You can search by title, but there are filters if you don’t have anything specific in mind. The app will shoot you a notification whenever your holds are available, and you usually have about three days to take action, before your hold is rescheduled. This is useful when you’re in the middle of another title and won’t get to the new one away, or have too many holds come in at the same time, making it impossible to read them all. There you can see how long the wait is for each book, read a sample, or even push back the date it’s offered to you for borrowing. If they can’t be checked out right now due to a lack of free copies (library ebooks are limited to one user at a time) you can still place a hold, and the app provides a handy page to check on all your requests. What’s nice about Libby is that when you pull up a list it shows you which books are currently available, and lets you take them out with two taps. The app has a home page that features guides to specific genres or audiences, like teens or “mystery & thriller.” There are also curated lists of books about topics like Asian-American culture or Magical Realism. (Some library systems may not have access yet.) It’s made by Overdrive and, while the original app is still available, I don’t see why anyone would choose Overdrive over Libby given the choice.

As people turned more to ebooks during the pandemic, word of mouth got around in places like Reddit, and I decided to give it a shot. Libby has been around since 2017, but it was never really well publicized. But then I found out there was a new app - a better app - called Libby. So I decided to suck it up and go back to Overdrive. That’s good, but it also left me without anything to read. The latter is the industry standard for checking out ebooks but it’s rather clunky and outdated.įor the first few months of 2020 I went through my to-read pile and pretty much wiped it out. Yes, I could still check out ebooks, but it’s always been a rather cumbersome process, searching the web interface and hoping they had what I wanted, sending them to my Kindle, or using an app called Overdrive. As for books, however, there was one problem: The libraries in the city had shut down and I didn’t want to start buying books because it can get expensive real fast. Lockdown here in New York didn’t seem so bad, as I could encase myself in a cocoon of movies, TV shows and comics to keep myself entertained.

Libby app for amazon fire