Hoopla: Your Library Anywhere

I have been using Hoopla for a little over two years now, to listen to audio books. In the beginning, it was frustrating, because the stories would quit once you got to the end of a streamed part. As time passed, they kept making updates to the sight, which cured the interruptions. Then they added more content to stream, besides the audio books, movies and music. I still mostly use the audio book feature. My son and I enjoy listening. The only thing I hope they consider changing is to decrease the price of the service that they charge libraries. I am lucky that the township that I work for lets school district employees have a library card. The library system in the community that I live in decided that Hoopla was too expensive for the amount of people that actually use the service and discontinued Hoopla. This was much to the disappointment and frustration of the patrons who use it. They kept limiting the number of collective borrows allowed to 4 in a month. Then, even that became too expensive so they made the decision not to carry it any longer. They suggested to the patrons to use Libby instead. I kept pointing out that you have to wait up to 6 months to listen to a new or requested book. I wonder now how long it will be before the my work library system has to cut it as well. Until then, I will continue to let my students and their families know what Hoopla is and how to get it from the library.

I really think I could like this app of hoopla if you would fix a few problems. I use the Libby app and really like it. So I thought I would try hoopla as a second choice to Libby since they’re both related to the library. The first problem is I like to read my books with the two column choice. So when I select that option on hoopla, it duplicates a lot of sentences and paragraphs. And that happens too often for me. Then comes the bookmark, which is laughable. Sometimes the bookmark will take you to where you’re supposed to be and sometimes it won’t. You need to set up your bookmarks like Libby does. So that your bookmark tab is showing the whole time you are reading that page so it reminds you to disable the tab, while you are reading. the way you have it set up is very awkward. Another problem is that when you quit reading for a while during the day, or power down for the day, a lot of times when you go back to read, you have to start from the very beginning, instead of taking you right to your place that you left off. Another situation I ran into , when you go to the area where you read a few paragraphs of what a book is about so you’ll know whether you want to choose that book or not. A lot of the words are running together. Is there no proofreading? like I said, in the beginning, I think I could really like this app of hoopla, but the website itself needs quite a bit of work.

I think one of the minor annoyances is that the favorites are not arranged in chronological order. They're in either alphabetical order, or when the book came out, or when the book was added to hoopla. There's no real reason to even have these options as far as I'm concerned. Wouldn't it make way more sense for it to be listed in the order you've added it to your favorites? I can't always remember the titles of books I've added, only a general timeline that I added them in. Like, I know I've added it recently, or a month ago, etc. Seems like it should be relatively easy to change this, but whoever designed this feature gets an F for UX. While I understand the need to implement borrowing restrictions, it can be incredibly frustrating for those who tend to borrow audiobooks as there is no way to preview the book without using up a months allotment. So if the narration is bad or unlistenable, you’re just out of luck. I get that the limit is set by our local library, but the fact that there are limits is determined by hoopla. I just wish that the platform would be more like overdrive/Libby where you get to borrow more books once you return the ones you’ve checked out. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten into a book only to discover it’s not for me a few chapters in. I really am grateful for this app and the large volume and variety of media they provide, there are definitely drawbacks that make it frustrating. Overall though, a wonderful resource that is free to access through your public library -as access to media and information is a fundamental right in my opinion.