Checking out library books on your eReader?

Got a Sony eRead­er and use the Sony Read­er store? Well check out the little blue & white box in the right-hand side­bar on the page.

Yep, you read cor­rectly — you can check out books from the lib­rary and read them on your eReader.

In early Decem­ber, Sony (and tech­no­logy pro­viders Over­drive) will have hun­dreds of Cana­dian lib­rar­ies hooked up and ready to lend books; many lib­rar­ies are already set up and run­ning. As I under­stand it, only lib­rar­ies in Atlantic Canada will be missing…for now.

This Lib­rary search page will help you find a par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rary in your region. For example, enter­ing Alberta in the search field turned up a large num­ber of par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rar­ies in my province.

The sys­tem requires you have an Adobe account to man­age the DRM and ‘return’ of the eBook you ‘bor­rowed’. Actu­ally the DRM just expires and you can’t read it after the lend­ing peri­od runs out. Which is anoth­er way of say­ing you don’t have to remem­ber to return bor­rowed eBooks back to the library.

Not every book at your lib­rary will be avail­able for loan, but as lib­rar­ies start to con­vert their cata­logues to digit­al, you’ll find more and more of the pop­u­lar reads on your library’s vir­tu­al shelves. Wel­come to the 21st century