eBook of the Week

Finals start next week!  Need some study tips?  Check this out …

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Study Skills

eBook of the Week

With a Milkweed National Fiction Prize designation, it’s got to be good!  Check out this 2008 winner.

Driftless by David Rhodes

“The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties that bind a community. In his first novel in 30 years, David Rhodes offers a vivid and unforgettable look at life in small-town America.”

Read Your Way to Good Health … by Listening

Walk, read, and improve your health at once.  How?  Audiobooks!  Download them to your devices from the Library’s EBSCOhost Audiobooks Collection, Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection, and OneClickDigital collections.  Find them on our Databases – EBooks and EAudiobooks page.

To read about one listener’s experience with audiobooks, check out this excerpt from an article in The Chronicle Review (July 30, 2012):

Walking to ‘Middlemarch,’ 50 Years Later by Sanford Pinsker, Emeritus Professor of Humanities, Franklin & Marshall College

“Flash forward 50 years and one coronary bypass. Now that I’m an emeritus professor, my days of teaching classes in American literature are over. Curiously enough, George Eliot’s novel has re-entered my life—this time as an audiobook I listened to while doing my five-day-a-week, 40-minute stints on a treadmill. It turns out that treadmill walking is as much an exercise in tolerating boredom as it is, well, exercise.

The deal I made myself was this: I would listen only to books I had first read unaided and unrequired in college and only while exercising. Middlemarch saved the day five days a week. As I trod my way to a healthier me, I followed Dorothea Brooke’s loveless marriage to the dry-as-dust Casaubon and then her subsequent life as a wealthy widow who not-so-secretly loves Will Ladislaw.

I’m not sure I would have discovered audiobooks on my own. While I’m not a card-carrying Luddite, I hardly live on the cutting edge. I’m the guy without a cellphone or an iPad. I am, however, a person who has birthdays, and on my 70th, my adult children presented me with an iPod shuffle and a year’s subscription to an audiobooks service. They can take credit for putting the right tools into my hands; I can take credit for picking the books I did and for listening to them on the treadmill.

My doctor tells me he is amazed at how well my regimen is working; I am even more amazed at how much about life in Middlemarch I remembered. The same beleaguered husband who can’t quite remember to bring home bread and milk (or was it butter and eggs?) can rattle on at length about the Rev. Edward Casaubon’s wildly ambitious (and fatally flawed) project, “The Key to All Mythologies.” That the study is never completed—how could it be?—resonated with me as a student. I suspected my college of housing at least one Casaubon, and encountered even more of these types in graduate school and then in faculty lounges. Apparently blowhards with big schemes came with the territory of book learning gone amuck.

Many people equate audiobooks with a chance to learn about Steve Jobs’s life or to dip into the latest John Grisham novel, but the format also includes the classics I revisit. At the moment, I’m in the early stages of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, with a mere 43 hours of listening time left. I am happy to report that, this time, the off-putting, triple-decker Russian names are going down easier. In fact, I plan to put Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the on-deck circle, followed by Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. What started with Middlemarch has taken on a life of its own.”

OverDrive Announces New eBook Platform

eBook distributor OverDrive has announced plans to introduce “OverDrive Read,” a new ebook platform that will enable readers to use standard web browsers to read ebooks on computers and mobile devices without installing any additional software or activating a dedicated device.

OverDrive powers our Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection.  We’ll keep you posted about the launch.

Beyond Library Walls – One Year Anniversary

Today, February 21, marks one year since we launched the Library’s Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection!

If you aren’t already downloading ebooks, eaudiobooks, and video from the collection to your ereader and other devices, what are you waiting for?!  There’s something for everyone in this collection.  If you need help, ASK a librarian.

Save the date: Wednesday, April 11

On April 11, we’re planning a series of workshops on downloading library materials to your ereader and other devices as part of our National Library Week celebration.  Watch this space and your BSC email for more details!

