eReader: Library Books and Adobe Digital Editions

Recently, I just helped my mother buy her first eReader, and she's been so excited to check out free eBooks from her local library. The process is far from intuitive, though, and in light of my recent post encouraging people to join their local library and/or the Free Library of Philadelphia, I thought I'd create a quick-and-dirty tutorial detailing how to check out books from an Overdrive-affiliated library.

The biggest trick is that the majority of Overdrive titles have Adobe DRM, and thus are only available for management and loading to your eReader through the Adobe Digital Editions program. The program itself is quite powerful, and even lets you return your library book before its due date (otherwise, it will just stop working on your device after its due date, and the book license will be returned automatically), but these options are a little hidden within the program and may not be immediately apparent to new users.

My amateur tutorial video can be found on YouTube and is also embedded directly here: