Libby: All About the Platform and How it Works

I used to go to the library about once a week. Since COVID hit, I haven’t gone in a whole year. Buying books online is great, but they take a while to get here. Add a pandemic to it, and shipping takes even longer.

So today, I’m going to be talking about Libby, a platform that lets you check out ebooks and audiobooks for free.

What is Libby?

Libby is a free app that lets you borrow ebooks and audiobooks from your public library. All you need to use it is a library card.

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How it Works (plus some small features I enjoy)

If your library offers Libby, all you need in order to create an account is a device that can support the app and a library card. You can download Libby on iOS 9+ devices (from the Apple App Store) or Android 5.0+ devices (from Google Play). You can also use libbyapp.com on your web browser if you have a Windows computer, Mac computer, or Chromebook. The best web browsers to use are the latest version of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge (Chromium).

Libby’s layout is pretty simple. When you first download the app, it will ask if you have a library card. If yes, you can find your library and enter your card number.

When you open the app on a phone, it usually takes you to the homepage, unless you were in your shelf when you last closed it. On this page, you can scroll and find sorted guides to help you look for specific categories. You can also choose preferences you want. Libby also creates Librarian Lists, which are complied lists of books that fall under the category they’re making.

Along the bottom, the menu displays, from left to right: Search, Home, Menu, Shelf, and Timeline. I’ll explain some of them later.

Note: I’m using night mode in these screenshots so they’re easier to see. The app usually has a white background.

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On your shelf, you have your most recently read book at the top and then if you scroll down, you can see what you have on your loans shelf. One thing I like about Libby is that it shows the percentage of completion that you’re at. It also keeps track of the number of times you picked the book up, and how long you read for, so it has an estimate of when you’ll finish the book. There is a timeline for the book as well, which notes when you bookmarked a page, highlighted something, or the like.

Both the loans and holds shelf have options on how you want to organize the books you’ve borrowed. You can sort it by title, author, or when the due date is.

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The search function in Libby is nice as well. You can search up book titles, series titles, and authors too. If you just want just one type of book, such as audiobooks you can filter that in the preferences and it will narrow down your search. Something to notice about checking out books is that when you search a book up, it will tell you if there’s a wait or not. In the second picture below, the ebook version of Eliza and Her Monsters has a plus sign next to the title. That means you can borrow it right away. Below it, with the audiobook version, there’s a little clock. That means someone is currently borrowing it and you’ll have to wait for a while to get it. I like this easy way of telling if I can read the book now or put it on hold and read something else.

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There’s another small feature that I enjoy and that’s when you put something on hold, it will tell you information about your hold. You can suspend the hold or cancel it and it also tells you information about your place in line, how many people are waiting and how many copies there are.

There are also tags in Libby. There are two that come with the app and you can also create ones. The one I mainly look at the one with the picture of a slice of cake. In there is a list of all the books you’ve sampled.

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Some other things to know about Libby:

• You don’t have to worry about late fees. Books get automatically returned on the due date, unless you renew it and extend your loan.
• Once you borrow a book, your loan lasts for 21 days. You can renew a book if you’d like more time, as long as no one else is waiting in line for it. If there is, you can put it on hold again.
• On the far right of the bottom bar, there is a clock icon. That’s the timeline and it shows all the books you’ve checked out and returned in the past.
• Depending on your library, there is a certain number of holds and loans you can have at one time. For example, my library allows me to have up to 6 loans and 10 holds at one time. Each library is different.
• In the reading section, you can adjust the settings, such as font size, background color, or font type to make it easier to read. Narration speed on audiobooks can be adjusted as well.

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Just to wrap this up and quickly summarize, Libby is a free app that you can download to read or listen to books, through your local library. I definetely recommend getting it if you can.

Do you use Libby? Are there other platforms like this that you use?
Chat with the in the comments below!