Borrowing Library eBooks on Your Sony eReader no comments
One of the new features that Sony proudly announced when they officially unveiled their new ereaders was the ability to borrow ebooks from your local public library, providing your library uses the Overdrive system. This seemed like a really good idea, and one that someone should have thought of a long time ago. In reality how good is it?
I use the Los Angeles County Public Library, which as you can imagine is quite large and has a lot of holdings. In spite of its size, the LA County Library only has a little less than 230 ebooks available for download at this time. Of these, 50 are fiction and the rest are nonfiction. The library only has a fixed number of “copies” to loan out, so almost all titles have a waiting list. After putting yourself on one of these waiting lists you will be notified by email when your requested ebook is available for download. Your newly borrowed ebook will be usable for a period of 21 days, after which time it will be deactivated. I was mainly trying to test the process so I found an unloved nonfiction ebook that I could download immediately and give a temporary home to on my Sony ereader.
First you will need to install Adobe Digital Editions on your computer, which went pretty smoothly in my case. Make sure you use the same email address to register it as you used to register your Sony ereader. After installation, ADE found my Sony PRS 600 by itself with no problems. It was a simple matter to then drag and drop my newly downloaded ebook onto the ereader in the Digital Editions window. The process, once you have the software installed, is comparable to purchasing and installing an ebook onto your reader using the Sony eBook Library, except you use a library card instead of a credit card.
The system seems to work pretty well and is a good feature. I was a bit skeptical when I first heard Sony was integrating this ability into their ebook readers. The last time I tried to download digital media from the library I could never get it to work because of some kind of DRM conflict. That was a couple of years ago though, and the system appears to be much more usable now. You will need to live near to a library system that has digital media provided by Overdrive (many do) for this to work for you. You can go to Overdrive’s website and search for any compatible libraries near you.
While being able to check out ebooks from public libraries and read them on your ebook reader is a really good concept, I wouldn’t let it sway your decision about which ebook reader to purchase. The number of titles available at this time is just too limited. You will probably find a few titles that are on your reading list, but you will have to get in line before you can read them.
Probably we will see our public libraries carrying more ebooks as time goes on and as ebook readers become more and more popular. Hopefully too we will see compatibility with more ereaders than just Sony’s.
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