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I just went to my main library (Brooklyn) and was very unpleasantly surprised. I KNEW it was coming, but I did not expect it to be this bad. My wishlist now shows as pages and pages of huge cover images, without any useful info at all. Isn't it supposed to be a wish LIST? Why is it pretty pictures without any actual, you know, TEXT. I have to go into the book record to see the sequential series number and synopsis. How is that an improvement? This is a library, so a safe assumption would be the users can READ? They don't make the decision on what they want to READ based on the pretty pictures? If that was the case, I would have gone off to read Gauguin, or Salvatore Dali. Maybe Rembrandt or Goya, if I was in the mood for classics, or weird classics.
Manually counting the books in your loans and hold list, and then making a note of it so you know how many books you can still borrow is another "improvement" I truly don't need. Who was hurt by this info being available in the top left corner of your loans view and wish list (LIST) view? Who was hurt by a little pop-up that told you how many books you've borrowed every time you added a new book to the loans? And it also gave you the option to click and go your loans, a nice bonus. So now while assuming I will make a decision on what to read based on a cover image, the library also wants to improve my math skills? Obviously the ability to read become a secondary to the ability to count if you are a new overdrive customer.
I also tried to sort the new books to include only fiction, English and ebooks, all in one shoot, for the newly added books. Without even touching on the subject of whether or not the sorting by the date added works (I don't think so, I wish there was an actual info on the date the book was added to the library), this now forces me to select the format. I cannot just exclude the audiobooks. Now it's either epub, free epub, kindle or pdf. How about I DON'T CARE!!!! My reader runs android and I can read any format. It's the content that is of interest. Unfortunately the content went the way of the dinosaurs - became extinct. It's all about the form - pretty HUGE pictures and all. That need for just ONE format is doubly strange, considering that this change seems to be geared towards the people who use the (relatively) small-screen android devices to access the website, rather than people like me, who access the library website and borrow books on their windows laptop or desktop with a decently sized screen, and THEN read on a small screen android devices.
And I found a category I have never seen before - admittedly that might have been me not paying attention to detail when everything worked for me when the "unimproved" layout was still available. What is "mature adult" fiction as opposed to the "general adult" fiction? Fiction about geriatrics? And I did not find a YA fiction. Not that I am a YA, but some of the YA fiction is fit to be read by a mature adult as myself. I don't want to exclude it. I just want all fiction in my search result. ALL of it. I read a variety of fiction, and don't need my searches to be confined to the narrow categories. I just don't want any audiobooks, that's all. We are all different, and the previous layout accommodated that, this one just wants us all to be illiterates who will only look at a certain narrowly categorized book covers to decide if they also want to look at the black squiggles displayed when you go PAST the pretty covers.
But we have to count really well, and remember the numbers! Admittedly, remembering the numbers might be easier when one is not distracted by the contents of the book one is deciding to borrow (or not).
And all of this was paid for with my tax $$! Taxes in NY are not low. And now my $$ went into making the library borderline unusable, instead to buy more books that I could actually enjoy. What next? Just comic books with minimum text? Or just picture books without any written content at all? Libraries for the illiterate! The ones that can count, that is.
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