Libby, by OverDrive

Free ebooks and audiobooks from your local library

Libby, by OverDrive, turns your library card into a powerful gateway to digital reading and listening, wrapping a huge catalog of ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines in an elegant, user-friendly interface.

Once you sign in with a participating library, Libby lets you browse curated collections, search by title, author, or subject, and quickly filter by format, availability, or audience. The experience feels more like a polished bookstore than a dusty catalog, with clear cover art and smart recommendations helping you discover both best-sellers and hidden gems.

Reading in Libby is a pleasure. The built-in reader offers customizable text size, background themes, and book design so you can tune pages to your preferences. Magazines and comics benefit from crisp zooming, while definitions, search, bookmarks, notes, and highlights make it easy to study or annotate. Families will appreciate read-along titles that combine audio narration with on-screen text.

Audiobook lovers get an equally strong experience. The audio player is clean and intuitive, with fine-grained speed control from 0.6x to 3.0x, swipe gestures to skip, and a reliable sleep timer for bedtime listening. Support for Android Auto lets you bring your current listen straight into your car’s dashboard.

Power users will enjoy features like tags to build wish lists or custom shelves, plus seamless syncing of your reading position, bookmarks, and notes across devices. The option to send ebooks to Kindle (in the U.S.) adds flexibility for dedicated e-ink readers.

The main limitation is availability: your experience fully depends on how well your local library stocks and manages its digital collection. Still, if your library participates, Libby is one of the most enjoyable and convenient ways to borrow digital books for free.