Downloadable

Still using the OverDrive app? It’s time to switch to Libby!

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On May 1, 2023, the OverDrive app will be discontinued. Now’s the time switch to Libby, OverDrive’s newer reading app. Libby is made by the same people, with the same goal of connecting you to your favorite books, audiobooks, and magazines, and is streamlined to make finding and downloading digital materials easier than ever!

Why is the original app going away? Libby has actually been around since 2017, and and for that period of time OverDrive offered both options. Since then, Libby has seen much more use than the older OverDrive app, and it no longer made sense to maintain both apps.

Making the switch is easy! Simply download the app on your mobile device to get started. Good news, once you add your library card to Libby, all your loans and holds will be waiting on your Shelf! You won’t lose your place in line for any items you have on hold. If you have a Wish List, you’ll be prompted to import it from OverDrive via an in-app notification. Your wish list items will become a tag that’s available on your Shelf.

After checking out a digital item with Libby, you can read/listen right through the app. Prefer to read ebooks on a Kindle? Check out your ebook through the Libby app, then send it to Kindle and read it there:

  1. Tap Shelf.
  2. Tap loans at the top of the screen.
  3. Tap Read With….
  4. Tap Kindle.
  5. You’ll be taken to Amazon’s website. If prompted, sign into your Amazon account.
  6. Verify the “Deliver to:” device and tap Get Library Book to finish getting the book.

If you use a Kindle Fire tablet, you can sideload the Libby app to your Kindle Fire by following these instructions. You can also use the OverDrive website or Libbyapp.com in your Fire’s browser. 

Finally, if you’re more comfortable using a computer instead of a mobile device to access our digital collection, don’t worry, Libby works on a computer, as well! Visit libbyapp.com to browse, search, read or listen and more on your computer.

Downloadable Books for Valentine’s Day

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Love is in the air with these e-books for kids and adults. Download with your Cheshire Library card!

FOR KIDS:

Franklin’s Valentines by Paulette Bourgeois. It’s Valentine’s Day and Franklin can’t wait to give his friends the cards he has made. But when he gets to school, he discovers that they’re missing.

Elmo Loves You by Sarah Albee. Elmo loves lots of things. But what does Elmo love most of all? Read along with this charming book to find out!

Dora Loves Boots by Alison Inches. It’s Valentine’s Day! Dora and Boots can’t wait to spend it together. They pick a favorite meeting place and set out with Map’s help. Will they find each other on this special day?

Rotten Ralph’s Rotten Romance by Jack Gantos. Sarah is very excited to take Ralph to Petunia’s Valentine’s Day Party. But Ralph will do almost anything to avoid the party and drippy Valentine kisses!

February Friend by Ron Roy. Bradley is passing out his class’s valentines, but one of them has no name on it. Inside, the card tells the class to look in the closet. When they open the closet door, the kids find a rabbit named Douglas in a cage! What mysterious “friend” left him there? And why?

FOR ADULTS:

Royal Valentine by Jenn McKinlay. Molly Graham stumbles across a very handsome British professor seeking refuge in her office during the Museum of Literature’s Valentine’s Day gala. But just when things start to get interesting, he disappears.

Brava, Valentine by Adriana Trigiani.When Valentine Roncalli discovers a long lost shoe design, a family secret unravels that helps her take control of the company from a conniving relative, but first she seeks the counsel, and more, of her ex-fiancee, Bret Fitzpatrick, to help re-boot the business while she pursues a hot romance with a handsome Italian from her past.

Death of a Valentine by M.C. Beaton. Announcing his engagement to associate Josie McSween, police sergeant and once-confirmed bachelor Hamish Macbeth struggles with prenuptial jitters while investigating the murder of a woman whose increasingly complicated case introduced him to his fiancée.

Sweet, Thoughtful Valentine by Alexander McCall Smith. When philosopher and amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie runs into an old classmate facing marital and financial troubles, the secret becomes more and more difficult for Isabel to keep. Thankfully, Isabel’s devoted husband, Jamie, is there to help her navigate her competing moral obligations.

