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Borrowing e-books in the EU just became a lot more complicated as libraries move to closed ecosystems (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/38033968

Apparently many libraries, including the ones in my country, are moving over to a system where you're not allowed to digitally download the epub file anymore. You're only allowed to borrow the book, and read it, in a closed ecosystem: an app. This per definition then excludes the majority of e-ink readers that don't run Android. This is due to Directive (EU) 2019/882 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on the accessibility requirements for products and services (Text with EEA relevance) (source) entering into force June 28 this year.

As the Adobe DRM solution hasn't been updated for years, it isn't capable of fulfilling all the requirements that this law lays out without endangering the DRM solution. Text-to-speech is one function that isn't fully supported by Adobe for example. This means that there are apparently two directions to go for full compliance, Readium DRM which is barely supported as well or a closed app ecosystem.

This is frustrating on so many levels, especially if I would like to borrow an ebook in my native language that isn't available elsewhere on the web, which is often the situation for books in my language (and I'm guessing most languages outside of English). The alternatives left is borrowing a physical copy, or buying it.

The enshittification of everything continues...

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (11 children)

Using Onleihe is already a horrid experience even now. There is only one 'copy' of each book and this copy is not only for my city, but the whole region, meaning all slightly popular books are reserved for years in advance.

I can borrow books from the website but the only way to return them before the allocated time is via an app. You can only return the book from the phone app after downloading it again onto the phone (which is a really weird design choice).

Since the allocated time per book can be very long (21 days) and returning books early is incredibly cumbersome, this makes the one copy per region bottleneck even worse since most people can not be bothered to 'return' their eBooks once they are done and just wait out the timer.

There are a lot of books in my language that are not (yet) on the shadow libraries and this DRM change probably means I won't have any way in the future to change this anymore.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

For my local library, I noticed they have both Onleihe and Libby available - though with different selections, ymmv

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Libby is mainly only for english books, am I mistaken? I can log into libby but they have a whopping 7 books in german on offer for me, all of which are books for small children.

Edit: and I can't even find where to download the epub file from libby.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I imagine the amount of books by language depends on the library. Mine has 2k German and some Dutch and Ukrainian as well - didn't vet those. I was able to download an .acsm file via Manage Loan -> Read with... -> Epub, but then you still need to deal with an acsm file - definitely not a real solution, just figured I'd mention it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the pointer to the acsm file! That extension is no issue, Calibre is extremly useful. The selection for my library on libby is not really my taste and most modern english ebooks are available from the shadow libraries already anyways but it is still useful to know.

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