But as mentioned above, more and more people are switching over to the eBook side, whether it’s using a designated eReader, a tablet, a smartphone, or even a regular computer. If you love eBooks, it does not mean you have to forego your library habits! On the contrary, checking out eBooks is much easier than checking out actual books. This guide will show you how to merge eBooks with your love for the library, where available.

Finding A Local Library That Lends Kindle Books

The easiest way to lend out library eBooks on Kindle is by using Amazon’s Kindle public library books. While only available in local libraries in the US, Kindle books are a great choice since you don’t have to own an actual Kindle to read them. The free Kindle app is available for iOS and Android devices, and you can even read those books on your computer using Kindle Cloud Reader. But how can you find a library that lends Kindle books?

To start, head over here. This is a database of libraries and bookstores around the world which hold downloadable media.

Choose the “Library Search” tab to search for libraries. You can also use this site to search for titles or bookstores. In the search box, type in the name of your library, your city or a zip code. Note that you don’t need to include the state, the search does not support that.

You will now get a list of all the libraries which match your query. All these libraries (the US ones, anyway) also have Kindle books to lend.

Click on the library that’s closest to you, or one you already have a library card for, to access the downloadable media section of this library. If the name itself is not sufficient for you to recognize the specific library, the next page also contains the library’s complete address.

On this page you can also see what kinds of media are available in this library (audiobooks, eBooks, music, video). Click on the bottom link, as shown, to enter this section in the library.

Checking Out A Kindle Book

To actually check out a Kindle book from a library, you would need to have a library card and a PIN number with that library. Browse the eBooks the library offers, and when you’ve found the one you’d like to take out, find the Kindle version of it and add it to your cart. This part can look slightly different for each library.

You can now check out, using your library card ID and PIN number. Once you’ve checked it out, choose Get for Kindle. This will redirect you to Amazon’s Public Library Loan page for that title. After logging into Amazon, click on the “Deliver to” menu and choose your device (a Kindle, a tablet, a phone, etc.). Choose “Get library book” to send the book to your device.

Note that this option will only work if the device is connected to Wi-Fi. If you don’t have an available connection, you can simply download the file and upload it manually onto your device. The book will expire at the end of the loan period, which depends on your library. You will get an e-mail notification 3 days earlier, but no need to worry about heading to the library to return it!

And What If I’m Not From The US?

Although Amazon may have forgotten, we don’t all live in the US. Should this small fact exclude us from lending out eBooks? Not necessarily. While eBook lending outside the US is not supported by Amazon, it’s still possible to download eBooks from many libraries around the world, and read them on different devices.

To find local libraries that lend eBooks, head over here again and look for your library, same as above. You can also use the interactive map to browse for your library.

If your country is on the list, you can browse for libraries. After you’ve found a local library, access the downloadable media section, as seen above, and choose your book. You will now have the option to check it out in the ePub or PDF formats. You can read these eBook formats on multiple devices using apps such as iBooks for iOS, Aldiko for Android, or a PDF reader of your choosing for PDFs.

This may not be as convenient as lending out a Kindle book, but it is still a great way to enjoy library books without even having to leave your chair, and without having to worry about returning the book on time.

Where do you get your books? Do you prefer buying them or lending from a library? Do you have any experience with taking out Kindle books or other eBooks? Share in the comments!

Image credit: Shutterstock

But there is a catch. Or actually several of them. The service is only available for Amazon Prime users ($79/year), a service which also gets you free 2-day shipping, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows and other shortcuts and benefits on Amazon. The service is also available only for actual Kindle owners (a Kindle app for say the iPad is not enough), and you’re limited to one book per month. When you switch books, the previous book disappears from your device.

So what’s good about the service? If you’re already both a Kindle owner and a Prime member, you can choose a book a month from more than 5,000 books, 100 of which are current and former New York Times bestsellers. And it’s probably going to help Amazon sell some Kindle devices.

To access the library, grab your Kindle, head over to the store, choose See all… under Browse, and from there access the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. As with many other Amazon services, this one too is limited to US users since Prime’s benefits only work with US addresses.

