For Your Listening Pleasure: Always Available Audiobooks

Are you looking for a digital audiobook to listen to while you’re waiting for Becoming to become available? Are you dreading the Seattle Squeeze and wondering how you’ll pass the time on those long commutes? We’ve got a solution for you. Fifty of them, actually.

The Seattle Public Library is happy to provide 50 Always Available Audiobooks through OverDrive! You can access them through OverDrive’s Libby app or stream them from your desktop computer, and they are available immediately. No holds, no wait, no worries!

Always Available Travel Guides

Seattleites love to travel (or at least love to read travel books). While the library has a large collection of travel books in print, they are not always available when you want them. OverDrive, our ebook provider, had a small collection with limited destinations.

Until now.

Welcome W.W. Norton to OverDrive!

~posted by Frank

W.W. Norton is the latest publisher to make their ebooks available to libraries, and the library has added more than 350 titles to the digital collection in OverDrive. Here are some of the highlights.

Seattle Cooks…Digitally

Everyone knows that The Seattle Public Library has an outstanding cookbook collection. But you may not know that you can check out “e-cookbooks” through OverDrive. If you’re a messy cook prone to spilling ingredients on page after page, then this could be the best option for you!

OverDrive has more than two dozen cookbooks, food and wine guides that celebrate the bounty and creativity of growers, farmers and chefs in Seattle, Washington and the Pacific Northwest. With chefs from Ethan Stowell to Renee Erickson, restaurants Cafe Flora to Skillet, local institutions like Ivar’s and the Herbfarm, sweet treats from Macrina Trophy Cupcakes, and guides to local cheese, beer and wine there’s something for everyone. Check them out right now!

Addressing data privacy issues around Adobe Digital Editions

— by Jim L.

Yesterday, Nate Hoffelder, the editor of The Digital Reader blog reported that the newest version of the Adobe Digital Editions software (ADE 4) appears to be transmitting data about eBooks back to Adobe’s servers.

The Library’s primary eBook distributor, OverDrive, uses Adobe’s Digital Rights Management software to help enforce the rules that publishers require to permit libraries to lend eBooks. The Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) application is used to setup Adobe IDs, which are required for you to borrow and read library eBooks. Often, the process of setting up and configuring an Adobe ID happens while you’re checking out your first library eBook and rarely needs to be repeated.

ADE can also be used to manage your eBook collection and even to read eBooks. A friend of Hoffelder’s discovered that ADE version 4 gathers and transmits data in plain text about eBooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. Hoffelder’s article includes samples of data captures and screenshots that seem to bear this out.

According to another source, this issue appears to only affect users who use ADE on a desktop computer for reading and managing eBooks. If users use the OverDrive app or an e-reader device to actually read eBooks, it does not appear that they are affected.