The Palace Project

We are mainly using this app for my soon to be first grader and it is difficult to find books for her age group without having to sift through novels for middle schoolers. Early readers should have their own section or filter. Libby does a better job at this. The picture books are also all one page off in landscape mode. The start of a spread will begin on the right side and it’s pair is on the next spread when swiped. Please fix this.

I have been trying for several days to download a couple audiobooks. On the library screen it tells me the audiobooks are downloaded and ready to listen to. But every time I click play it just says “downloading”. Very frustrating.

Haven’t used this yet to borrow a book but I notice two things in browsing for books. 1. A ‘save for later’ option would be helpful. 2. The ability to preview readers for the audio books would be quite nice. I don’t want to use one of my ‘borrows’ only to find that the reader’s voice grates on my nerves or puts me to sleep. Thank you.

The browsing experience is fantastic compared to Libby. It’s easy to find things and navigate around. Great job on that! The only thing is, I love to read on my kindle and it is not yet supported. The good news is I can browse and borrow on Palace, then head to Libby to push it to my kindle. Thank you for taking the care in the browsing experience. It’s a much needed improvement to the digital public library experience.

Dark mode is supported. There is a distinction between the app interface and what you see when you are reading a book. With the help of the developer, Jill, I was able to switch back-and-forth both the app and/or the book to either a white background with black text or a black background with white text. Thanks, Jill.

If you browse, you can see limited filter options (available vs own, popular vs everything) and the app offers genre and subgenres for browsing. I would love to have an option to filter by language.

Leaving a review as it looks like the CS team is pretty responsive. I really like the interface to search for books, which lets you drill down by genre and subgenre but also allows you to View All. Much better than Libby in the ease of use there. I wish there was a “save for later” type functionality - maybe someday. :) Where things fall apart for me is the audiobook playback. Biggest issue is that it heats up my phone and absolutely chews through my battery - doing nothing but listening (through Bluetooth headphones, connected to my home wifi) for the ~90 minutes drained my battery (iPhone 11, 75% performance per Settings) from ~75% to ~30%. Another quibble is that when moving from one track to the next, it seems to play the new track for 15-90 seconds and then jump back to the beginning. That’s a little weird and kind of annoying, but not a dealbreaker for me like the battery issue.

long tale with many. twists and turns.Interesting

My library moved to this app and it's very dissapointing. You cannot sample an audiobook to hear the narration before borrowing or reserving. You cannot review the catalogue while listening to a book. And the most disappointing, you can only change the speed in 0.25 increments. If 1.0 is too slow or fast, changing to 1.25 will be too fast and 0.75 will be too slow. You might as well have no options. Please fix this at least.

Doesn’t open to my book- have to go to the catalog & then to my books. Have had to download multiple times so my place is lost. Can’t get app on Kindle Fire.