Meet Libby. She has a ground-breaking ebook reader, a beautiful audiobook player, and she lives on your smartphone. Libby is the newest app in the library-world to help you discover and enjoy the thousands of free ebooks and audiobooks offered through the Ohio Digital Library.
As I explained in last week’s column, the publishers of Recorded Books ebooks and Zinio magazines merged their services into one easy-to-use app called RBdigital.
This week, it’s OverDrive’s turn. If you are a digital content consumer, you likely have heard of OverDrive and use it to access the Ohio Digital Library collection. To many library users OverDrive was clunky and confusing. It became even more difficult if you were a super-library-user and had multiple library cards from different systems that you wanted to store within the app.
OverDrive’s new app, Libby, makes it incredibly easy to add multiple library cards, and switch views between various online library collections. Because the Delaware County District Library uses the Ohio Digital Library for ebook content, when you link your card, you’ll have full access to the Ohio Digital Library collection, shared between more than 300 libraries and branches in Ohio.
No many how many library cards you have, all your loans and holds are consolidated on a single shelf. By default, titles are automatically downloaded for easy offline reading and data saving, but settings can be adjusted to allow for streaming and space saving. Additionally, Libby syncs positions, bookmarks and notes across devices, including your Kindle.
Users can download Libby on the iTunes App Store, Google Play, or Microsoft. If you wanted to give Libby a try on your own, I think you’ll find that she’s incredibly user-friendly and a big step up from the original OverDrive app. While you’re checking it out, look up some of our upcoming book titles for the August adult book clubs to give it a whirl.
“West with the Night” by Beryl Markham. Describes growing up in an Africa that no longer exists, training and breeding race horses, flying mail to Sudan, and being the first woman to fly the Atlantic, east to west.
“Kitchens of the Great Midwest” by J. Ryan Stradal. Raised with a sophisticated palate by her single father, Eva Thorvald learns the culturally rich stories behind a series of Midwestern dishes while becoming the star chef at a legendary restaurant.
“The Wonder” by Emma Donoghue. Hired to care for a small Irish village girl said to have miraculously survived on nothing but “manna from heaven” for months, a journalist and nurse veteran of Florence Nightingale’s Crimean campaign quickly finds herself fighting to save the child’s life.
“Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance. Shares the poignant story of the author’s family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle-class life and the collective demons of the past.
“I Forgot to Remember” by Su Meck. Documents the story of an amnesia survivor who permanently lost all of her memories after a traumatic brain injury and who endured a more than twenty-five-year effort to relearn basic skills and reclaim her life.
“Little Mercies” by Heather Gudenkauf. When her life unexpectedly collides with ten-year-old Jenny Briard, a homeless girl struggling to survive on her own, veteran social worker and mother Ellen Moore discovers that one small mistake can have life-altering consequences.
