If you grew up in the age before everything was digitized and could fit in the palm of your hand, you likely remember weekend trips to the local public library. Everything was literally at your fingertips much like today, but you could feel the pages as you thumbed through books consuming all the information you could. Libraries may not be as populated a place as they were 20 years ago, but they’re still around and in a much more fitting form factor for the modern age of technology. Through apps. Hoopla is one such application and in the most recent update, it’s just added some new functionality including Chromecast support.
To be more precise, Hoopla is a digital library but it works by letting you checkout the content from your own local library digitally as opposed to getting things from Hoopla themselves. You still need to have a library card too. You’ll find all manner of media to browse including books, music, and videos, as well as audiobooks and even comic books. It’s worth noting though that the Chromecast support will only let you stream videos to the TV or monitor you have the Chromecast hooked up to, so you’ll still have to use everything else on the screen of your device.
After becoming familiar with the interface which shouldn’t take long at all, the user experience should be quite enjoyable as it makes checking out books and other content much easier than going down to a local library or using the library website. You can use whatever you borrow without worrying you’ll be getting it back on time as Hoopla sets things up to automatically return themselves, so however long your lending period is you can enjoy what you have until its over and forget about the return dates. The app needs at least KitKat to run, and it doesn’t support every single library on earth, so you definitely want to make sure your local library’s digital content is supported through the Hoopla system first. If it is, installing the app is a breeze and using it is even simpler. Best of all, you can check out content any time of day, any day of the week.