It took my husband two hours to get home in the snow Friday night…Not a happy camper.

As the snow falls, and the evening commute turns into a nightmare, you might be considering what you can do with your local library’s resources without leaving the house. Enter Overdrive and Hoopla!

Both resources are FREE to Upper Dublin cardholders and with both, you can get thousands of free ebooks and audiobooks! Hoopla Digital takes it a wee bit further and gives you audiobooks, music and movies! A world of entertainment is available for you from your internet-enabled device.

People often ask what the difference between the two is. Practically speaking, the difference is two-fold: number of checkouts and breadth of catalog.

Overdrive’s catalog is made up of the latest hits in both books and audiobooks. Each member card gets a rolling 10 checkouts at any given time. Books act like regular library books, in that they have holds queues and can be checked out and not available. However, unlike standard library books there are never any overdue fines. Make sure you log in before you search as Upper Dublin buys extra copies of popular books for our members!

Hoopla’s catalog, on the other hand, is of back-list items-items that are not currently the most hot thing, but may still be your next great read. The largest difference between the two is that Hoopla’s catalog is vast. There are over 500,000 items in Hoopla including besides ebooks and audiobooks, music, movies, comics and tv shows. (They just got a whole bunch of Marvel comics too!) Members get 7 checkouts a month from Hoopla, but there are never any waiting lists; everything is available at any time. Hoopla also has one of the best audiobook catalogs I’ve ever seen.

Both resources can be accessed through our website, but for the real use, you will want to install their native apps: Overdrive has two apps-Libby and Overdrive (which you use depends on what device you have)-and Hoopla has its own Hoopla Digital app.

If you’d like to know more, we have a handy-dandy class coming up! Free ebooks, audio & video: Overdrive & Hoopla. Wednesday night, 1/10, 7-8 pm.

Happy reading!