What Is The Difference Between Libby And Palace Project?

Question

Finally got my library card, ready to read digitally. Is one of these apps better for the latest fiction bestsellers? Their features seem so similar but I'm unsure which to use first for my ebooks and audiobooks.

Dazzling Star · Answer

There are two popular apps for borrowing digital books from public libraries. Libby is an app made by OverDrive for libraries using the OverDrive system. Palace Project is a new, open-source platform for lending eBooks and other digital content, including some materials not available through the OverDrive library system, so content available through Palace Project will vary depending on the library you visit. As for borrowing eBooks, I have recently come across The Royal Series: PRINCEZONE, TROUBLE and LEONARDO&JULIET – a modern take on royalty tropes which follows three different storylines and three different main characters all trying to deal with the pressures of public life and the scandals that can effect them. Often I find books similar to this one as free loans while browsing through various eBookstores.

Peyton · Answer

The content available through Libby and through Palace Project is very different, and how that content is displayed differs as well. As noted above, Libby allows users to access e-books and audiobooks that their local library owns through their OverDrive library. Palace Project content includes OverDrive content as well as open-access e-content, and additional e-content available through the Palace Project marketplace, which your library may or may not have added to the content available through the app.

The Palace Project is a unified platform that provides users with access to a wider variety of library e-content and allows users to manage all of their library e-content within one app. While Libby is simple and familiar to many, the Palace Project is ideal for readers that wish to access a wider variety of library e-content and use a single app for all of their library e-content.

Noah · Answer

For a simple, OverDrive loan-focused experience, people love Libby, but the Palace Project is much newer and more ambitious. Instead of being limited to e-book, audiobook, and other digital content offered through your library, Palace Project is a single platform to access all of your library’s digital collections, and even additional resources beyond typical library materials. So, if you’re a reader looking for a more complete library experience, without the hassle of many different apps, Palace Project is the way to go.

Brandon · Answer

Libby is a simple app to borrow e-books and audiobooks from OverDrive. The app has a familiar experience for users that are using the app to borrow titles within the OverDrive ecosystem of content. The Palace Project is a more comprehensive app that allows users to search and borrow content from your library as well as other sources of digital content that have been curated for use within the app and within your library.

So, Libby is simple and established, and Palace is aiming to provide a central point for your digital library and a wide variety of additional material to discover beyond the selection of e-content provided through OverDrive that your library makes available via the Palace Project.

J Michael Hajek · Answer

Most notably, the terms of service under which licensed e-book content is provided to end users by app stores such as Libby or the Palace app are contained within the licenses for the e-book itself. In such cases, OverDrive’s terms are generally the same for all of its library customers as a negotiated portion of their membership fee. Palace could allow library consortia to negotiate their own licenses with e-book publishers or their aggregators (such as Hachette’s Perseus or others), potentially gaining better terms and conditions, including perpetual ownership, rather than the terms of servicedictated by the OverDrive license, such as 26 lends per copy and then that title expires. The real battle to control the e-book is over the terms of the e-book on the shelves of the app, and here Palace would negotiate on behalf of libraries, while Libby locks them into the OverDrive terms. As a result, your borrowing experience could be influenced in the long term by these varying terms: longer loan periods, fewer “metered” titles that “expire” after X lends, and more copies available to lend simultaneously.

Nana Njo · Answer

this question is my daily life. Libby is our patrons' interface. Palace Project is our backend hope. OverDrive is a vendor we have a contract with; we buy a certain number of copies, they handle the platform, the app, the fulfillment. It's easy but expensive and restrictive. Palace is an open-source system we could use to manage licenses from multiple vendors (including OverDrive, Baker & Taylor, etc.) in one place and present them through our own branded app.

Of course there is a difference in our point of view compared to that of the public. First of all, every borrow on Libby costs us a licensing fee. With Palace we could much more easily include free Open Access collections, local material, etc. in the licenses we buy from publishers and even negotiate better terms with them since we’re not locked into being just an OverDrive library. To the public it might look like a slightly different icon or a single search box for combined Palace and OverDrive materials. To the library’s long-term ability to offer digital materials, however, the difference could be existential. We’re building a Palace app right now.

