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Time for a post that isn’t about quilts and my health :) I need to tell you something amazing I discovered a few weeks ago!

There’s an app called Libby. https://meet.libbyapp.com

Install, help it find your library, and enter your library card info.

And then BOOM you can check out ebooks and audiobooks right there, instantly. You can listen to the audiobooks right in the app, with a well-designed little player whose features include offline play, bookmarks, easy scrubbing forward and back through the book, and a sleep timer.

If you want to read with your eyeballs, you can read in the app or — get this — you can have your book DELIVERED TO YOUR KINDLE INSTANTLY. I don’t like reading on my phone, which is what has stopped me from checking out library ebooks in the past, so this is thrilling to me!

The Libby app lets you filter your search in sensible ways. You can search by genre. You can search for audiobooks, ebooks, or both. You can search for titles that are available to check out instantly, or ones which are already checked out to someone else, in which case you can put a hold on the item and it will be checked out for you automatically (with an email notification) when the item becomes available.

I tell you, it is such luxury to think, hmm, I’d like to listen to a new crime thriller, let’s see what there is… and then 3 minutes later I’m listening while I sew. Or thinking, hmm, I’ve never read “The Devil Wears Prada”, I wonder if it’s on Libby? And then three minutes later I’m reading it on my kindle.

I installed the app on 6yo Em’s iPad and helped her to find picture books to read and kids’ audiobooks to listen to.

Of course, the selection is limited. It’s not EVERYTHING you can get physically at your library. But I don’t check out physical audiobooks at all, because I don’t own any kind of cd player, so this is the only way I’ve found to get free modern audiobooks. Librivox is awesome but sometimes you want to hear something that was published later than 1923 :)

Through Libby I discovered a fantastic police procedural series by Elizabeth George, starring Inspector Lynley and his pals. I’ve been listening to them non-stop for weeks :) They’re well-written, and very long (like, around 25 hours of audio each). They are perfect for bedtime listening too — not gory or scary, interesting without being too exciting. Just right to help my tired brain fall asleep, and of course I drop a bookmark when I go to bed, so in the morning I can back up to that point and not miss anything. There are 20 novels in the series so far, so if you like ’em as much as I do you’re set for a long time. I prefer the ones narrated by Donada Peters, which is most of them.

Oh! Also I recently listened to “Heartburn” by Nora Ephron. I think I found it on the “humor” shelf. It was read by Meryl Streep!!! She is an absolutely amazing narrator, and the book was great too. While I was listening, I thought, huh, this dialogue really reminds me of When Harry Met Sally. And then I found out that Nora Ephron wrote When Harry Met Sally :)