Is the new lending library a service you plan to use, or are there currently too many limitations for it to be useful?

Source: Techland

Borrowed Kindle books get the same features and services that come with purchased ones, including Amazon’s Whipersync technology for synchronizing books between devices, and the ability to annotate and add notes to pages.

How It Works

Currently, Kindle books are available at more than 11,000 libraries in the U.S., according to Amazon.com. In order to borrow and download a book from your local library you will have to use of one of several OverDrive Media.com’s Mac and Windows desktop platforms, or an iOS, Android, and BlackBerry mobile application.

You will also of course need a valid library card and a registered Kindle device or reading app. When you browse your local participating library, click the “Get for Kindle” button. This will open the Amazon.com Kindle website, and from there you can download (borrow) your selected Kindle ebook to your specified Kindle device or e-reader app.

Amazon says that, “after a public library book expires, if you check it out again or choose to purchase it from the Kindle store, all your annotations and book marks will be preserved.”

It’s not clear why e-book loans can’t be done directly through Amazon, but it’s nevertheless great to see the service available.

Source: PC World
Image credit: Shutterstock

But unless you are a member of the Congress, you can’t check out books. You can use the huge collection for reading and research. For those of us who have yet to experience something like the majestic Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building, an online peek is the next best option.

Though it doesn’t come close to the real deal, the online website of the Library of Congress offers some nice free resources.

Take a Virtual Tour of the Library of Congress Online

The next best thing to actually being there, or something better than hearing someone rave about it. The Library of Congress gives you a virtual tour with the help of an iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad app. If you don’t own any of these, you can still go to the online site and catch the virtual tours. You just need to have Microsoft Silverlight installed for two of the interactives. The screenshot above is a tour of the Main Reading Room. Click on the red markers to learn all about the 16 magnificent statues.

There are host of other interactives. For instance, you can literally turn the pages of the Gutenberg Bible.

Play Knowledge Quest

Knowledge Quest is a historical trivia game that you can play on the MyLOC sub-site.  The interactive game is a great way to learn about the historical objects of interest in the library and also about history itself. The learning game has many levels and you can start from anywhere. It is a very useful resource for teachers and students and beautifully designed.

Listen to Podcasts

Downloadable podcasts forms an important audio resource on the Library of Congress Online. You can subscribe to the free podcasts and listen to them in your podcast player or iTunes. You can expect the podcasts to be of topnotch quality as they are presented by well-known novelists, historians, and narrators. Many podcasts are part of featured series audio presentations.

Watch Webcasts

If you are less of an audio guy and more for streaming videos, you won’t be disappointed as LOC has an entire section covering not only history but also more contemporary topics like environment, the Afghanistan conflict, weight loss etc. The entire American Memory video collection is listed alphabetically and it should take you the better part of your life to go through all of them. Typical maximum sizes are about 40 MB. Webcasts may require a Real Player plug-in. You will also find webcasts on iTunes U and then there’s the Library of Congress YouTube channel with 800+ uploads.

The Flickr ‘Commons’ Photostream

LOC runs a ‘Commons’ project where they provide access to a large number of historical photographs via Flickr. Some of the most famous photographs in the world (e.g. Migrant Mother) are part of these collections. Explore history visually. All photos are free from copyright restrictions and you can use them for any educational project.

Go Back Today In History

I had written about a few places where you can find out what happened today in history. The Library of Congress Today in History found a mention there. You can bookmark and visit it every day to get a sense of time.

Solve Today’s Science Mysteries

I bet you can’t answer all common everyday phenomena (How high can a nine-banded armadillo jump into the air?). Then you need to visit the neatly laid out Everyday Mysteries page along with a child and look up everything related to the strangeness in our sciences.

Read a Few Classics

The Library of Congress actively ties to promote literacy and good reading. The Lifelong Literacy section has interactive resources for kids, teens, students, educators, and adults. You can browse through books in a fun way using your Silverlight enabled browser. There are classic book titles and suggested titles for nourishing the reading habit. The above screen is from an interactive Story Book Adventure game.

