Using Overdrive Through Your Library

These days, many of us are reading e-books that we get from our local libraries. I may have been late to the party on this, as I didn't get an e-reader (in my case, a Kindle) until the pandemic hit, when the library became off-limits physically for a significant period. I've found, however, that checking out e-books is really great! They're available in several forms, and I never have to worry about returning the books overdue--they're renewable but unless I renew, they're simply no longer readable on my device. Overdrive, which is the system that my library uses, keeps a record of what I've checked out, so I can easily get a book again if I should have renewed but didn't.

I'm sure the above is old news to many of you. But do you know how to take your Overdrive checkouts to the next level?

If you read a lot of classics plus newer books that are not bestsellers, you may be frustrated that you aren't finding everything you'd like at the library, even via Overdrive. I know that I've found it quite tedious to look up book after book that's on my Goodreads want-to-read list and find that none of them show up on my library's Overdrive. The author's name usually does, but none of their books.

Each library chooses which books it wants from Overdrive's catalog. In other words, when you're on your library's Overdrive site, you aren't searching Overdrive in totality--you're just searching within what your library has decided, in its wisdom, that local borrowers are likely to want. But you can request the library offer books from Overdrive that it does not currently show!

I just did this today, as I'd discovered (via a simple Google search) that my forthcoming novel In Search of the Magic Theater is listed in Overdrive. I wasn't at that point looking to see if it was in Overdrive, I was just looking for any pre-publication reviews that might have surfaced, and discovered that the Somerset County Library (New Jersey) has it listed in Overdrive. So although they won't have the book until it launches June 1, they've already got it in their system. I therefore went over to my own local library's Overdrive site and typed in my name in Search. While my name didn't show up in search, I was nonetheless able to get the e-book of In Search of the Magic Theater to come up as something I could recommend to the library, which I then did.

Therefore, I tell you, go forth to your local library's website and proceed to its Overdrive site (while not all libraries use Overdrive, it is a very commonly used e-book service). Tell it that you recommend In Search of the Magic Theater and whatever else you may be itching to read that isn't already in its catalog!