Visit the Library Without Actually Visiting the Library
A couple of days ago, the Seattle Public Library announced that patrons can now check out Overdrive digital audio books and eBooks. Enter your card number, browse their digital collection, and check out up to 6 digital files. You get to keep them for 3 weeks.
Seattlest has spent a little time playing around with the digital checkout desk. We're not blown away by the selection, but we assume more books will be forthcoming. It's perfect if you want to read John le Carré or Nora Roberts novels, or need a Zone diet cookbook.
Speaking of selection, in the press release, selection services manager Tom Horne mentions listening to Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian as an audio file, but it's currently only available through SPL as an eBook PDF. At least, that's the only copy we found using the site's search feature.
We would have played around with the audiobook feature, but a) we're on a Mac, and the library's software only supports PCs; and b) the audio files aren't iPod compatible. Then again, we've never been big fans of audiobooks -- we prefer to move through books at eyeball speed. But there are passionate fans of audiobooks out there -- including our mother -- and we're sure this is great news for them.
While SPL Overdrive is a cool new feature -- and we're pretty sure it'll only get better -- it's still not a patch on our favorite benefit of SPL membership: access to the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary. (Any chance we could get access to LexisNexis or newspaperarchive.com, SPL? Pretty please? With sugar?)
