No More Overdue Books: Getting Digital with your Local Library
Greetings, Bookworms!
I’ve told y’all a time or twelve how much I adore reading on my kindle. (Sorry physical book purists, this post will be of no interest to you. You have my full permission to daydream about unicorns and puppies and singing penguins.) One of the biggest drawbacks for me when I first got the kindle was that I had to pay for all my books. Sure, there were free classics, which is great, but a girl cannot live on classics alone. There are always free titles available too, but the only stuff I wanted to read I had to pay for.
Now that Oyster, Kindle Unlimited, and all sorts of other services claiming to be Netflix for books are floating around out there, it seemed a good time to remind the internet of an older, awesome service for free e-books. It’s your LIBRARY! Holla! My local library now carries an entire digital book list on their website that I can download straight to my kindle (and they have since like 2011.) The service is powered by OverDrive, which is compatible with most e-readers and tablet devices. The best part? You can NEVER forget to return your book. They’ll just take it back if you forget to renew or return it.
My friend Joules (of Pocketful of Joules, you should be reading her blog) asked me to put together something approaching a tutorial on the subject because she got confused and frustrated when trying to figure out how to get library books on her kindle. I am NOT an expert on the subject, and I can only speak for my experience with my library, but a little googling has revealed that OverDrive powers the majority of the e-book library programs, so I think the process is fairly uniform.
First things first, check out your library website. They may or may not have access to this service. My town, which, despite my claiming I live in a cornfield, has access to this. If you live in a super small town, you might be out of luck, for which I apologize on behalf of library kind. You will probably need a pin number in addition to your library card number, which you should be able to request pretty painlessly from your library. That’s it. I was going to put together a tutorial, but then I realized the folks at OverDrive have already done it and they did it better than I would have. CLICK THIS LINK!
As much as I love this service, it’s not ALL sunshine and rainbows. My library doesn’t always have EVERYTHING I want to read. And, because they have to legally treat their digital copies like physical copies, there are often long wait lists for new releases. BUT. Oyster and Kindle Unlimited have some serious limitations too (like the fact that some of the big fancy publishers won’t play nicely with them) so it’s all relative. At least the library option is free!
Tell me Bookworms- do any of you utilize your library’s digital offerings?