Catch Exhibitions Online

When you can’t make the trip, why not catch a glimpse of the exhibitions in your browser. There’s something always going on and you can browse through the previous ones too. It is all very systematically laid out with multimedia resources and interactives (wherever available). The latest one is on I Love Lucy, the popular TV show.

The Virtual Reference Shelf

Exploring the library – even virtually – tires you out. There’s so much to click and browse. If you still have an appetite, head for the Virtual Reference Shelf. Here you will find a comprehensive list of external resources; from acronym finders to quotation sites…it’s a directory which you can keep bookmarked because the sources are collected with a strict eye for quality by the staff of LOC.

I have been browsing through the Library of Congress Online for the past few hours or so. I still have a sneaking hunch that I might have missed an important resource or two. If I have, do mention it in the comments. It could add something to our education and learning. Also, let us know if you have actually visited the Library of Congress? How was the experience?

Here at MUO, we’ve covered lots of great e-reader apps, like the desktop reader KooBits, or IbisReader for portable devices. Another great article was Bakari’s book on reading eBooks on the iPad. Setting the world of eBooks aside for a moment though, I’d like to offer the second half of our readers out there – the ones that absolutely love real books – with a set of apps devoted to book lovers.

5 Best Book Apps For Android

These apps all have common features that will help book lovers integrate mobile technology into their reading habits – the ability to scan book titles and information into the device, and a useful electronic “library” to organize the books that you own.

MyBookDroid

The first app is called MyBookDroid. I’m covering it first because it’s also my favorite. I love it because the graphics are a lot different than most of the streamlined, “techno” sort of graphics you find on so many other mobile applications out there. Each of the icons on the main screen look almost hand-drawn.

MyBookDroid is created for one reason and one reason only – to log and organize your book collection. While you can manually “create” a book by typing in the title or searching for it, the real beauty of this app comes from the ability to quickly either scan or type the ISBN number into the app and add it to your own library in just a click or two.

The app will quickly search for the title and information from the ISBN number and display all of the information on the screen.

At that point, you can quickly add the status for the book – whether you’ve read it or are reading it – and then save it to your electronic library. The cool thing about this app is that you can notate quotes from the book, take notes while you’re reading, read reviews from other readers (or offer your own), and also check out prices for the book online.

aNobil

My second favorite book-library app is called aNobil. This is another one of those apps that lets you quickly scan any book to instantly get information on it. This is very much a social app that offers many more user reviews than any other Android book app that I’ve reviewed. As you can see below, there are almost 300 ratings for the Stephen King book that I’m reading right now.

To get to the reviews or add/remove the book from your own electronic mobile library, just scroll down toward the bottom of the listing. You can even click “share with friend” to email information about the book to your friends.

BooksApp

Another good app, if you are more interested in getting very detailed information about books, is BooksApp. This app is great as a personal book research tool. You can walk through any bookstore or library, and when you spot a title, just open up the app and click on the top “Scan barcode” button.

When you add the book to your own library, you’ll see the count of your saved books in the little blue bubble next to the “Books” link. The real plus for this app is the amount of information available. It’s a fantastic app to have while you’re checking out books in the bookstore and not sure whether or not you want to buy it.

FriendItem

One of the few apps that I found which was more integrated into popular social networks was FriendItem. I had a little bit of difficulty with using FriendItem’s barcode scanner with my Droid. However, the search area is pretty easy to use and typically finds the book you want pretty fast with just the title.

The cool thing about this app is that on the book information page, just under the link to add the book to your personal electronic library, are the three links to share the book information with friends.

You can post the book to your Facebook wall, tweet it, or email it to friends. If you have a lot of people in your life that also love books – this app is a must have.

Goodreads

Most book lovers that have adopted online technology as part of their enthusiasm for reading know about the website GoodReads. Whether or not you’re a regular reader of the book review site, you’ll appreciate the community of book reviewers when you install the mobile GoodReads app. The aesthetic quality and the amount of information available makes this easily one of the top mobile apps for readers.

