It’s so silly every library has their own pool of books. I kinda wished it was more centralized, even though that would mean ‘competing’ with even more people about the reservations. But at least there would be copies to compete for…

When I made my account I had to physically go to the library and let them validate my ID + pay in cash, but it would make sense that bigger cities don’t have the capacities to check every single ID card and just send the logins out. But looking for one of these and making a new account just for a better selection sounds really cumbersome, especially compared to just downloading from the shadow libraries, so I’ll just stick with what’s available there.

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.

Oh wow you are right, if you click the that button you get an option return the book. I never even opened the web reader because I just want to download the file for my e-reader, I wouldn’t have guessed the way to return a book is hidden behind a button labeled ‘jetzt lesen’. That site has some weird design choices imo.

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.

Edit, sorry just saw your screenshot, didn’t realize I could expand those lines. The website I login to looks a lot different so maybe it’s a setting the Library has to enable or something.

These are all the options I see:

Edit, sorry just saw your screenshot, didn’t realize I could expand those lines. My library doesn’t even have a single copy of the book you posted as an example, let alone 16. I assume you might be living in an area that actually has funds for their library, which must be nice.

Even the most popular books I know only have one. Resulting in some books being ready to rent in 2 years or so:

It is quite painful to see how many books are missing from them for my language. Currently I can remove the Adobe DRM and upload the ones my library offers using the very tedious reservation process , but this change will probably put an end to that.

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.

I’ve had one children’s book that Gmail flagged as a virus when I tried to send it to my nieces eBook Reader via Mail, so I deleted that and just got another instead. I didn’t bother opening the book because I didn’t not care much so it might just have been a false positive. I don’t remember which format.
It was the only one out of about 200 books that got flagged.