Last Christmas my family finally made the jump and began “eReading.” I don’t like to think that I’m getting so old that my children are better with their iPads than I am with my Kindle, but that is fast becoming the truth. With all the games and apps that they find—and you should see some of the things that they can do with them—I’m starting to feel like my parents must have felt when they bought the first family computer back in the early ‘90s. Still, good ol’ dad has at least one last trick up his sleeve for the kids, and it’s the
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I recently expressed to a friend that I was thinking about limiting the number of e-books that I buy for each of my children to two a month because of how fast they read them. At right around ten dollars a pop, you start adding up the cost of e-books and it can get a little spendy. A more affordable solution would be a way to “rent” e-books, in a similar fashion to the way traditional libraries operate. My friend smiled and told me:
There’s an app for that.
OverDrive is being used by libraries all across the U.S. to rent e-books out to families like mine for no cost at all. In the same way that you would rent a book from a library and return it when you are finished, OverDrive is the most widely utilized app that allows users to rent e-books from their local libraries for a specified period of time, after which the file is deleted from your device. I was intrigued, to say the least, and we gave it a try.
My first concern was with compatibility. With my kids wielding Apple’s iPad2, and myself on the Amazon Kindle Fire, I have found that a lot of apps do not cross platforms (I don’t know who was more disappointed—them or I—to find out that I could not participate in their games of Draw Something).
The first plus for OverDrive is that it is available for most devices, including the Kindle, iPad, Nook and, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows operating systems. You can also get it on your computer.
While the app downloaded, I hunted for our library cards. Not every library is offering e-books through OverDrive, but you can check whether or not your local library does by entering your zip code on OverDrive’s website. Luckily, our cards had not expired.
We began browsing, and one of the things that surprised me is that some of the books were unavailable because they were checked out. I reckoned that a digital copy of something would automatically always be available, however, libraries are only allowed to loan a limited number of “copies” at a time. As a result, some of the e-books that we wanted were already on loan, and we had to pick others.
Our loaned e-books were indistinguishable in quality and format from ones that we’d bought. We all ended up “returning” our books early, but since then I’ve found out that you do receive notices letting you know when your loan period is almost up.
This is only a brief overview, and there are, of course, the cons to OverDrive: Popular books seem to always be rented out, and not all libraries offer e-book options (I also found out that first generation Kindles using 3G instead of wireless are not able to utilize this app). Ultimately, however, I would recommend this app to anybody with kids that like to read, because mine are loving OverDrive.
Brian Burton loves reading children’s books and running the blog at childrensbookstore.com. He often writes on the topics of children’s books and parenting.
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