The Gift of OverDrive

January 08, 2013

For Christmas, I gave my sister a Kindle Fire (thank you Cyber Monday sale!), something she had talked about buying for over a year. She teaches first and second grade at Rural Center Elementary—a small school south of Abilene, KS. Her busy schedule does not always allow her to get to the library unless she is visiting our parents in Hays, KS. So as excited as she was to have a Kindle Fire, she was even more excited to learn that both the Hays and Abilene Public Libraries are part of the Sunflower eLibrary, which is powered by OverDrive. I immediately set her up with the OverDrive App, and she had downloaded a book before the end of the night.

My husband and I visited his parents in Wisconsin over New Year’s. My mother-in-law is a high school math teacher and also doesn’t get to visit the library as often as she would like. I was reading Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell (which I highly recommend) on my iPad when I asked her if the local library had eBooks. She didn’t know, and we were pleased to find that the Waupun Public Library is part of the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium, once again powered by OverDrive. I downloaded the OverDrive App to her iPad, and she is reading Janet Evanovich’s Smokin’ Seventeen.

The moral of the story is: if you generously gave a device that can download eBooks, have that person check their local library’s website to find out if their library is part of an eLibrary network. The download process is the same as MCPL’s, although the library may have different restrictions, such as the number of books that can be checked out or the lending period. Who knows? You may have not only given a great device, but also the Gift of OverDrive. 

~Jill S.
Parkville Branch