According to OverDrive, the largest supplier of e-books to public libraries, about 9,000 libraries offer digital audio books and about 5,400 of them offer e-books as well. E-book selection is still small compared to print collections, but they are growing. Other companies that distribute books to libraries include Ebrary and NetLibrary.
For the most part, library e-books are not yet compatible on Amazon’s Kindles. Amazon could shift course and embrace ePub, but an Amazon spokesman said the company would not comment on future moves in that direction.
Although there are some collections that are available in subscriptions that permit unlimited access to books by multiple users, most e-books are treated like printed ones: only one user can access it at a time. That means there can be waits for digital books just like there are for print books. On the other hand, since so few people know about the library e-book collections or want to use them, the waits for e-books are often much shorter than for printed editions.
For now.
Since borrowing an e-book does not require a trip to a physical library, readers can download at any time of day or night.
Open virtually all the time.
Below are some links to the digital e-book and audio book collections of various libraries around the country.
New York Public Library
E-book titles: 18,300
Brooklyn Public Library
E-book titles: 4,083
Boston Public Library
E-book titles: 3,636
Las Vegas Clark County Library
E-book titles: 5,000
Lee County Library, Florida
E-book titles: 7,000
Indianapolis-Marion County Library:
E-book titles: 1,300
BookFlix (available in 500 public library systems, including the New York Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, the Dallas Public Library and the District of Columbia Public Library)
A collection of children’s books and complimentary videos from Scholastic. These are subscription based, so multiple readers can access the collection at the same time.
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