As a librarian, and as an audiobook consumer, I am so excited! Overdrive has released their iPhone app for their audiobooks. One of the most difficult questions I get in the library (honestly) is how to download audiobooks from Overdrive. It is an extremely tedious process and doesn’t always work very well. As soon as I heard about the app, I downloaded it. The one thing I dislike about it is the help file. Once I had the app on my iPod Touch, I couldn’t figure out how to actually get books on it. I was worried that ultimately I would have to connect it to my computer and still go through all the steps, but be able to navigate easily from my device. Luckily I was wrong!

I went to my library’s website and went to our downloadable media page. First off, I was very pleased to see that it is actually mobile-device friendly! I searched for a book to download, easily added it to my card and checked it out. When I clicked download, it opened the Overdrive Media Console app and added it to my library. It was that easy! There was one more step that wasn’t perfectly clear, but I figured it out easily enough. It doesn’t automatically download the parts of the book, but I was prompted when I clicked on the title to download all or part of the book.

There are mobile apps for Android and Blackberry, too, and I can’t wait to share this information with my coworkers. Not everyone has these devices, but it will be such a convenience for those that do!