When you find books you want to read or that you are reading, just add them to your library and set the status to currently reading, or want to read. The library view is fairly simple, and also offers a small thumbnail of the book cover.

Personally, I think whether you prefer ebooks or real books, the Internet has only enhanced the job of reading even more. Either way, you have lots of choices of mobile apps that can help you organize your current book collection, or – thanks to the magic of social media – find new books to read by checking out what everyone else likes.

Have you ever tried one or more of these apps? Let us know what you think about these, or let us know if there are any others that you like to use. Share your insight in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Peter Mazurek

Journal articles are just as relevant in the academic world today as they’ve ever been, but fewer and fewer people actually handle a physical journal on a day-to-day basis. Instead students and professors are amassing ever-growing folders of PDF files containing the papers they need to do their job. These files are convenient in many ways but the more papers you collect the harder it is to find anything.

Featuring quality OCR and a searchable document library complete with metadata (author, subjects, tags and more), Qiqqa makes organizing your PDF files a snap. Add an indexed way to add comments and markup pages and you’ll quickly realize that this is the tool you’ve been looking for.

Your Library

Start up Qiqqa and you’ll see a summary of your library, along with a collection of links to learn how to better use Qiqqa:

You’ll also notice that there is a tabbed interface. This means you can open various documents at once, which is useful while writing.

Open the library and you’ll see your PDF collection:

All of your papers are presented here, assuming you’ve added them. Adding files to this library is easy. You can set Qiqqa to watch a folder on your computer for new files; do this and any files added to that folder will be in your library. Alternatively, you can add files individually or add entire folders of files.

Once you build your collection you can scroll through to find a specific paper if you’d like. Alternatively, you can use the search function:

This is probably the quickest way to find what you’re looking for, but it is by no means the only way. You can also break your library down using metadata:

Above you can see the papers organized according to whether or not they’ve been read. As you can see there are a variety of other options, including authors, publications, year and tags. Some PDFs include this information but most don’t; you’ll have to add metadata to the files to use these tools.

Getting Metadata

Luckily Qiqqa also includes a brilliant way of collecting metadata. It requires some input from you, but will ultimately save you a lot of time when you’re searching for documents and when you’re building a bibliography later. This video tutorial outlines everything nicely:

Reading PDF Files

Qiqqa comes with a built-in PDF reader, of course:

From here you can read the way you usually would, with a few bonuses. You can highlight text and add notes; these notes are then indexed for easy reference. In fact, all text in all the PDFs you add to Qiqqa are indexed; even PDFs made from scanned documents. This is possible because Qiqqa comes with very good OCR technology.

This is put to good use. For example, Qiqqa can automatically determine the title of a paper by looking for the biggest words on the front page of the paper. This same concept is used to automatically generate a table of contents for any file that doesn’t have one, a feature that can save you a lot of time.

Other Features

If you’re working on a paper you might want to visualize your ideas alongside the sources that inspired them. Qiqqa includes a tool for this:

This isn’t that different from other mind mapping software, except that you can directly reference the papers from which you’re drawing ideas.

Another feature worth mentioning is online syncing. You need to purchase a user account to really make use of this, but for academics with multiple computers it could be a godsend. It’s even possible to browse your papers online.

Download Qiqqa

Ready to download Qiqqa? Visit the Qiqqa homepage to find out how.

Want to see Qiqqa in action before you download anything? Watch the following video; it goes over all the features mentioned above and more:

You can find more Qiqqa tutorial videos here.

Conclusion

I’m not an academic; at least, not anymore. My wife Kathy is though, and it was her quest to organize papers that made me aware of Qiqqa. She is a physics graduate student and uses the software all the time; she tells me it’s extremely useful and I can certainly see why.

I want to know what you think, though. Is Qiqqa a good way to manage documents, or is there a better one? Let me know in the comments below, as always. I love learning from you guys.