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Engaging Methuen Readers


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Read anywhere with Libby!

You may already know about the Nevins Library’s many different e-book borrowing methods. We even wrote a post about them recently. You may even be using them at an increasingly rapid rate, judging by the anonymized statistics that the library gets from the companies that provide our digital books. But did you know that borrowing e-books is now easier and more fun than ever before? That’s right: there’s a new app in town, and it’s called Libby. Once you try it, you’ll see why we love it.

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Libby is strictly for mobile. It’s an interface made for your phone or tablet, so don’t try and download it for your laptop or desktop computer. It draws from the OverDrive catalog, just like the old OverDrive app did. Think of Libby and the OverDrive app as two phones that can call the same number. In this analogy, the OverDrive app is a rotary and Libby is a smartphone. They both dial into OverDrive, but one is way faster and more fun to use than the other.

Libby features an easy-to-use interface that lets you return, renew, and read books with greater ease than ever. Instead of navigating a maze of directions to log in and borrow books, Libby keeps you logged in and even stores multiple cards at the touch of a button. Then, when you want to borrow a title, two taps get you the literary lusciousness that you crave. The item downloads right to your phone over wifi and then it’s yours for 21 sweet days of bliss. (Remember how the OverDrive app used to burn out your data plan? Libby will only download over wifi unless you expressly tell it otherwise.)

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Two-tap returns and – yes – renewals make Libby the easy choice for the discerning reader. Best of all, the entire system is completely intuitive. Once you download, you’ll be amazed that you ever used anything else.

Remember, if you ever need help with a reading app, you can always ask the staff of the Nevins Memorial Library for assistance. We’re available from 9:00am to 9:00pm every Monday through Thursday, as well as 9:00am to 5:00pm on Fridays and on Saturdays in the winter.

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Spotlight on Ebooks: Axis360

The ebook market is exploding, nowhere more so than in libraries. Now, as the demand for electronic literature and audiobooks grows greater than individual libraries can handle, the state of Massachusetts is stepping in with the Commonwealth Ebook Project. Its flagship service, Axis 360, is the product of book supplier Baker & Taylor. The success of this app will determine the future, not only of ebooks in libraries, but of how readers browse and borrow electronic material. The key is a diverse, stable collection that is both widely available and easy to use.

If one thing can be said for Axis 360, it is selection. The amount of mainstream, current material available through this service is unrivaled even by its biggest competitors, OverDrive and Freading. Best of all, Axis 360 hasn’t yet been overwhelmed. Longtime users of OverDrive are used to waiting for a hold for months at a time as everyone in their library or consortium piles onto a coveted title. Axis 360 duplicates many of OverDrive’s most problematic items, and thanks to its newer status, it’s not nearly as popular. In other words, there’s good stuff in Axis and nobody’s taken it yet.

As features improve, initial skepticism toward the Axis app is turning to cautious praise. The borrowing process is ludicrously simple: just point and click. You read (or listen) on your phone or tablet. Axis maintains a browser interface for search and to keep up Nook functionality, but it’s easy to see the entire service migrating to mobile in the future.

And now that this collection is available in libraries, it is easier to see ebooks having a future there. Axis 360 won’t supplant reliable standbys – if nothing else, the e-reader owners of the world need OverDrive’s tie-in to Amazon – but it will supplement, and digital book options are what the reading library community has been waiting for.
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