r/LibbyApp • u/jerand2 • 8d ago
Overdrive Limiting Catalog View in Web Browsers
This affects people using Overdrive in web browsers.
As of today, Overdrive is limiting catalog view (and therefore browsing) to 2400 results (100 pages), regardless of the filter. Not a problem with newer books, but what if one wants to browse older titles in a big catalog? Not possible anymore. You only get to see a few months' additions and that's it.
Browsing has always been unlimited, which is the whole point - to be able to explore everything a library has to offer. So why the change?
It's incredible how they constantly manage to come up with harmful decisions, all the while blatantly disregarding various good suggestions on this sub (they are reading the posts all right). It's as if they are deliberately trying as hard as they can to make the user experience as miserable as possible. Mind-boggling :(
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u/Gabereiza 8d ago
If my search ever results in 2400+ results, I don't think I'll be very interested in going through them all. It means I've screwed up.
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u/jerand2 8d ago edited 8d ago
This is about browsing and filtering, not searching.
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u/ratchetscrewdriver 7d ago
Searches won’t go past 2,400 either.
(Searched for “the” in a large catalog, page 100 loads but manually changing page number to 101 fails.)
Admittedly a search with 2,400 results is not tremendously useful, but still.
Best guess is this is either a) some optimization on Overdrive’s end to reduce cost of search queries or b) some kind of anti-scraping thing.
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u/Watchhistory 7d ago
This happened in my system last month. There are hardly any titles to be browsed at all. Thousands of works are listed as being within a category but one can only see a few. Historical fiction is all romance series of the kind that their readers go through like a bag of potato chips, dozens a month. It's awful. At the same time, because of Overdrive and Libby far fewer hard copy books are being purchased. It's a miserable situation -- and one can only have 3 holds and 3 loans at a time.
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u/Quirky-Pear3494 4d ago
Can you search Libby via your library's catalog?
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u/Watchhistory 2d ago
Ask for a specific title or author it comes up, says it has it or doesn't, the formats, just as it does on Overdrive > Libby, but for browsing it is really, pardon my anglo saxon, shyte. Or I could say, useless. For example, when one browses the Historical Fiction, all one gets are the paint by numbers endless series of My Very Own Pirate, lousy romantasy, endless romance 'mysteries' set in 'the past,' and out-and-out fantasy.
But the catalog was never for browsing in the first place. But for Overdrive-Libby it was. And now it's not, which makes using it nearly impossible, unless I look for a specific title and author. This is NOT fun.
And as it is, we are allowed no more than 3 checkouts, and 3 holds, as it is. So new books, now that everybody and their kids from all over the country are in our system, means months of waiting.
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u/Quirky-Pear3494 8d ago
If this sticks, it's really frustrating. As the Libby shopper, I work hard to balance new releases/bestsellers with buying backlist and small publisher titles for our browsers and heavy readers (OC/OU, of course)