Rick (Rick and Paulette's RV Travels) put a link on his blog to a post that he wrote last September about using the library to find books for his new Sony E-reader. This topic is of great interest to me since I am an avid library user.
We don’t own an e-reader yet, but we are interested in purchasing one. We think it would be a handy way to take books with us when we travel. Our local library system, Fort Vancouver Regional Library does not have any e-books at this time.
I looked online at Multnomah County Library, Portland’s library system. They do have e-books and even though we are across the river in Washington, patrons from our county, Clark, can check out books and e-books out from the Multnomah Library free of charge. Multnomah is a member of the Oregon Digital Library Consortium which offers books through a system called Library 2 Go.
Our first step was to sign up for a Multnomah County library card. We did this online. Then the instructions told us to go to any Multnomah library to get the actual card. Luckily for us, all the libraries are open on Sunday afternoon. We chose the branch closest to us which was about 20 minutes away. We got our new library cards!
When we were back home again, we experimented with checking out books. Since we don’t have an e-reader yet, we downloaded a few books to our computers. It’s not an ideal way to read e-books, but it allowed us to experiment with the system, see the books, adjust the font size, and see how easy/hard it is to read books online.
So far, we are impressed with the system. The two things we don’t like are:
1) we are each allowed to check out only 6 e-books at one time.
2) we can’t delete the books when we are done with them. They will automatically expire in 7 or 21 days, depending upon how long we checked them out for.
Tim and Kiersten came over this afternoon and showed us their iPad and Nook. We liked both. The iPad is pretty whippy but costs a lot and provides more features than we need right now. We like the Nook a lot. The Kindle is also a well-known e-reader and Tim owned one before he got his new iPad. The disadvantage with the Kindle is that it doesn’t work with the library system. The Nook and Sony e-readers are the ones supported by Library 2 Go.
Today was a day filled with visiting, saying goodbye to Jonathan, and learning new things about e-books and e-readers. It was a busy day!
Interesting post, Carol, and thanks for the shout-out. Looks like you're getting a real good handle on this library e-book stuff. I found it great that even while we were in Palm Springs, we could still take e-books out of our library here on Vancouver Island - the Internet is great!
ReplyDeleteThe only thought we have about e-readers is that we'd have to buy two, because Suzy and I both enjoy reading, and we like to read at the same time!
ReplyDeleteDo your thing, and have fun!
I really enjoyed your post today and along with Rick's post have learned alot about e-books. It would make so much more sense than lugging so many books around in the motorhome and then giving them away to make room for more. Thanks for the library info...we'll look into the library in LaGrange and see if they have e-books.
ReplyDeleteMike & Gerri (happytrails)
http://freedom2roll.blogspot.com
We just bought the Sony Reader and now do not know how we ever lived without it. They are on sale at Wal-mart for $169 and can hold up to 300 books, more if you buy the additional memory card.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, we lost our library card and in order to get a new one, we have to go in person. We are not in the area where we had our library card and to get one in this area, we will need to have our license changed which is not going to happen. Otherwise, we would be able to download so many books from the library system for free.
There are some books for free available and we are weeding through them as well as buying others for our reading pleasure.
A habit that we have both strayed from ever since coming out here in this lifestyle, all because of the weight of all the books. Now, we can have so many books with just the weight of the Reader...Life is Grand!
Sorry you had to say good-bye to Jonathan, but he is going off to his wonderful new job with the State Patrol, so that part is great.
ReplyDeleteThe reciprocal system with the Oregon library is wonderful. Who knew?
Enjoy reading!