Ah, the ebook – it can be your greatest friend or your worst enemy. One day you’re reading along merrily, the next you’re staring sadly at an unintelligible error message that just might possibly mean something in Sumerian. But you don’t speak Sumerian – so where do you turn when your ebooks turn on you?
A shipment of new eBooks waiting to be checked in by our staff.
I always like to start with the OverDrive help pages, for three reasons: one, they’re detailed and always up to date; two, they’re super searchable; and three, I like to think that the people who make a product are the most likely to know how to fix it (this theory works equally well with ebooks, dryers, and nuclear weapons).
Anyway, to reach the OverDrive help pages all you have to do is click on the happy little question mark – it’s at the top of every page on our OverDrive site.
CLICK CLICK CLICK
That will take you to this general help page. There’s a lot of useful stuff there, including the “Recommend to Library” page – great if we’re missing a title from your favorite series – and a link to our email help form, down there at the bottom.
But if you’re like me (or it’s two in the morning and no one’s home at the library), you’ll want answers NOW. And if you want answers NOW, you should click on the first link, the one for “OverDrive Help.” Trust me here; I’ve been working with OverDrive since 2006. They gave me a frisbee once.
So many buttons, so little time.
And now you’re into the super searchable OverDrive database of awesomeness. The bar across the top has many fine drop down menus that link you to articles and videos about all of the formats that OverDrive offers (note: we don’t have all of them; we have ebooks, audiobooks, and video).
But if you still want answers NOW, just drop a couple of keywords into that old search box. Let’s pretend that I checked out a James Patterson book by mistake (I do not like James Patterson, but here I am promoting him anyway), and I want to return it early, instead of waiting three weeks for it to expire. So I’ll type “return” into the search box.
You can even keep refreshing the page until you get a background picture that you like.
Just hit enter, and BOOM. Look at at that, the very first result is exactly what I need to get rid of that James Patterson book. Perfect!
Your time is up, Patterson.
That link will take you to an article that explains how to return OverDrive titles in lotsa different formats (EPUB, Kindle, MP3), and from lotsa different devices (Android phones, iPads, Kindles, nooks). So you’re pretty much covered, no matter what you’re doing.
You can even copy and paste your esoteric Sumerian error message into that handy search box, and OverDrive will explain it to you. Nice.
So remember, even if you don’t know what the heck is happening with your ebook, OverDrive probably does. Just give them a chance!
– Amy
Eleventh Stack 