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I’ve had this app for a few years now. It has been slightly irritating at times. Sometimes it won’t play so I’ll have to restart it. Sometimes it randomly pauses so I’ll have to restart it again. But the past few days have been way worse. It keeps telling me I’m using my account on another device. I have never logged into another device. So I change the password to my account just in case. Twice. Then it won’t load. My books won’t show up under borrowed. So I keep killing the app and restarting it and half the time (I’d say I did it over 35 times) it would show my books on the home screen. But if I click on any of them to listen to them or return them it freezes and shows a blank screen. Of the very very few times it actually showed the page with the book it hardly ever started playing. And if it did, it made an awful squeaking, stuttering noise. I have restarted my phone, deleted and reinstalled the app, used different wifi’s, and reported the problem. I’ve noticed other people have said the same thing since the last update and the response is that it was fixed. It is not so. I have been having the problem for the past 3 hours. I am still - right now - trying to play my audiobook and as I write this review I am hearing squeaking. The problem is most certainly not fixed. It seems to me it shouldn’t be this hard to play an audiobook.

While on the whole, hoopla is a nice app to have, to easily borrow books from your library, constant glitches make it frustrating to use. Consistently it zonks out-after a couple of pages and especially after the end of a chapter, the app just stops. One has to click done, go back to menu and reopen the book. Updating the app has not helped. I am also not a fan of the 10 books per month limit. I prefer the “five books at a time” limits posed by other digital reader apps like Overdrive and Axis 360. Update: Borrowing e-books and videos is easy. But videos have an extremely short check out time. On the negative side, the book selection tends to be too heavily leaning on the romance/family genre, and most bestselling authors will not be found here. I had previously given this app three stars, but the glitches have become too annoying to use the app. You have to read the book in portrait mode. Landscape is not available. The page will not reorient itself nor can you set it in one mode over another. They updated the app to give you a page turning experience, but after once or twice, you will not be able to proceed to another page. You will need to shut down the app and restart it. Additionally, it will also shut down on its own while you are reading. There are many readers on the market now. I find overdrive and cloud work best with my library. Hoopla—give it a miss.

Hoopla is the most frustrating audiobook app I have used (and I use several). It is much worse than overdrive for several reasons. For some reason it takes forever to download titles, and it downloads all as one big file. Plus sometimes the download doesn’t work and you don’t realize until it’s too late and you’re already on your road trip, etc. overdrive is superior in this regard. It downloads individual files that save faster, plus you can delete them one by one to free up space on your device. On hoopla it is also difficult to navigate between chapters/sections (once again, one huge file for whole book). As far as I know hoopla doesn’t let you listen to a sample of the book before borrowing. The 15 seconds back/forward feature seems to have a multiplicative effect if you hit it several times, which can sometimes send up far backward/forward in the book when really you just wanted to listen to the last minute or so again. Finally, I tried hoopla on another device and on this one, despite downloading titles, it doesn’t let me access them unless I’m logged in... which requires WiFi. For me, this defeats the entire purpose of the app. I hate this app and only use it through my library when I can’t find specific titles on overdrive.