The past few years have seen tremendous growth in the popularity of digital audiobooks. And why not? Audiobooks allow you to couple the imaginative, meditative aspects of reading with the relaxing, go-anywhere nature of recorded audio. While ebooks have their adherents and their detractors, audiobooks are undeniably at home in the digital age. In fact, streaming and downloading could the best thing to happen to audiobooks!

As our circulation trends bear out, none of this is news to Free Library cardholders. Digital audiobooks account for about 30% of checkouts from our Overdrive service and over 40% of activity on our Hoopla platform. We're also hard at work improving the selection of digital audiobooks on RBDigital Audiobooks (formerly OneClick Digital).  

Having three platforms for digital audiobooks is great. It allows us to offer you a wide selection of titles and lets our librarians comparison shop to get the best prices for the content we offer. However, if you want a specific audiobook, it can be tricky to know which platform will have it. 

Your first stop for digital audiobooks (and ebooks, print books, DVDs, and pretty much anything else) should always be our online catalog. All of our Overdrive and RBDigital content is available through the catalog and we are in the process of adding Hoopla titles. As this project progresses over the next several weeks, you will have a one-stop shop for digital audiobooks. 

Overdrive, Hoopla, and RBDigital also each have their own mobile apps. While these apps are essential for listening to the audiobooks you checkout, searching for titles within any of them will only show you a portion of what we offer. So for the widest selection, head to our catalog. 

As a reminder, our Overdrive and RBDigital platforms allow you to checkout up to 6 items at a time. Starting November 1, 2017, you can also check out 4 titles a month from Hoopla (Note: this is a change from the current limit of 10 Hoopla items a month, but the new limit will allow us to offer a very exciting new resource beginning in November—stay tuned for that announcement here on our blog next week!).   

We hope you continue to enjoy all the audiobooks we provide. Remember, each of these platforms, like all of the digital content we offer, is available without late fees, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week—and at no cost to you—with your library card!