How to get ALL ebooks & audiobooks free - even if your library sucks!

want to give a shout out to all of my patrons thank you so much for all of the continued support hey everybody over the years I've read roughly 250 books through a mixture of both Kindle books and audiobooks and I've only paid for about 10 of them saving me literally thousands of dollars so today I'm going to tell you how I do this fully legally using a combination of the apps Libby and hoopla and I'm going to tell you how you can do this exact same thing and share some tips with you that even if you use these that you probably have not heard before so while many people already know a lot of the benefits of using a Kindle by far the greatest benefit and the least well-known benefit is the fact that you can get ebooks from a library sent directly to your Kindle for free and you can use this method to do audiobooks as well and while I love sites like audible.com I mean and heck they advertise on my channel you would be foolish to spend money on audiobooks from audible when you can get these exact same audio books for free so in this video I'm going to share with you four different things so first is I'm going to show you how how I utilize my local library to get these books and how you can do the same thing at yours second I'm going to show you how to use neighboring Library systems to get access to even more books third I'm going to show you what to do if your library system either doesn't have Libby or hoopla it has a really weak collection of books or if you happen to live outside of the United States and you want access to everything that I'm talking about and fourth I'm going to show you how to use a super convenient Google Chrome extension that very few people know about that'll make this whole process a whole lot easier all right so now let's learn how to use these two main apps uh first starting with Libby or overdrive now overdrive is the main name of the company um but Libby is their app so you're going to want to get the app um if you're ever going to want to listen to audiobooks but if you if you don't ever listen to audiobooks and you just want to do ebooks you can use the app but I'm going to show this to you on desktop but it's it's the same exact process for using on your phone I have it on my phone but let's go through the desktop version here so every overdrive or Libby account is going to look the same except it's going to have a different title up top I'm looking at the Sacramento Public Library system which is one of the library systems that I have access to so you're going to search for a book let's look for the way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson and right away when I pull this up I'm going to see two different options here I'm going to see that an audiobook is available and an e-book is available let's start with the ebook so for the ebook I want to look at one thing right off the bat I want to see that it's available in Kindle it is great now let's look at the status of this there are zero of eight copies available that means um just like a regular Library they have a certain number of copies that they can loan out for three weeks at a time some libraries are two weeks most of them are three weeks so um none of them are available and the wait time right now is 13 weeks if I look at the details here it's saying 13 weeks because there's eight copies available there's 48 people waiting in line which means that there are six people waiting per copy um and they have some formula to figure out what that means but it will never take 13 weeks to get this book why because when you place a hold on a book which I'll do right now for an example um I'm on a hold I am number 49 on eight copies and if I go to my account and look at my holds I can see that I have it here along with a number of other books uh some of these are my wife's books uh don't judge me but The Witcher is most certainly mine so on this this is going to slowly tick down as I go look at it but when a a lot of people are going to drop off this because they might not want it so it's going to go faster than the 12 weeks the 12 weeks is the worst case scenario um and I've never had it go that long um that it says it's going to take but another thing a really cool thing that's going to happen is when this book is available I'm going to get an email that says your book is available you have three days to grab it and send it to your Kindle and the you're going to get the option then to say do I want it now or do I want to go further back in the line a little bit and how long do you want to wait sometimes if I'm not ready for it I'll say go back a week and essentially after one week the next copy that's available will be given to you and you can keep pushing this back as long as you want so this is a strategy that I often use is I will go put a hold on tons and tons of books that I want to read and I'll just keep moving them back and back and back knowing that then I'll get them when I want to read them but lots of other people do this too and every time you move back another person gets it so this 12 weeks will rapidly go quicker than you think it will go so that's how to place a hold on a book um but now let's look at a book that maybe that we kind of want to read right now let's look at I don't know let's look at mistborn um let's look at the Lost metal uh the Lost metal has six of 12 copies available so I'm gonna and it's available on Kindle over here I'm gonna go ahead and borrow this it's going to say borrow for 21 days or less I'm gonna go 21 days and then I'm going to say read now with Kindle and as soon as I click that button it's going to pop me over to my Amazon account and I will be able to send it to my Kindle and within about 10 seconds it will show up directly on my Kindle it's that easy now when I'm done with the book because I don't want to read this book because I don't like this book and I've already read it I will go to my loans I will see that it is here and I can return it early return boom and it's done uh it's that easy now you want to return it to be a Good Samaritan because then the people waiting behind you in line if there's a wait list will then get that email saying the book is ready um now let's look at how to do an audiobook so let's go to the way of Kings again and check out the audiobook version of that so audiobook for the way of Kings it's not available there's a 10 week hold so I could place a hold um or I could let's look at an example for a book that I currently have so under loans there are currently two audiobooks that are in my account available to listen to right now you have a couple options you can listen to it in your browser you just pop it right open and boom I can listen to it it'll save your place it'll sync up with the Libby app on your phone um or just pull out your phone and you can listen to it just like you would be listening to audible.com it's like the exact same interface it's just as good you can speed up the pace over here to 1.5 speed which is what I normally listen to um but do whatever you want you can bookmark it right