Two weeks ago, the annual Book Expo America (BEA) conference hit New York City. A gathering of publishers, booksellers, librarians, authors, reviewers, and book bloggers, BEA is the CES or E3 of the literary world. However, though e-books are a huge portion of the book world today, you wouldn’t know it from walking the show floor. The literary world is slow to adopt and acknowledge that it is now a part of the tech industry, and no where is that more apparent than the sad state of e-book lending for libraries.

 Libraries have been able to lend e-books for many years, but the practice went mainstream in 2009 when Sony announced a partnership with the New York Public Library. Since then, libraries across the country have quickly adopted lending systems that work with most major e-book reading devices from Sony, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Amazon.

 Four years in, borrowing an e-book from your local library is still a difficult and confusing process that varies wildly depending on what kind of e-reader or device you own. And once you finally figure out how to borrow a book, there are other frustrations. Often, the e-book you want is unavailable, either because it’s been checked out by another patron, it’s not in your library’s system, or it’s not available for your device.
So why is it so hard to borrow an e-book? It’s because none of the companies involved are working together. The e-reader makers, library lending software developers, and the publishers are all working at odds and it’s us who suffer. E-book library lending is broken.

The frustrating way we borrow e-books today

One of the early pioneers in the digital lending space was Overdrive, Inc., which developed the e-book lending systems used by most libraries today. Overdrive uses the same Adobe DRM (Digital Rights Management) scheme as Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, and Google Books to protect files from piracy and manage the lending period of library e-books. That system was first devised for E Ink e-readers and the method for loading e-books onto those devices is about the same now as it has been since 2009.

 Sony Reader Library App

 Borrowing an e-book involves a ridiculous number of steps: You must create a free Adobe account, download Adobe software onto your computer, start an account with your local library, connect up those two accounts, and finally sideload the books onto the e-reader via USB. With some devices it’s a bit easier - Sony’s latest Reader has a Library app that hooks into Overdrive with fewer steps – but this tedious process is what most library patrons must go through. And if you’re not tech-savvy or don’t have access to your own computer, the whole thing is even more frustrating.

 Up until about two years ago, tablets and smartphones were more difficult, and often impossible, to use with library lending systems. But then 3M announced an e-book lending service built to mimic iBooks and other iOS and Android e-book buying apps. 3M’s Cloud eBook Lending doesn’t rely on Adobe IDs and is designed so that library patrons only have to enter their information once and not over and over. Overdrive also finally released mobile apps around that time, and independent e-book apps like Aldiko started to work with Adobe so that users could add their ID and sideload books on their Android devices. Even with these more user-friendly systems  librarians still have to help confused patrons navigate it. Smartphone and tablet lending is easier than it was; E Ink device lending remains a major problem.