My reading plans for the next two to three years are gone! A warning for anyone using the Libby app
I’m visiting a friend. My friend recommends a book to me. I open the Libby app on the new phone and want to tag the book with my “wtr” tag, “wtr” as in “want to read”. But the tag is no longer there. My other tags are no longer there either. Neither do the books I have read and neither do the places I have marked in the books I have read.
I google what it’s like with Libby and find something horrifying: all of this data isn’t attached to my four library cards that I entered into the newly set up app yesterday! They are saved on the cell phone. The broken cell phone. At least that’s what I assume, because they never arrived on the new one.
During setup you will be asked if you want to copy data from another device. To do this, you have to generate an eight-digit numerical code in the Libby app on this other device and enter it in the app on the new device. That didn’t work for me because the old cell phone was broken. I didn’t think about it any further and assumed that this numerical code only saved me having to re-enter the library cards.
Reading books has been very important to me over the last year. “How many tags are there?” asks the friend, “about twenty?” – “More like five hundred,” I say. It makes me very unhappy at this moment. First of all, basically: loss of personal data! And then these reading plans were so difficult to obtain. I’m currently trying to compensate for the fact that for decades I read 90% of books by men. I get recommended books by men everywhere. I have to actively look for books by women. It took a lot of effort to get to those 500 want-to-read tags. Who can imagine that they won’t be saved correctly!
Others discussing the problem online say that you only need to have the app on two devices. Then they synchronize and you always have a device that still has everything. But firstly, I should have known that beforehand and secondly, I don’t have a second reading device. The “libbylinux” app won’t even start for me, and it won’t work in the browser either:
ALT
This information from the Libby help is incorrect; it also works in the browser under Linux. But I’ll find out later. It is unclear whether such an open browser tab can reliably function as a backup by synchronizing.
From a data protection perspective, it is probably desirable that this personal data is not stored at the library, but only locally on the cell phone. I understand how you can come to such a decision when developing the app. But I think I should have been warned in big red letters. And there should be a way to export important data regularly, ideally automatically.
A few hours later I had already come to terms with the loss. I’ll have to check Goodreads to see what other people’s reviews I’ve liked this year (thousands probably) and use that to reconstruct my own reading plans. I go to bed. The broken cell phone lies next to the bed. I’ll turn it on again because maybe a miracle will happen. It shows the sad error message. I can choose between “factory data reset” and “try again”. Like yesterday many, many times, I press “try again” AND IT WORKS.
Very quickly, in case the cell phone falls apart again, I copy my Libby data to the new cell phone. Then I make backups of my WhatsApp and Signal chats, because they were also lost during the move, but I didn’t mourn them so much. It was all about the past, not about the future of reading.
And then everything is back. Only the matter of conserving resources by buying a Fairphone didn’t work out as I had imagined, because of course it’s even more resource-efficient not to buy a new cell phone at all. Especially if you didn’t need one.
(Kathrin Passig)