Enrich your life with Hong Kong Public Libraries’ e-resources
- The Hong Kong Public Libraries offers an extensive e-resources to enable the public to get access to digital books, magazine and databases for free.
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Looking for some good reads when commuting? Want to grab a cookbook or the latest issue of a food magazine to get some ideas for your weekend dinner on your way to the grocery store? Targeting to increase the sales next year and searching for some business ideas? Without visiting the bookstore or library in person, you can now get access to a huge array of digital books, magazines as well as databases anytime, anywhere for free on your mobile devices and tablets, thanks to the extensive e-resources offered by the Hong Kong Public Libraries (HKPL).
In addition to its massive collections of physical books available at all the public libraries in the city, the HKPL also has a wide variety of electronic resources that are suitable for both leisure and self-learning.
For instance, if you want to have a read of the best-selling historical fiction A Gentleman in Moscow by American author Amor Towles or Stephen King’s crime/horror novel Later, or get some inspirations for this weekend’s dinner from cookbooks, or learn something about science from Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, or tame your kids with a copy of Minions comic, you can simply make use of the OverDrive platform and obtain a digital copy of your desired publications instantly no matter you are in your home, office or even commuting.
The OverDrive platform features various e-books that suitable for all ages and with genres ranging from fictions, to non-fictions, literature, comics, science, history, business, politics, health & fitness, art and design. It also features both current and back issues of popular e-magazines from around the world, covering fashion, business, travel, sports, tech and gaming, art, music, cooking and more.
Some of the popular titles include fashion magazines such as Vogue, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar; news & politics magazines such as Time, Newsweek and Guardian Weekly; science magazines National Geographic and New Scientist; entertainment and music magazines Hello!, Rolling Stone; food and cooking magazines Cook’s Illustrated and BBC Good Food Magazine; design magazines Architectural Digest (AD), Wallpaper and Design Anthology. You can also find titles catering to children, such as National Geographic Little Kids and The Week Junior.
While the digital copies on the OverDrive Platform are available for online reading through any web browsers, you can also download the copies to your smartphones or tablets and read them offline with the Libby app which can be downloaded from the Google Play or App Store for free.
For those who are looking for some self-learning resources, especially on information technology and business-related subjects, O’Reilly for Public Libraries is where you should go. On the O’Reilly online platform, you can get free access to different professional subject e-books and videos, case studies, interactive tutorials, audiobooks as well as conference videos on a range of disciplines, such as computing, web design, programming, business and finance, accounting, human resources, marketing, management and entrepreneurship.
You can browse the content by topics or easily find the courses that best suit your self-learning goals by choosing the skills (from Python, to JavaScript, to machine learning, swift, adobe photoshop) that you wish to build. For example, by selecting the topic of machine learning, you can find hundreds of e-books, online courses and videos related to the discipline. Content on this platform is available for online reading only.
Business Book Summaries is where you can read concise summaries of leading business books on different topics from leadership, entrepreneurship, to business strategy, management and innovation. For example, when you research for the top-rated business book Lessons From the Titans by Wall Street analysts Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, and Rob Wertheimer, you can find the key takeaways, the overview and the authors’ information as well as audio summary of the book.
To enjoy free access of the above e-resources, all you have to do is being a HKPL’s registered borrower and you don’t need to apply for an account separately. You can just login with your library card or Hong Kong ID card number and password. If you have forgot the password, you can follow the instructions to reset your password with your registered email address, or go to the nearest library for help.