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| overdrive |
You may be familiar with purchasing books and magazines for your
iPhone and iPad, but have you ever borrowed an ebook or digital edition of a
magazine from your local library? As more and more local libraries are
adding online digital catalogs of books for borrowing, it’s a great —
and
cheaper! — way of building up your digital library for free. After trying
out a few methods for using the resources of your local library to borrow electronic
versions of your favorite ebooks, magazines and audiobooks, I’ve written up a
quick guide to follow.
Borrowing ebooks with OverDrive
Most libraries are choosing a third party to host and manage the lending
process. One such service provider, OverDrive Digital
Downloads, is what my local library uses. OverDrive currently
supports 18,000 libraries with
millions of readers. The experience is not quite what you would
expect if you’re used to Apple’s integrated iBooks(s AAPL) app or Amazon’s
Kindle(s AMZN) bookstore. But it does work, and once you have the ebook on your
iPhone or iPad, the reading experience is just about the same.
Getting Started:
The first
thing you will need is an active account at your local library. This will
be used to identify you as a borrower and ultimately limit the number of ebooks
you can have checked out at any one time.
Selecting an e-reader:
For most of
the titles available from my local library on OverDrive, I have only two main
choices: to either use Amazon’s Kindle solution on my iPhone, iPad and Mac, or to use
OverDrive’s own e-reader client for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. As
a possible third option, you can also elect to use Adobe Digital Editions
for the Mac. But be aware: the one client that you will
not be able to use is Apple’s own iBook e-reader for iOS, as it does not
support the DRM solution that the other readers support.
Borrowing an ebook:
Browsing the
online library of ebooks is the same experience for all e-eaders. You
will select a book via your browser. I found that using Safari for OS X
and iOS work just fine for this. Once you associate your library account
with OverDrive, you can create wish lists and place holds on books you want to
read. Each title in the library is limited to a predetermined number of
copies that the library can lend out.
Downloading the ebook:
If you place
a hold on a book, you will be notified via email when the book is available.
Depending on your e-reader, once you log in to your library account, you
will either download the file directly to the OverDrive e-reader client on your
device, or you will log on and register your library account with Amazon, and
check the book out directly to your Amazon account.
Since I
already have all of my devices registered with my Amazon Kindle account, as
soon as I checked out the ebook it was available on all of my devices for me to
read. So reading any ebook that I check out from the library is the same
experience on my Kindle as with any other book in my library. Even my
bookmarks sync across all of my devices.
Digital
magazines with Zinio
The
experience with magazines is different since my library chose to go with Zinio
as its partner. Zinio has been around for a while and was bringing
digital versions of popular magazines to your iPhone and iPad long before Apple
introduced iOS Newsstand to the world. There are no choices here, you
have to use the Zinio reader for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.
You do have to sync your Zinio
account with your library account, but once that is done, as soon as you select
a magazine from the online library of digital magazines available for lending,
it instantly shows up on your Zinio account for reading. While you won’t
have the same connivence as you would with a receiving updates via a paid
subscription, selecting individual releases can be more cost effective since
borrowing is of course free.
Borrowing
audiobooks
I was also
happy to see that you can use OverDrive to check out audiobooks from the
library as well. To do this, you will have to use the OverDrive client for
Mac, which does come with some restrictions: You will not be able to borrow any
audiobook that in only available in WMV format. You will be limited to
borrowing only MP3 audiobooks.
You will be able to listen to
your audiobooks in your favorite audio device as the OverDrive client for Mac
supports exporting audiobooks to devices like an iPhone, iPad and iPod.
You are even permitted to use the OverDrive client to burn an audiobook
to CD.
Overall the
experience was a positive one. It takes a little to get used to the
process of searching for electronic books and magazines that will work with the
format your e-reader supports, and ultimately to get them working on your
preferred devices. But after you have done it a couple of times, it’s
really not all that complicated. And it can definitely help expand your
reading list and your own personal digital library without costing you anything. Source
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