OverDrive Brings eBooks To MDC Students

A new eBook rental system for MDC students, faculty and staff is accessible through the Learning Resources website.

Currently, there are 295 titles available on the OverDrive service, including bestsellers like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Piper Kerman’s Orange Is The New Black and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. OverDrive  is a free alternative to paid services like Amazon and Google Books.

“Building our collection is [currently] our top priority,” said Joshua Spencer, Associate Instructor at the Hialeah Campus.

Spencer, along with other Learning Resources personnel from the Hialeah and InterAmerican Campuses, was heavily involved in the design and implementation of the service. An external company called OverDrive, Inc. owns the eBook rental software but Miami Dade College owns the digital library and the website. The service went into effect this semester, with at least 300 unique MDC users so far.

Accessing the system can be done through the Libraries tab of the Learning Resources page on the MDC website. An OverDrive link takes users to a grid-style page where books are categorized by popularity, genre, date of addition and other criteria. Mousing over a book reveals the option to either borrow or place a hold on the book using an email address, if the title has already been checked out.

Borrowing a title yields the option to either download it in a variety of formats (through a host of mobile and desktop applications, including Amazon’s Kindle) or to read it in the browser using the OverDrive Read applet. The time limit for rentals is a renewable 21-day period, and up to three titles can be borrowed or placed on hold at one time.

OverDrive, Inc., founded in 1986 and located in Cleveland, Ohio, bills itself as the leading full-service digital distributor of eBooks, audiobooks, music and video worldwide. The company began by producing interactive software on floppy disks and compact discs; now, it serves as the middleman between publishers such as Random House and HarperCollins and purchasers of digital titles such as colleges and libraries. It offers the service to more than 30,000 K-12 schools, general libraries and academic libraries.

Users of the service can also recommend books they want to rent. When a search for a title yields no results, users can click a link that will take them to a larger catalog of books that includes titles not currently owned by their institution’s library. They can then choose to be notified and even placed on the waiting list for a prospective title using their e-mail address.