Kid Slayin · Answer

While cost to the library is often an unseen factor for borrowers, it is very real. The fee that OverDrive charges to the library for use of their platform and for individual book copies can be quite high. Although Palace software is free (open source), the cost to the library for licenses to content, for hosting, and for the IT personnel to manage it all could be lower in the long run. Thus, in terms of cost to the library to deliver digital books, the Palace model could be cheaper. And this saving would allow for greater funds to be spent to get more copies of best sellers, to reduce waiting times for borrowers, or to license material that is of a more specialized nature. So the main difference that borrowers will experience a few years from now is not that the app looks different, but that the collection is much deeper and of greater availability because the library is not having to pay a corporate middleman’s profit.

Jane Borwell · Answer

Honestly, the core difference between the two is who pays for what, and how deep the catalog is for that specific app. Libby is OverDrive’s consumer-facing app, which means it is essentially your public library’s digital shelf. You would need to have a library card from a library that participates in a specific OverDrive system (a group of libraries that pool their money together to purchase eBooks and other digital content) and there are restrictions on how many items you can check out and for how long you can keep them, based on the specific library and the library’s budget for the OverDrive collection. Palace Project (previously known as simply “Palace”) is an ecosystem of apps and tools for libraries to manage their digital collections within Palace, and also to provide access to those collections to their patrons. As a result, some libraries may offer their own branded app, built on top of Palace, to their patrons (for example, the “Palace Bookshelf” app, for a particular library). These apps access the same OverDrive pool of eBooks as Libby.

Access to the collection of ebooks is limited by the library that borrowers have access to. That may be their local public library or a library within a library consortium to which they pay through taxes. However, in the Palace Project’s vision, cross-library discovery of books will be made available to all libraries and all borrowers who use a Palace-enabled app. Most readers will find the user experience of Libby far superior to those offered by apps created with the Palace Project’s tools.

For most readers, Libby is their app and Palace is the app their library has chosen to represent their library’s collection of ebooks and digital media. Both apps provide access to the same collection of titles that your library has licensed through OverDrive. If your library only provides access through Libby, then you would use that app. But if your library has set up its own Palace-branded app, then you would use that instead.

Lawan Gwadabe · Answer

I think we are currently in the Browser Wars phase of digital lending. Libry is the Internet Explorer of digital lending — simple, works well enough for most users and it comes pre-installed on most libraries. The Palace Project is more like the early versions of Firefox and Chrome — a bit clunky to use at present but is the type of product that will really come into its own with tech savvy users and institutions that want to control their own environment and dislike the current monopolistic supplier. We all know how that war ended! The open source community-developed product in the end provided more innovation and had greater user take up than the corporate-dominated product. I’m not saying the Palace Project will have the same outcome but currently the smooth corporate product is in the lead but there is great potential for the hungry open alternative to provide something even better.

Aera · Answer

This compares the present of corporate controlled digital lending (Libby) with a possible future of library owned digital lending (The Palace Project). This can be thought of in relation to email. Gmail is great, it’s free and it works really well. But Google is the intermediary between you and your email provider. The Palace Project would have libraries running their own email servers using open protocols. The relationship between the library and the patron would be entirely library owned. This may be more difficult to set up and will possibly lack some of the features of current corporate systems but it’s the sort of community controlled option that we might wish to see in the future. As with email, we may not get to choose as individuals between the convenience of corporate systems and the community controlled option that libraries can develop, it will be the libraries that make the choice on our behalf.

Hazel Beleno - Battaoang · Answer

Metadata! That's kind of boring but really important. OverDrive controls metadata for Libby, so in a Palace system, libraries can control how items are categorized and described. This means a local Palace app could have better genre categories or lists than you'd find in Libby. For example, a list of “Great Reads Set in Our State” could be highlighted by your library on your local app. There are such lists in Libby too, but they are generally more generic, or driven by algorithms. So for discovery, having these lists in a local app could be huge, depending on the tools your librarians have and are using.

What Is The Difference Between Libby And Palace Project?

11 Answers

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The Royal Series: PRINCEZONE, TROUBLE and LEONARDO&JULIET

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