| Title | How to Find Free Ebooks While Libraries are Closed | |
| Date | Wednesday May 13 2020, @07:45AM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the free-looks-at-books dept. | ||
How to find free ebooks while libraries are closed:
Shelter in place orders throughout the country haven't just brought the economy to a grinding halt, but frozen civic infrastructure as well. Sure, water still flows from our taps, police and firefighters are still on the job, but your local library likely isn't considered an essential service. But that doesn't mean you can't ride out this plague with a stack of good books by your side, they just might be of the digital variety.
Your first order of business should be to check in on your neighborhood library branch. Systems throughout the US have begun offering "second line" services -- from 24-hour free wifi and homeless services to emergency childcare and foodbank distributions -- to help their communities through these difficult times.
What's more, even if your local doesn't have physical books for borrowing, many now offer a variety of online services to augment their closed locations. A recent study by the Public Library Association found that while 98 percent of the 2,500-system respondents did have to close their buildings to some extent, among them 76 percent continued, expanded, or added online renewals for already-borrowed books while 74 percent built or expanded their e-book and streaming media collections.
The San Francisco Public Library, for example offers a smorgasbord of online classes and workshops, e-books and e-magazines, newspapers, streaming music, and virtual storytimes for the smol ones. LA County shut down its central branch and all 72 satellites in response to COVID-19 but is similarly offering music, movies, books, magazines, remote learning resources and workshops through its web portal. Chicago's public library system has also shuttered its branches but is offering to pipe ebooks directly to your Kindle for anywhere from 1 - 3 weeks. You don't even need to worry about "returning" them, they'll automatically remove themselves from the device once the borrowing window has closed. The public libraries of both Boston and New York have followed suit.
If you're a university student, be sure to check in with your campus library for its ebook collection and access to a variety of temporarily free remote learning and teaching applications. University presses around the world, including MIT, Cambridge and Duke, are offering free ebooks and course materials during the quarantine to their students and faculty. And if your school licenses content from Project MUSE, a multidisciplinary collection of e-books and online journals, you've hit the motherlode. More than 80 publishers have signed on to make their content free during the outbreak.
"The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge to the global scholarly ecosystem and its institutions. This move is our way of helping to ease the burden on students and instructors so that they can continue research and coursework as smoothly as possible, as well as to honor the work of our authors in making their research available when the world needs nuanced and rigorous scholarship the most," Tony Sanfilippo, Ohio State University Press Director, said in a recent press release.
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printed from SoylentNews, How to Find Free Ebooks While Libraries are Closed on 2024-04-28 05:43:33