When we look for iPhone downloads, we usually are looking for movies, TV shows, music, games etc. But it also include iPhone eBooks! And there is a growing interest in using our iPhones as a book reader! The recent launch of the Barnes & Noble site with an iPhone interface built in, demonstrates this dramatically.
What you may not know is that there is a way to read many of your favorite books on your iPhone for FREE!! Using a service called overdrive, books can be downloaded from libraries and read on our iPhone. And Overdrive make it easy for us to find out whether the book we want is available for download. The provide a search service which tells us whether the book we want is available in a library near us (pretty much anywhere in the world!)
As our iPhoneGizmo readers already know, one of our team is a Vince Flynn fan. So we will use his works as an illustration. All we need to do is type “Vince Flynn” into the “creator” bar at overdrive search and we will get a list of libraries from around the world that lend his books out in this format. An example result for one of the ten books listed, is shown below.
Alternatively, we can search by location or by the name of the library we belong to. Couldn’t be easier. But bear in mind that not all libraries offer the ebooks in compatible formats. Want to know if your iPhone is compatible? You can check it here.
So long as we are a member of the library, we can borrow these books for free – download it to our PC and then to our iPhone. Now most libraries explain that the OverDrive WMA Audiobook excerpts are delivered as WMA files. These can be used with any version of Windows Media Player.
To use a full OverDrive WMA Audiobook title, you will need to download Transfer Wizard in OverDrive Media Console v3.2 (or newer) for Windows®and complete a one-time ‘Windows Media Player Security Upgrade’ on Windows Media Player version 9 or newer.
Its not difficult and every library provides guidance to help get us setup. Check it out!