Floods – Maybe More than You Want to Know

We’ve just added some downloadable ebooks on flooding to our Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection, including:

• Disaster! A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues, and Other Catastrophes by John Withington
• Flood: a Saga by B. F. Oswald
• Flood Damaged Property by David G. Proverbs
• The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World without Ice Caps by Peter D. Ward
• Rising Waters: the Causes and Consequences of Rising Water in the United States by Samuel D. Brody 

Of course, you can also find print titles on this subject via the ODIN library catalog as well as magazine and journal articles through our other databases.  

Check them out!  If you need help, ask us.  Questions are our thing!

 

Kindle Owners Take Note! Amazon to Launch Library Lending for Kindle Books

Good news!  Coming later this year, BSC Library patrons who own Amazon’s Kindle will be able to download eContent from the Library’s Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection (powered by OverDrive) to their devices!  

The launch date hasn’t been set, but is scheduled for “later this year.”   We will keep you posted!

 For more details, here’s the press release: Amazon to Launch Library Lending for Kindle Books.

Make the Most of Your eReader at the BSC Library!

SO … you made the leap and bought a Nook or an iPad or a Sony Reader or some other e-reading device.* 

As a BSC student or employee, you can download all kinds of ebooks, eAudiobooks, video, and music to your device for free!  If you don’t have an eReader, you can download to your desktop.

Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection

Check out the Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection.  Lots of cool stuff there — everything from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) to classic Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin videos.  

Log in with your BSC library access number, download the free software, and get started! 

Your BSC Library access number is your key to information.  

• If you have a BSC photo ID, your library access number is the barcode number on the back of your card (starts 23103…)
• If you are a current BSC student or employee, but don’t already have a BSC photo ID, stop by to get one during regular library hours.  Bring documentation of your EMPL number (W number) and a current photo ID (e.g., driver’s license) with you.
• If you are a distance student or faculty member, you can apply for an online library access number.

*Note: At this point, Amazon’s Kindle has no library e-lending functionality.  Maybe someday …

SO … You got a Nook for Christmas

SO … you got a Nook (or some other device) for Christmas.  Did you know that, as a BSC Library customer, you can download all kinds of ebooks, eAudiobooks, video, and music to your device at no charge?! 

Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection

Check out the Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection.  Log in with your BSC library card/online access number, download the free software, and get started! 

Need a BSC Library Card/Online Access Number?

Your BSC Library number is your key to information.  It is the barcode number on the back of your BSC photo ID (starts 23103…). 

• If you are a current BSC student or employee, but don’t already have a BSC photo ID, stop by to get one anytime during regular library hours.  Bring documentation of your EMPL number (W number) and a current photo ID (e.g., driver’s license) with you.
• If you are a distance student or faculty member, you can apply for an online library access number.

Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection – Downloadable Stuff!

You can now download best-selling and classic audiobooks, eBooks, music, and video anytime, anywhere, from our new Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection.   To get started, visit the Library’s eBooks & eAudiobooks Databases page,  then choose Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection. 

You can:

• Browse the collection
• Check out with your library card/online access number
• Download to PC, Mac®, and many mobile devices

 You will need to install free software available on the site:

• For audiobooks, music, and video: OverDrive® Media Console™
• For eBooks, you’ll need Adobe® Digital Editions

Titles can be enjoyed immediately or transferred to a variety of devices, including iPod®, Sony® Reader™, and many others.  Some audio titles can also be burned to CD to listen on-the-go.  Titles will automatically expire at the end of the lending period. There are no late fees!

With any popular fiction and non-fiction titles to choose from, the new collection is guaranteed to have something for everyone. You can download everything from best-selling novels to well-known classics, career information, and much more.  We will continue to add items to this collection, so check back often!

 This new service, powered by OverDrive, is free to BSC Library students and employees with your library card/online access number. 

• For BSC photo ID card holders, your library card number is the barcode number on the back of the card. 
• For online/distance users, if you don’t already have a library access number, you can apply for one online from our Online Services page.   

We hope you enjoy the Beyond Library Walls Digital Collection.  Be sure to check out our other sources of eBooks & eAudiobooks, too.