Ugh. Looks like the
Halifax library has moved over to the new Overdrive design some time in the last month or so. Ugh.
And, as bad as it is through a desktop's web browser, it's sooooooooooooooo much worse on the mobile version through Overdrive Media Console on a tablet. :/
Discovery was a pain on the old site, but now it's almost impossible to find anything, especially on a tablet or phone:
1) Click an icon of 3 horizontal lines
2) Click "EBOOKS"
3) Click "View more..."
4) Scroll down a long page filled with giant covers that mean you get 4 covers at a time, but 6 covers per genre/category, to find your preferred category and click "View more..." - if you can. The choices are "All Fiction", "All Nonfiction", "Biography & Autobiography", "Business & Careers", "Cooking & Food", "Family & Relationships", "Foreign Language Study", "Health & Fitness", "Mystery & Thrillers", "Pets", "Self-Improvement", "Travel". The "View more..." is very tiny and you're likely to hit the giant book cover under it.
5) At the bottom of the category, you get the filters, all of which are links rather than a form. The "Subject" filter, the main one you'll want, has 37 entries, only 8 of which are shown, so you have to click "more..." to expand the list (amazing that they don't make you load a new page!). Links are tiny, so hitting the one you want is a pain.
6) Very limited number of results per page, so you have to page through to the one you want. No cart, so you have to click Borrow on it and then page back to your results.
(and, for some reason, when I clicked Download on one book, through OMC on my tab, it claimed to be "Loading New Title...", but no sign of it for the 10 minutes I let it run and, of course, no progress bar so you can't see if it's coming down or if it hung. Aborted by closing the program. Second time I tried, clicking the Download button sent me back to the library's main page. Third time it's "Loading New Title..." again, but no idea if it's actually doing anything - I think it probably isn't because my wi-fi icon isn't changing to its activity signal. Ugh.
EDIT: More than 10 minutes later (I know 'cos my screen dimmed) for the third attempt and it's still supposedly "Loading New Title..." with no wi-fi activity to back it up. About 2 minutes to download it, a 63MB Dilbert collection, on my desktop via Adobe Digital Editions.
EDIT AGAIN: Okay, found the culprit - gotta turn off the download immediately option so that it only adds the book to your library. Then you download it from the bookshelf (and you'll get a progress bar and everything). Still doesn't excuse the site's and the software's many faults!)
If Overdrive are actively trying to drive people away, they're doing a damned good job of it. Seriously, whoever it was at Overdrive who designed the new site obviously never actually tried to use it. Ditto for the team that did the latest version of the Console. They, and whichever execs signed off on them, really should lose their jobs for incompetence.)