Be My Valentine by Debbie Macomber. Dianne Williams, tired of matchmaking efforts on her behalf, enlists the help of a stranger to accompany her to a Valentine dinner; and, romance novelist Bailey York tries to find the perfect model for her new fictional hero.

The Long and Short of It

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Music and its forms have always been in a state of flux. While operas often dragged for hours, recording them, when the means became available, was a different problem. When temperamental wax cylinders gave way to 78 rpm shellac discs, you had 5 minutes of music before you ran out of groove and had to turn it over.  Post-WWII, when brittle shellac gave way to more forgiving vinyl, record speed dropped to 33 rounds per minute, allowing up to 22 minutes per side on a 12” “long-playing” record (or LP, for short.). When the 45 rpm single – cheaper to produce, cheaper to purchase – became standard, music averaged 3-5 minutes a side.

If you wanted to get airplay on a radio, music had to be submitted on a 45, thus most popular songs were limited to around 3 minutes in length (Hence Billy Joel’s line from The Entertainer: “If you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05”). Albums could play for as long as 20 minutes a song on each side. Jump up to CD, and you can now go to 100 minutes. Streaming? The only limit is your tolerance.

So what’s the long and short of it? What are the longest and shortest songs on the road to success? The 50’s and 60’s, with the advent of transistor radios to make music portable, saw an explosion of short catchy tunes, meaning more could be crammed onto the radio, which meant more airtime, more commercials, and thus more money all around. Elvis consistently comes in under two minutes (Let Me be Your Teddy Bear – 1:43, Are You Lonesome Tonight, 1:25) as do the early Beatles ( From Me to You, 1:56, Please Please Me, 1:59), Summer Time Blues by Eddie Cochrane (1:58), and Hit the Road, Jack by Ray Charles (1:58).  

Albums play around more – If you’ve got 18 minutes of music, but can squeeze one more short track in, you fill it. Styx’s legendary Paradise Theater album has 3 blink-and-they’re-over tracks (AD 1928, 1:07, State Street Sadie – a flash at 33 seconds, and AD 1958, 1:06). Pink Floyd, who loves to drag out a tune, logs in at 1:25 with Pigs on the Wing, a beautiful melody on the Animals album. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s legendary Welcome to the Pleasuredome album clocks in two blips – Snatch of Fury, at 36 seconds, and The World is my Oyster, which is 1:02, perhaps 45 seconds longer than the track needs to be. 

 

But just how long can you carry a tune? Well, outside of perhaps an opera or symphony (Beethoven’s 9th is about 70 minutes long). American Pie takes up both sides of a 45 at 8 minutes 32 seconds, and Hey Jude clocks in at 7:11, perhaps the longest singles on 45s. But when you hit albums and their longer tracks, if you count all nine parts of Pink Floyd’s ethereal “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” from the album Wish You Were Here, it totals 26:01, the longest segment being over 13 minutes. You could add Rush’s 2112, at 20:33, Yes’s Close to the Edge at 18:30, or the legendary In a Gadda da Vida by Iron Butterfly at 17:05 – three songs that can carry you clear across the state.  Meatloaf’s I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) made it to Number One on the Charts with a time of more than 12 minutes, so length does not affect popularity at all. 

With the pandemic, streaming of music and even live concerts has increased in popularity. While the current trend is to make shorter songs for the attention-short listener, it will be interesting to see in the next five years or so if, freed from the limits of physical media, musicians will increase the length of their songs or not. Genres are losing their hold as streaming crosses boundaries (ie, Jimmy Buffett gets mixed with a lot of country), 24-bit audio capacity has lead to quieter music (less digital noise on soft tracks and streaming services even out loud tracks anyway), music labels are losing importance as musicians self-release songs, and songs are even breaking up their ages-old format and frequently starting with the chorus instead of a verse. We might cringe at the pace of the changes, but in the end, for the musicophile, it’s a wonderful time for variety and a widening range of music.

