay with them, but something they couldn’t do anything about. How about they contact the publisher?) Useless. I found another bug in the process of telling them about that, but I’m really not going to bother.
If I were directly paying for Libby and OverDrive – and really I am paying through my Council Tax – then I would be even more incensed.
It’s a below average service I wouldn’t use if it weren’t for my local library.
