Happiness is an e-reader!

I bought an e-reader for vacations (no more suitcase full of books for me!) and found it useful for travelling to work as well. The reader can be held in one hand if the train is crowded, and it's much lighter and smaller to cart around. My library offers e-books for download, so in keeping with this blog's theme, I searched for "happiness". Up popped The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin. I've seen this book in other people's laps and they were smiling, so I've put a hold on a copy for myself.

My library, Calgary Public Library, loans free electronic print books for downloading onto your e-reader. To get them, you need a suitable e-reader (more about that in a moment), a USB cable, a CPL library card, and a little time to download some software. The collection of e-books is called Overdrive, and you find it on our website at http://calgary.lib.overdrive.com/. You download software called Adobe Editions to manage the e-books, which is required by the publishers to protect copyright. Then you search for something to read. I often use the advanced search feature to limit to items that are checked in. Otherwise, you can place holds for a book just like in the regular library catalogue. The e-book is downloaded to your computer using a checkout system, and then transferred to your e-reader. (You can also download audio files to to listen to stories on your iPod or MP3 player.)

The first step is to pick which e-reader to buy ; there are pros and cons to each. The Amazon Kindle, though it offers the ease of wireless downloads, is proprietary and won't work with Overdrive. A list of supported devices can be found at http://www.overdrive.com/resources/drc/ Check with your own library to see what e-books they offer, and which devices are supported. And then have fun squeezing reading into more places in your life!