Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Downloadable e-Books From the Library

Downloadable e-Books From the Library

There Are A Ton of Them. You have access to 2,459 e-Books through your library card. The titles are downloadable through the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium's contract with Overdrive. Just log-in with your library card, select titles, check-out and then download. Be patient, Overdrive's search feature is not very good; try the advanced search or use the browse feature.

Today's press release from Amazon and Overdrive touting their new partnership should mean all the PDF and EPUB files available through Overdrive will soon be available for loan on Kindles. Kindles currently do NOT work work with Overdrive.

If Overdrive and Amazon work together library users will have much wider access to the self-published work offered for sale on Amazon. Yes, much self-published work is crud. But, many authors are now able to make old, out-of-print titles available again. Authors are also able to publish good novels that print publishers have passed on.

Anyway, electronic publishing and self-publishing is a changing landscape but libraries - and this library - are working to collect and make available e-Books for you, the user.

An Aside: 42 of the 100 most popular e-Books for Wisconsin libraries are romances.

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