Bibliotheca E-boook CloudLibrary, DRM and Failed Downloads

For the past couple of days, I’ve been trying to borrow e-books from my public library through Bibliotheca CloudLibrary, so I can transfer them to my e-book reader. Unfortunately, because of the way their service seems to interact with Adobe Digital Editions DRM, the books have been failing to download, stalling at 10%, regardless of which book I borrow. I’ve gone back and forth with the library, to little avail, before figuring out how to get around the issue. I can read the books through the provided web interface, but that does little to help me read the books on my e-reader.

Overview:

1) When you install CloudLibrary for the first time, make sure to allow it to configure itself with the default / recommended Adobe Digital Editions DRM settings from your library. If you tell it to associate with any other ADE configuration already on your computer, say from a previous e-book reader configuration, your downloads will fail without explanation.

2) If CloudLibrary is already installed and you’re stuck, as I was, you can navigate to %appdata%\Bibliotheca in Windows, and delete the CloudLibrary folder. This will delete the program’s cache/settings, allowing you to reconfigure all settings. When you next start the application, it will walk you through the configuration process again. Be sure to select the default library DRM configuration.

This is, quite simply, poor application design. If this is expected behaviour, the user should at least be notified why downloads are not working. In any case, this should get you around the issue.

Not to harp on issues with DRM, but this is a very good example of poorly implemented DRM providing for a poor user experience. This should be entirely transparent to the user, which quite clearly is not the case. Now if only Adobe Digital Editions would actually recognize my no longer supported Sony PRS-T1 e-reader. Oh technology.

Header image by Charles Knowles // CC BY 2.0