I have an appreciation for those who must try to provide technical support. When they interact with me, I have already tried to problem solve an issue and possibly already created new problems through my trial and error and efforts. Those who try to help as part of another job face significant challenges.
I have been struggling with an app called Libby. This app is provided by Overlook as a way to request and make use of audiobooks and ebooks from libraries. I like to listen to audiobooks and have a 24 books per year Audible account. I discovered the opportunity to download audiobooks from libraries and I have been trying to use this option, too.
I have accounts with two libraries. One located near my “home” in Richfield, MN, and a second with the small country library near our lake place in northern Wisconsin. If you have not tried accessing books, ebooks and audiobooks through your local library you may find the digital option a surprise. The problem is that it may take a long time to be able to read or listen to the book you want. I am just being provided books I put on my list in August (this is the end of December). If you want to read or listen to the currently hot book you will need to make a purchase.
Here is the problem I was trying to resolve. The audiobooks I was provided through the library in Richfield gave me 21 days to complete the book. The book from the library in Northern Wisconsin gave me 7 days. Getting through a 14 hour book in a week was not feasible and I wanted to know if there was something I was missing. The librarian who tried to help was not an iPhone user and even when provided my iPhone was confused. She said she could select either 7 or 14 days when downloading books on her phone, but was unable to show me how to do this. I am guessing someone who addressed Libby problems full time would have the breadth of experience that would make explaining the problem a simple matter.
I think I have this figured out, but for practical reasons it will take some time to test. Libby offers an automatic download option. This was the option I selected. I use the Gmail tool InBox that will automatically shunt different kinds of emails into different folders. This can be very useful as much of the email we receive is not necessarily the messages we want to review daily. With the clock ticking on my access to audiobooks, I thought the automatic download option made the most sense. The problem seems to be that the auto download option applies the default of the library to the time allowed to complete. I have no idea why any library would expect patrons to complete a book at average two hours of listening time a day, but this was evidently the approach taken by one of my libraries. I have changed my use of the auto download feature to see if this will fix the problem.
I have encountered an interesting problem in testing my hypothesis. I have to wait until I have the opportunity to actually download a book. This might seem to be easy enough to test. Pick an old book that would seem unlikely to have a backlog of interested patrons and test the idea. The problem turned out to be that we could not think of such a book that allowed this opportunity and I did not really want to waste a lot of the poor librarians time tyring. We tried “Tom Sawyer” and a few other classics, but all are now on my wait list. I guess this is good.
Be kind to those who cannot be expected to be experts with a specific application. The factors that can be mixed and matched to create unique situations are difficult to anticipate.