Hoopla Helps You Use Your Library From the Comfort of Your Home
The Hoopla online service – also an app for iOS , Android and Amazon devices – is a great way to enjoy all the amenities of your local library from the comfort of your home.
And if you’re all “but the books are boring,” don’t worry. Hoopla lets you take advantage of just about everything your local library has to offer, including movies and TV shows, comics, music and even audiobooks – in case you prefer to listen to Benedict Cumberbatch, read the Sherlock Holmes stories because it’s perfection.
How to link Hoopla to your favorite library
Getting started with Hoopla is easy: go to the website and create an account. You don’t have to enter any crazy information first, other than your email address and password. Hoopla will also ask you for the nearest local (participating) library, which you can find by the name of the library or by the name of the place where you live.
Hoopla will then ask you to enter your reader card number. This means that you will need a library card, which may well require you to get out of your chair and go (or drive) to your local library, repeating a process you may not have done since your youth. Nothing wrong. You can do it.
(In my case, I was able to sign up for a temporary library card using the local library’s online portal, which saved me the hassle of talking to people – and getting a real library card – for up to 30 days.)
You don’t need a card or stamp to borrow books online.
Like a real library, Hoopla can seem daunting at first. The website is not difficult to use; anyway, the user interface is simple. The tricky part is figuring out where to start. It’s like the feeling you get when you walk into a library and want to read everything – as a kid, I dealt with this simply by looking at stacks of books at a time. (I’ve always loved Choose Your Own Adventure and Calvin and Hobbes.)
If you don’t know what you want to watch, you can always click “View” and then click one of Hoopla’s six categories to jump directly to the “Most Popular” list for that content. I was pleasantly surprised to see a decent amount of interesting content on the list (at least for music). For example, in the Music category for my library’s offerings, Hamilton’s soundtrack is one of the most popular. Clicking on it opens a complete list of tracks, as well as the ability to “borrow” it for a full seven days.
While I feel like I already have everything that Lin-Manuel Miranda does, I borrowed the album and it went straight to the Hoopla homepage, eating up its “up to five elements at a time” limit. This is fine. Clicking Hamilton again will start streaming the album from the first track. When I just wanted to hear Christopher Jackson’s blast, I switched to Washington On Your Side by clicking the name in the Hoopla online player.
Hoopla is not Spotify, so don’t expect to be able to shuffle tracks, create custom playlists, or share your sessions with friends. You can listen to the album for free; This is it. And when you’re done, you can choose to manually return the album or, if you’re lazy, let Hoopla do it for you after the seven-day borrowing period has expired.
Don’t expect a lot of frills from free library content
You use the same process to borrow movies. It wasn’t until I went looking for something that I discovered that the selection was much more classic . Also, I was only able to stream the movie 72 hours after I picked it up, not seven days. And quality is what quality is; Unlike Netflix, you cannot get Hoopla to stream your 4K movie or even 1080p stream to you. Beggars (and borrowers) cannot choose.
Reading the Hoopla e-book was pretty easy. Using a browser-based reader, you can adjust the text size; change the visual theme of the book (if you prefer “dark mode” to black text on a white background); and customize margins, line height, text alignment; and whether you want a two-column or one-column layout for your book. Again, the selection of books was not the best – I could not find a single George R.R. Martin, for example – but the selection of comics in my library? Fine. It’s time to get to know the Infinity War saga.
Can I still Hoopla? Certainly!
All things considered, my experience with Hoopla hasn’t been all that bad considering the service is free, my library card is free, and I can use Hoopla to listen to a pretty good mix of albums while reading a decent batch of comics. I don’t have a map for other local libraries, so I’m very curious how the choices might be different for hopper library literary enthusiasts who can’t get what they need from one place.
While Hoopla isn’t going to give you access to every book ever written for free – you can dream – it’s another tool to add to your arsenal when you’re looking for something specific (or your friend changed the password for the streaming service you’re sharing ). And it might even make you think about going to your local library someday.