You may be familiar with purchasing books and magazines for your iPhone and iPad, but have you ever borrowed an ebook or digital edition of a magazine from your local library?  As more and more local libraries are adding online digital catalogs of books for borrowing, it’s a great — and cheaper! — way of building up your digital library for free.  After trying out a few methods for using the resources of your local library to borrow electronic versions of your favorite ebooks, magazines and audiobooks, I’ve written up a quick guide to follow. Most libraries are choosing a third party to host and manage the lending process.  One such service provider, OverDrive Digital Downloads, is what my local library uses. OverDrive currently supports 18,000 libraries with millions of readers. The experience is not quite what you would expect if you’re used to Apple’s integrated iBooks(s AAPL) app or Amazon’s Kindle(s AMZN) bookstore. But it does work, and once you have the ebook on your iPhone or iPad, the reading experience is just about the same.

Getting Started: The first thing you will need is an active account at your local library.  This will be used to identify you as a borrower and ultimately limit the number of ebooks you can have checked out at any one time.House For Sale Bogenhausen Munich Selecting an e-reader: For most of the titles available from my local library on OverDrive, I have only two main choices:  to either use Amazon’s Kindle solution on my iPhone, iPad and Mac, or to use OverDrive’s own e-reader client for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.  Ramones T Shirt New ZealandAs a possible third option, you can also elect to use Adobe Digital Editions for the Mac.  Oprah Shower Head FilterBut be aware: the one client that you will not be able to use is Apple’s own iBook e-reader for iOS, as it does not support the DRM solution that the other readers support.

Borrowing an ebook: Browsing the online library of ebooks is the same experience for all e-eaders.  You will select a book via your browser.  I found that using Safari for OS X and iOS work just fine for this.  Once you associate your library account with OverDrive, you can create wish lists and place holds on books you want to read.  Each title in the library is limited to a predetermined number of copies that the library can lend out. Downloading the ebook: If you place a hold on a book, you will be notified via email when the book is available.  Depending on your e-reader, once you log in to your library account, you will either download the file directly to the OverDrive e-reader client on your device, or you will log on and register your library account with Amazon, and check the book out directly to your Amazon account. Since I already have all of my devices registered with my Amazon Kindle account, as soon as I checked out the ebook it was available on all of my devices for me to read.  

So reading any ebook that I check out from the library is the same experience on my Kindle as with any other book in my library.  Even my bookmarks sync across all of my devices. The experience with magazines is different since my library chose to go with Zinio as its partner.  Zinio has been around for a while and was bringing digital versions of popular magazines to your iPhone and iPad long before Apple introduced iOS Newsstand to the world.  There are no choices here, you have to use the Zinio reader for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. You do have to sync your Zinio account with your library account, but once that is done, as soon as you select a magazine from the online library of digital magazines available for lending, it instantly shows up on your Zinio account for reading.  While you won’t have the same connivence as you would with a receiving updates via a paid subscription, selecting individual releases can be more cost effective since borrowing is of course free.

I was also happy to see that you can use OverDrive to check out audiobooks from the library as well.  To do this, you will have to use the OverDrive client for Mac, which does come with some restrictions: You will not be able to borrow any audiobook that in only available in WMV format.  You will be limited to borrowing only MP3 audiobooks. You will be able to listen to your audiobooks in your favorite audio device as the OverDrive client for Mac supports exporting audiobooks to devices like an iPhone, iPad and iPod.  You are even permitted to use the OverDrive client to burn an audiobook to CD. Overall the experience was a positive one.  It takes a little to get used to the process of searching for electronic books and magazines that will work with the format your e-reader supports, and ultimately to get them working on your preferred devices.  But after you have done it a couple of times, it’s really not all that complicated.  And it can definitely help expand your reading list and your own personal digital library without costing you anything.

E-reading is most popular among young booklovers. According to the Pew Research Center, 34% of 18- to 29-year-old readers consumed a digital book in 2011, matching the percentage of 30- to 49-year olds and beating the older age groups. Unfortunately, the go-to money-saver for bibliophiles everywhere — borrowing instead of buying your books — proves tricky in the Internet age. E-books are tougher to lend and borrow than their musty paper counterparts, and e-sharing comes with many strings attached. Still, you don't have to buy every book on your digital reading list. Here are five ways to make the most of what's available: Users of Amazon's Kindle reader or Barnes and Noble's Nook reader can share only select books. (Publishers choose which books can be shared; you can find whether a book is lendable on its product page of each site.) And lenders need to pick their borrowers judiciously. With both platforms, a loaned book can never be lent again. Your designated borrowers should be prepared to receive and read your loaned e-books.

They must have the appropriate device — either the Kindle or Nook, or their free apps for a smart phone or tablet. And Amazon and Barnes and Noble allow you just seven days to accept a loan and 14 days to finish reading. During that time, the book is unreadable on the lender's device. Amazon Prime subscribers can also borrow one book per month for free from a selection of 400,000 reads. Unfortunately, Mac heads can't share books bought in the iBooks store. Readers can join free lending networks to expand their digital book options exponentially. You'll still have to abide by Kindle's and Nook's strict sharing policies, but the sheer number of people lending out books through these sites gives you a better shot of snagging a free read than simply perusing the digital shelves of your close friends. For example, eBookFling has nearly 110,000 users and is free if you lend to strangers on the network as much as you borrow. Each time you lend a book, you earn one credit. And each time you borrow a book, it'll cost you one credit — or $2.99, if you have no credits to cash in.

Other lending networks, including Lendle, The Book Elf and BookLending, are completely free to use. Some publishers are making it easier to lend good reads by selling books in open formats — such as EPUB, the world's most popular open format — which don't restrict your ability to share. The files work across most devices, and you can privately distribute books that you buy and own however you'd like. The number of publishers using this format is limited. Publishers such as Tor, Forge and Baene EBooks, which focus on the science fiction, fantasy and mystery genres, also offer EPUB files. Don't forget that public libraries lend e-books, too. For example, 16,000 libraries across the country offer e-books using the popular service OverDrive. But some publishers don't allow libraries to lend their titles, so your options will be limited, especially for new releases. Head to your library's Web site and look for its e-book page to see all the titles that are available.

At libraries, bookworms can place e-books on hold as well as borrow multiple e-books. Policies vary from city to city. Washington, D.C., for example, lets you place a hold on up to 25 e-books at once, and you can borrow up to ten e-books at a time. In Chicago, you can place holds on three titles and borrow up to six e-books at a time. Lending periods vary from one week to three weeks, depending on your library and title of choice. Don't forget that you'll need a library card, too. Public libraries aren't the only place to get freebies. You'll find vast libraries of older titles no longer under copyright via Project Gutenburg and Google Play, for example. Most conventional online book sellers, such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble, also have a wide array of free e-books. Some of the most popular free books in Google Play, for example, include H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. And the bard himself accommodates "where sadly the poor wretch comes reading," as the Queen says upon seeing Hamlet.