By Shaun Szkolnik
For The Trussville Tribune
TRUSSVILLE — The digital revolution has changed, likely forever, the way the public consumes information and entertainment. America’s libraries have been doing their utmost to keep up with these trends and serve the new demands of their communities. Most often, that means offering digital media in an on-demand way.
Several applications have been produced to help libraries keep up with the changing needs of their patrons. Two popular ones are Overdrive and Libby. Both of these applications allow for patrons to, through streaming or downloading, read eBooks, eComic books and listen to audio-books directly from their computers or personal mobile devices. Another service, now available from the Trussville Library, takes the process one step beyond.
The Hoopla service offers the users not only eBooks, eComic books and audio-books, but expands the types of digital media available to categories such as music albums, television shows and movies.
Hoopla is a free service and can be accessed once a user account has been created. To set up that account, nothing more is needed than an email address, new password and library card information. From there, the user has several choices of how to enjoy the content. Hoopla can be used from a web browser, an application can be downloaded to a mobile device, or an application can be downloaded to a Roku device, Chromecast, Android TV, Amazon Firestick or Apple TV.
Once set up with Hoopla, patrons can check out movies and television shows for three days, music albums for a week, and audio-books, eBooks and eComic books for three weeks.
Reaction to the new service, by patrons of the Trussville Library, has been highly positive.
“They were really excited to find out we were getting it,” Administrative Assistant Viridiana Herrera said.
New adopters of Hoopla, however, will want to hang on to Overdrive and Libby for a while yet.
“It is totally different content,” Assistant Director Jason Baker said. “There is next to no overlap.”
However, given the ease of use and access that Overdrive, Libby, and now Hoopla provide it is not too difficult at all for users to check all three for the content that they want.
Patrons of the Trussville Library that would like to try out Hoopla can get started by visiting the Trussville Library’s Hoopla website.