How To Troubleshoot Kobo OverDrive Issues?

I enjoy reading on my Kobo books and most of the time my overdrive books download with no problem. Occasionally I have trouble borrowing books, and after some trial and error I have a few tips that may help.

Make sure your Kobo device is running on the latest Kobo firmware. (Access Settings > Firmware Update and check for any software updates.) Once updated, switch off your device and re-start it. It’s often these simple things that fix the majority of connectivity issues. Also, ensure your Wi-Fi connection is enabled and correctly accessing the Wi-Fi network you require. OverDrive is an online service and it therefore requires an active internet connection to download and access e-books.

Also be aware that you need to add the correct library card to your Kobo and that you select “OverDrive” when clicking “Get Books” from the home screen of your Kobo. And then of course enter the correct library card number. A small mistake when typing in the card number will lead to problems when trying to borrow books. Also make sure that your library supports OverDrive. Some libraries have made different agreements with OverDrive then others, so it might not be possible to borrow e-books from your local library through OverDrive.

You can always come back and try to borrow a title that isn’t available right now. Also, many digital libraries are constantly being updated and sometimes even titles that are temporarily unavailable are added back to the collection. The titles that you want to read the most you can always add to your wishlist. Perhaps, we’ll even read them to you in audio format.

It may help you identify why the issue is happening when you access your OverDrive account via a web browser to view your Holds or Loans. (Note that with some errors, the problem may appear to resolve itself on your eReader after you have reset it, yet you may be left with no clear explanation of what caused the problem in the first place.) As always, if all of the above fails, contacting the support team at Kobo can be extremely helpful.

Overall, troubleshooting can be very frustrating but solving the few problems that may occur when using your Kobo for OverDrive borrowing is easily done with a bit of patience and knowledge on how to approach the problem. Hopefully, this article has given you a bit of help back on to your eReading adventures!

A less obvious setting in the Kobo books reader is for regional settings. OverDrive/Libby e-books are generally tied to specific library systems, so it’s easy for a Kobo with ‘wrong’ country settings for a store to not find any e-books for that store. Go to Settings > Device Information > Country and make sure this is set for your library’s country. Traveling? Buying a Kobo somewhere that’s not your home country? Be prepared for some hassle. Some Kobo models are only fully supported for borrowing OverDrive e-books in certain countries – you can check on Kobo’s support pages for your model (e.g. Libra 2, Sage). One final point about borrowing books with a Kobo: if you have multiple libraries listed on your single OverDrive account then the Kobo can get very confused as to which library to try and borrow books from. In order to get around this, you can temporarily remove all but your primary library from your OverDrive account on your computer and then re-add all your libraries after you have managed to borrow and download a book with your Kobo. It’s a right old nasty process but it’s the only way that I have found to deal with this. Obviously, for simple accounts it never happens, but it seems to be a more common problem with more complex accounts.

Just feeling your pain here. I want to read a library book, not become a systems administrator. The fragmentation of responsibility in this little ecosystem is just maddening - is this a Kobo problem, an OverDrive problem, an Adobe problem, a library problem, an ISP problem? I've spent hours navigating the respective support forums for each of these players, only to have each point a finger at the others. My solution to all of this: Document, document, document. When you finally do manage to get this to work, write down every single step that you took to get here. Save that in a note somewhere. Because six months from now, this is all going to break again, and you'll have to go through this whole puzzle all over again. I don't have any solutions to offer up here. The best that anyone can do is to try to patch things up as best that they can with a few bandaids and hope that someone else comes along and builds a better system here. In the mean time, I hope your Wi-Fi is strong and your syncs are all successful.