here you can look at your bookmarks here it's got everything you would ever need um but let's say let's go back to that wave King's example let's say I don't want to wait the 10 weeks what is my options well that's where hoopla comes in handy so this is what hoopla looks like on most Library accounts they will give you access to both hoopla and Overdrive or Libby I use those interchangeably so let's look up and see if um let's look up that mistborn example um let's look up a mistborn book because if I look over here and look up mistborn um and let's say I wanted to read the final Empire the final Empire isn't available it's a 12-week hold well let me go over to hoopla and type in the final Empire and the beautiful thing about hoopla is they don't have a wait list they have a rule that you can only get four books a month um but you just get them right away boom borrow now I don't want to use one of my four right now but if I hit borrow title I could have it immediately um and so I always check with overdrive first but if it's not there let me go check on hoopla and see if it's there and oftentimes it is um so you can interchangeably use these two systems the Hoopla app on your phone works just like the other one just like audible it works beautifully so that's how to work these systems and please let me know if you have any questions so now let's talk about how to get access to even more libraries than just your local one so in many places there are things called reciprocal agreements where between Library systems they can share a catalog for you so where I live not only do I get access to my local library but I also get access to the three Library System nearest to me just by signing up online which gives me access to like four times the amount of books or three times I'm not very good at math so what I would do if I were you is I would call the nearby library systems just call them up on the phone talk to any librarian and tell them where you live and ask if you can get access to the layer library system as well or you can call your own library and ask them what system they have reciprocal agreements for but in my experience it's a lot better to call the individual systems you'll get a lot better answers from them so aside from this in America many states also have state laws that allow reciprocity between all Library systems across their entire State as long as you show up in person so I happen to live in California where this law exists so whenever I go to a new city like if I'm on a trip or just driving through for whatever reason I always make a point to stop off the library I show my California ID and I get a new card and now I've done this for about 10 different Library systems across the state which means that at this point I get pretty much any book that I want whenever I want unless it's like hyper indie or it's like just come out but even the ones that just come out I still have pretty good track record on getting those books all right now let's talk about what to do if your local library either does not have Libby or hoopla it has like a weak collection of books or you happen to live outside of the United States and want access to the things that I'm talking about because I think a lot of other countries don't get this access that I've gone over in this video but I have a solution for you so some libraries allow you to purchase a card for one year you even if you don't live there now they do cost money but the savings is enormous so I've done a ton of research into this and I found that by far the best library to buy a card from that has an enormous catalog of books is the library system in Orange County in Florida and it costs 125 dollars per year and while that may seem like a lot of money you only need to read about 10 books a year to make this worthwhile so I'm going to leave a link down in the description where you can buy this card and the beautiful thing about the Orange County system in Florida not the Orange County system in California you got to look at the Florida one but they also allow this for international residents as well so it doesn't matter where you live in the world if you pay 125 dollars per year you can get access to pretty much any book that exists now there might be a wait list on some of these which is totally fine if you've done the tips that I talked to you about before but that's how you do it all right so you have signed up for your library system and let's pretend that you've done my trick and you've signed up for a bunch of Library systems and now you have a bunch of cards and it would be annoying to try to juggle all these cards and figure out which library has your book and take a lot of clicking here is the power user way to solve this problem and it is by using this cool extension called the library extension just type in library extension Chrome pick this bad boy up when you get it you're going to open it up and it will show you you can click in all the different what country you're in what state you're in type in what library system you're looking for and add it into your system so I have a bunch of libraries plugged into here that I'm a member of I'm a member of a lot more than this but I use my laptop for it and I'm using my desktop right now so let's go to Goodreads this also works on amazon.com but I'm a big fan of Goodreads so let's look up a book let's look up Grace of Kings by Ken Lou and when you pop open a book it's going to pop over this extension on the right side of the screen and it's going to show you so in the Sacramento Public Library System there are none available on audiobook but look there's a green there is one available for ebook but in all these others there's not so it's going to quickly go through all of the different Library systems that you're a member of and just quickly summarize which ones is available so I can just quickly hit borrow it'll pop open boom borrow it from this Library System it's mine it's that easy it's a beautiful beautifully run little system and it's a must must have if you have more than one library system on your account so thank you so much for watching this video I hope you've learned something new here if you have any technical questions about this feel free to mention them in the comments and I'll try to answer or better yet come visit my Discord Channel and I can talk to you live about it I have a link down always in the description and I would love to have you so that's it for me thank you so much for watching and as always happy reading to you thanks again to all my patrons with a special shout out to my ascendant tier and librarian tier patrons Anna G Ben Brian CJ Darren Jonathan my book is lit Nathan T Nev's book Channel Ron Reich Russell Ryan L Anna Andra Angelo Ben Blair Brock Evan fanaxan Jamie Jeff Pixlr Maria Michael Sugarman Skye and Zion

Channel: Matt's Fantasy Book Reviews

Views: 164,010

Keywords: fantasy, fantasy books, books, book review, booktube, booktuber, bookstagram, bookworm, booklover, booknerd, bookish, book, reading, read, booktubers

Id: xafwrZQ7FSk

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Sun May 28 2023