Purchasing books is nice, but I like going to my library and borrowing books. I know that the Seattle Public Library lends books electronically via OverDrive in the ePub format the iPad uses, but can these books be read on the iPad?

It is, eventually, possible to do this. The Mac documentation is a bit sparse, and you do need some Unix comfort to get it done.

First I tried to simply download and extract the book. This didn’t work: the DRM that OverDrive uses to enforce library return dates isn’t compatible with iBooks.

By this point I was obsessed. A little poking around revealed that the ADEPT DRM used by OverDrive has been cracked.
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