Duke Libraries Offers E-Books and Audiobooks for Personal Mobile Devices

Duke University Libraries has launched a new service, called Duke OverDrive, which lets students, faculty and staff download e-books and audiobooks to their personal mobile devices, including iPhones, iPads, Nooks, Android phones and tablets and Kindles.

The Duke OverDrive service went live in May and currently offers 158 e-books and 132 audiobooks, all of which are searchable through the general Duke Libraries catalog. Faculty, students and staff with a Duke NetID can borrow up to five of the books at a time, and the books  automatically expire after 21 days. Patrons can also recommend additional titles; the library will add the recommendations to its wish list for future purchases once funds become available.

Since the service is a partnership between Duke Libraries and the Ford Library at the Duke Fuqua School of Business, many of the books are on business-related topics such as careers and finance. However, a number of the books, such as "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell and "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke, are of general interest as well, as are the numerous fiction books in the collection.

The Duke OverDrive service enhances the university's existing e-reader program, which offers Kindle devices for checkout. However, the library has only a limited number of Kindles, and the ebooks on the Kindles can't be loaned without the physical device.

According to  Meg Trauner, director of the Ford Library, the service is popular with students in Fuqua's Weekend Executive Master of Business Administration program because they can listen to the audiobooks during their commute.

Further information about the Duke OverDrive service can be found on the Duke Libraries site.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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