Tag: magazines

Ebooks, Part 2: Hoopla

September 10, 2020 By ml-admin

Last time I talked about how to get started on Overdrive, one of Maxwell’s vendors for ebooks, audiobooks, and other electronic material. Today’s post is about hoopla, the other vendor.

Getting started:
Looking at what’s available

Head over to hoopla’s website and click on the Browse Titles button about halfway down the page. The page you get taken to lets you browse the audiobooks that are available, but you can easily go to pages for other formats. Touch/hover the cursor over Browse in the page’s header. The dropdown menu that appears allows you to switch to any of the formats hoopla offers:

  • Audiobooks
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Comics
  • Ebooks
  • Television

Note that most of these categories are well represented in OCPL’s Overdrive collection as well. Music is the exception and is only in hoopla.

Whichever category you choose to browse, hoopla lets you select how to organize what you’re seeing by using the links

  • Featured
  • Popular
  • Categories

located just under the heading for the format you’ve chosen.1

Installing & setting up the app

You’ll need an account, but if you don’t already have one, you can install the app on your device first and then sign up through the app. Hoopla has a YouTube channel with several tutorials (as well as book talks). Here are links to their tutorials for getting the app and starting to use it:

And here’s the hoopla website:

Appendix: Why 2 vendors?

tl;dr: Hoopla allows instant gratification, but its potential cost means the library limits the number of items you can check out in a given month.

Since ebooks are physically just collections of bytes of data,2 it’s very easy to carry them around or to get access to them from any internet-connected location. However, just as books on paper are not only their physical manifestations as quantities of ink on paper, neither are ebooks only their bytes. Indeed, it doesn’t take much abstraction to view the real book one is talking about as being independent of either its ink-on-paper or magnetization-states-in-a-storage-medium representation.

This level of abstraction is the level where we say that the paper book and the ebook are the same thing. And from the author’s viewpoint this works since generally both formats contain everything the author put into the book’s creation. Thus, it is entirely reasonable that copyright law treats the formats identically: just as Maxwell can’t photocopy a book in the collection and lend both the original and the photocopy, we are limited in the number of copies of an ebook we can lend out at any one time to those “copies” (that is, licenses) we’ve legally acquired.

That preramble brings us to the primary distinction between Overdrive and hoopla from the standpoint of the access each vendor provides. Recall from last time that one of the things to notice while browsing titles in Overdrive is whether the title has a nice orange Available banner or a disappointing white Wait List banner. This is because OCPL buys a fixed number of licenses for each title in the collection. If you think of each license as analogous to a single ink-on-paper book, you can see3 how this results in the same sort of wait lists as paper books get.

Hoopla’s model is different. Instead of selling multiple licenses in a package deal, they charge the library for each item checked out. If Overdrive’s ebooks are like paper books we’ve bought and put on the shelf, hoopla’s are like books that we rent on demand and only on demand. This means that any number of patrons can check a given title out at once: we just pay hoopla the fee for each one, and hoopla pays its corresponding fees to the copyright holder.

The disadvantage of hoopla’s model (looking at it from the vantage point of the library’s budget) is that the potential costs are unlimited. With Overdrive we have a fixed rate for a fixed number of licenses, but there’s no definite cap to the costs for hoopla. That is why the libraries in OCPL that offer hoopla have set maximum numbers of items that patrons can check out in a month (Maxwell’s maximum is 6 per month).

1 Comics also lets you choose to browse by publishers or how recent an issue is since those criteria can be important for comics fans.

2 Well, the states of segments of solid-state memory or magnetic disks representing those bytes.

3 Especially if you’ve ever been #300 on the waiting list for a newly released book!

Ebooks: They’re Not Just for Quarantine Anymore

August 27, 2020 By ml-admin

Since Maxwell won’t have in person programs till at least January, I’m going to start presenting Tech Programs as blog posts. Rather than having a big, “hour-long” post (as it were) once a month, though, I’ll post a briefer, more focused post every other Thursday.

Today’s post is an introduction to OverDrive, one of our vendors for ebooks, audiobooks, and other electronic material. On September 10 I’ll have a post on hoopla, the other vendor.

During the shutdown, many library patrons gained a certain appreciation for the availability of ebooks through Maxwell. While holding a glowing device to read is certainly not the same experience as holding and paging through a book in ink on paper, when we were unable to circulate those meatspace books, it was good to still be able to read their texts electronically.

Even in normal times, though, ebooks have some advantages that can make them the first choice on occasion:

  • You can adjust the size of the print or even the typeface itself for your own optimal comfort. This can be useful if, for example, the book you want to read isn’t available in large print or if you find certain typefaces harder to read.
  • Their marginal weight and volume are 0. That is, you can carry as many as you like on your device without increasing the weight of your device or how full your bags are at all. This is quite useful when taking a trip out of town.
  • Continuing the travel theme, they return themselves on the due date, so you don’t have to worry about staying too long at the beach, at the pyramids, or atop K2 with library books in your pack.

The best way to start with ebooks is to browse the collections. Here are links to OverDrive and hoopla:

For today’s post I’ll look at OverDrive. I’ll cover hoopla 2 weeks from now.

When you go to the OverDrive site, you see something you’re probably familiar with at tangible libraries: a display of new and popular books and audiobooks arranged in various groups. Here are the titles of the current browsing collections:

  • 19th Amendment 100 Year Anniversary
  • Guides to Antiracism
  • YA Books That Broke Our Heart
  • Keep Calm & Carry On: Kids Picks for Tough Times
  • Best of 2020 So Far
  • Books Written by Black Authors
  • Coping with Stress & Anxiety
  • Pride 2020
  • I’m Bored! Kids Activity Books
  • What are OCPL Patrons Reading?

Notice that across the top of each cover image there’s either an orange bar showing that the item is available or a white bar showing that there’s a wait list for it.

Banners reading 'Available' and 'Wait List'

Back at the top of the page is where to find the tools you can use to look for books & audio books.

The Subjects link takes you to a page listing several fiction genres and a number of categories of nonfiction. Collections drops down to show you links to the 4 types of collections in OverDrive: ebooks, audiobooks, videos, and magazines. Kindle Books is useful if you have a Kindle; Kindles use Amazon’s proprietary format for ebooks and can’t use other formats, so it can be convenient to limit your search to titles that have a Kindle version. Lastly, Search drops down a search box where you can type in something to search on (often an author’s name or a specific title, but keywords or phrases related to what you’re looking for also work).

If you like some titles you find and want to check them out, you’ll need some way to read them on your device. For mobile devices or Windows machines, getting the app you need (Libby) and setting it up is pretty straightforward. Go to the appropriate “store,” …

install, … and start the app. Libby will guide you through the setup process (you’ll need the barcode from the back of your library card and your PIN), and then you’ll be able to check things out and read/watch/listen to them.

On a Mac or Linux machine, you can still use OverDrive, but there isn’t a version of Libby that runs natively. The most straightforward way to read things is to read them in your web browser.