eReading Room The future of books at NYPL

For this month's Reader's Den, we'll be hosting an online book discussion of Will Eisner's The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Aveue. This is only the second time we have featured a graphic novel (the first was Joe Sacco's Palestine in October 2010).

Great news for Nook tablet owners and readers looking for more new titles in ebook format.

Due to the popularity of last month's post, here are six more recent works of comic titles for the young or maybe just the young at heart. The last three titles are also available as eBooks through Overdrive, which you can know check out directly through the library's Bibliocommons catalog interface. Click here to access specific intructions on how to download eBooks to your eReader or visit the Help section on Overdrive's website. I hope that you enjoy these titles as much as I did!

Our final discussion will cover Chapters 13 - 15 of The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. Mystery Summer continues in August with an online discussion of Dashiell Hammett's classic 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon. 

When you check out an ebook from the library, you get to keep it for the full loan period (7, 14 or 21 days) before the file is no longer accessible to you.

Which means you will never get an overdue fee!

But there may be times when you want to return a book early once you finish it, decide you don't like it, or want to make room to check out more books — and that way the next person in line for it will have access that much sooner. Think of it as being a good digital neighbor.

I don't have a very good memory of the fiction books I read and enjoyed as a child. What I do remember is an obsession with encyclopedias, almanacs, atlases, the Guinness book, trivia, and general miscellanea. Which probably doesn't make it too much of a surprise that I ended up here, a reference librarian at one of the most fact-filled libraries in the world.

For our penultimate discussion, we will be taking a look at Chapters 9 - 12 of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare, which is part of both Mystery Summer and the New York Public Library's monthly online book discussion Reader's Den.

It's now easier to download and request holds on EPUB, PDF, Kindle and e-audio, music and video (a.k.a. OverDrive) while in the library catalog, BiblioCommons. You no longer have to sign in to a separate site with your barcode.

Your electronic holds and checked out items will appear alongside physical books and materials you have out, so you can better prioritize your must-read list!

This week, we will be discussing Chapters 5-8 of The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton as part of the New York Public Library's Reader's Den.

If you don't have a copy of the book yet, please visit the first post for links to request a library copy or download the FREE ebook.

Welcome to the New York Public Library's Reader's Den, a monthly online book discussion. For July, we will be reading G.K. Chesterton's 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare as part of Mystery Summer.

Get a free copy of the book from any of the following sources.

If it has happened to our patrons at the Grand Concourse Library and myself...

...then it must be happening somewhere else!

Here we are with our exciting new Amazon Kindles, and nothing to read except for Jane Eyre or Alice in the Wonderland — not that there's anything wrong with that!

But in this blog post, I am going to show you a couple of tips and tricks for getting books on your Kindle, even if the titles you want are unavailable.

This month in the eReading Room I shared with you some of the ways that voracious readers are able to adapt their reading habits to the online environment. I explained differences between e-formats, the best ways to manage both short and long reads, and today I'll talk about clipping, bookmarking, highlighting, and marginalia — concepts that sound old-school but that are also being electronically reinvigorated.

In this week's installment of I Love Reading I want to talk about the kind of reading that is not books, not news, not blogs, but something in between. It demands a little bit more of your attention span than Twitter, but maybe not as much as your book group's latest pick. It can be from last week or fifteen years ago, and still be relevant to today. It can be a true tale of crime and punishment, an industry exposé, an interview or profile of a famous figure, an in-depth review, or a speech. It could be a short story, nonfiction, or an interpretation or some kind. In my opinion, it makes the best kind of reading for airplanes, waiting rooms, the subway, and my couch. 

In this week's episode of I Love Reading, I will talk about updates. I don't mean the kind of updates that clutter your Facebook feed, though they are basically the same thing. When I say updates I mean news in the journalistic, newspaper sense, news from your field or area of interest, or news that is created and shared among your group of friends and trusted online acquaintances.

For the first part of this series, I want to talk about a few of the formats commonly used for reading digital text as well as the tools — software and devices — we can use to read them.

Library ebooks are available in EPUB, PDF, and Kindle format. The Library also subscribes to hundreds of databases, some of which will allow you to download articles or page images for personal use in PDF format.

This February in the eReading Room we'll be celebrating all the different ways we love to read. If you're the kind of person who will read a cereal box if it's the only thing nearby, you'll want to pay special attention to this four-part series. I'll be detailing some of the new ways we read now, outside of the traditional printed-and-bound-and-published volume (which, don't get me wrong, we still love just as much). This purpose of this series is to help you get the most out of online reading at work, at home, or on the go.

The other day someone asked if I still read "regular books." Have I become anti-paper with my new Kindle love? The answer to that is, look at the paper cuts on my fingers. I am a fan of reading, whether it's in book format or electronic. During my commute I use my Kindle because it's lighter to carry around, but I still love the feeling of a heavy book on my lap when I read in my apartment. When looking for material to read or download, I can now do all of my searching and downloading in New York Public Library's catalog. Thus my latest eReading searching tip: keep it simple, use one catalog.

I'm sure you've created a wish list in your mind that contains some impossibly unattainable items. For example, one of my wish list items includes a home on a private island. While my improbable wish list grows, I have started another list — an eNYPL wish list — where at least my reading dreams will come true.

My fellow eNYPL users: my number one eNYPL tip is to utilize the wish list feature, if you haven't already done so.

After the unfortunate death of my Sony Reader, I went through the five stages of grief, as the loss of my device was a very dramatic event. I denied that it was broken, I threw a temper tantrum, I told a Best Buy employee that I would do anything to have it back, and I cried on the train, but I finally came to accept that I had sat on my Sony Reader and I alone was to blame. As I browsed sadly through the eNYPL catalog, images of the distinctly curved cracked screen flashed through my head, and I imagined the day when I could once again comfortably read a book on my 1 1/2 hour (sometimes standing) train commute. Finally the day came when I was united with a new eReader —