Tip for Overdrive Audio Book Error: “Unable to acquire a license to play the selected title. The requested license is either invalid or already acquired.”
Check out the painfully true comic by the Brads, “Why DRM doesn’t work” or “How to Download an Audio Book from the Cleveland Public Library“. At Step 17 the character gives up on the Overdrive file and switches to Bit Torrent. In 2007, I wrote a small series on my evaluation of audio books, and in the third post I experienced the same problem with Overdrive and found a workaround. A number of people have since commented on the post, saying that it also resolved the problem for them. The comic indicates people are still have problems, so I thought it worthwhile to post the tip here again.
After following the instructions, I kept getting an error when I tried to save the audio book file to disk: “Unable to acquire a license to play the selected title. The requested license is either invalid or already acquired.” I resolved it by *opening* the file when prompted, rather than trying to *save* it first to disk.
Amusingly, I had to follow the opposite procedure. “Open” gave me the error, but when I “save”d it to disk first and then opened it, everything worked fine. In my case I was renewing a license for a book I had previously downloaded, so maybe that was the reason for the difference. Regardless, your tip got me on my way, so I thank you
Go figure. Thanks for the reverse tip, Steve.
Thank you! I’m glad I found your tip, I was about to take a bat to my laptop.
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