Diverse Romance

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People of all ethnicities, body types, sexual orientations, and interests fall in love every day in real life, but until pretty recently it hasn’t been easy to find romance books that reflect that reality. While straight white male/female protagonists are still the mainstay of the romance genre, more diverse authors and story-lines have been getting some attention lately, which is all for the good. Here are some recent examples of love stories with different perspectives.

Party of Two by Jasmine Guillory

The Trouble With Hating You by Sajni Patel

Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade

Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall

The Duke Who Didn’t by Courtney Milan

How to Catch a Queen by Alyssa Cole

Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai

You Had Me at Hola by Alexis Daria

The Marriage Game by Sara Desai

Something to Talk About by Meryl Wilsner

Library Resources You Might Not Know About: Part 2

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We recently highlighted some services & resources offered by Cheshire Library that may have been new to you. From a book-matching service to streaming video and online courses, the library has an abundance of free resources. Today we’ll highlight a few more you may not be aware of, that you don’t even need to have a library card to use.

Cheshire Library is constantly reviewing and adjusting our online services to bring  patrons what they need. The library is still here for you, even though how you use it these days might look a little different.

A Page Full of Freebies

When the shutdown happened in March 2020, our intrepid librarians started assembling a list of useful free resources that people could access from home. This expanded from Local (links to the CT Covid Response Page, 211 Directory, Cheshire School Meal Distribution)  and  National  (links to the CDC, NIH, WHO) Health Information to other resources that might help take the sting out of being isolated. Sites to access free online activities like virtual museum tours, webcams of animals and nature, interactive learning, and even armchair travel!

Community Service in a Virtual World

Many high school student are required to complete a set number of community service hours as part of their curriculum, but COVID-19 has made it difficult to volunteer in-person. We’ve designed a program (info on our Teen Page and monthly Event Calendars) where teens can earn community service hours by submitting a photo, video,  or other content for us to add to CPL’s social media pages. Ideas for submissions include book reviews, artwork, poetry, short stories, personal essays, photos or video of food you’ve cooked or baked, or any other creative idea you have for content. (Not all submissions will be used on our social media, and submissions including photos of people are not allowed.) Each submission will be awarded 2 community service hours.

Get WOWed by Our Newest Books and Dvds

If you’re not able to get into the library as often to check out what’s new, we’ve got a resource you’re going to love. We’ve teamed up with Wowbrary to deliver a list of the latest additions to our catalog straight to your inbox. The New Item Newsletter lets you know everything that’s new, digital items as well as physical items. In fact, you’ll learn about the physical books and dvds the minute we order them, before they even hit the shelf, and can place holds on them right away (you will need a library card for this part)!

No Printer? No Problem!

Many people have used our public printers in the past to print up important documents. Now you can do so without ever stepping foot inside the building. Our Mobile Printing Portal (accessed through the “Visit” tab on our website) allows you to send print jobs to us right from your computer or mobile device. We’ll let you know when your printouts are ready, and you can pick them up at the Grab ‘n Go station by the parking lot entrance.

Something Fun for Our Youngest Patrons

Our Baby Bop music & movement classes for infants 0-12 months and their caregivers has been on hiatus during the pandemic, but we’ve created a dozen free printable guides (find them on our Kids Page) of fun lap-sit songs, rhymes, and activities of music and movement to help develop motor and language skills. But mostly it’s just plain fun – playing is learning! We will add new guides periodically, so check back often!

Entertainment and Information in the Video Age

Finally, we encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube Channel. We’ve really stepped up our video content creation during this pandemic, and the results are on YouTube. From DIY tutorials, to lit tips,  to silly skits, to full length programs, we’ve got something for everyone to enjoy and learn from. You can even sit in on a Library Board meeting, if that’s your jam! Subscribe to be notified when we post something new.