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Monday, May 1, 2023

#MicroblogMondays: Free books! (if I can figure this out...!)

I've had a NetGalley account for a couple of years now (prompted by a friend who told me about it) but never actually used it to request any books, until this past week. 

If you've never heard of NetGalley, it's a site that helps authors & publishers provide digital review copies in advance of publication to readers and industry professionals who can help get the word out by reviewing and recommending their books. In a nutshell, you can read books for free, ahead of anyone else, in exchange for promising to post reviews to your Goodreads account, blog, etc. The larger your audience and the more reviews you post, the better your chances of getting access to the books you want. 

Who doesn't love the idea of free books, right?  I set up a profile and got it approved.  But every time I browsed through the site, I got overwhelmed. So I hadn't requested any -- until last week, when I got an email from NetGalley promoting Ashley Audrain's new book, "The Whispers," available to the first 200 members requesting it. I still haven't read "The Push" (which I got as a cheap e-book a while back), but thought this one sounded interesting and hit the "request" link. Amazingly enough, I was granted access. 

Now, supposedly there is a way to download a copy to my Kobo e-reader -- but I still haven't been able to figure out just how to do it. (I may need to get my sister's techie boyfriend involved...). From what I can tell, I have to download Adobe Digital Editions to my laptop, download the book there and then transfer it from my laptop to my e-reader -- but when I try to download ADE, I get a message that "This app is not available for your device." ??? (It's a two-year old HP laptop, using Windows 10, so I'm not sure what the issue is?)

I did download the NetGalley app to my cellphone, and it's available there -- but yikes, the teeny tiny (unchangeable) type...!  (And there's a number on the book cover that says "51 days left" -- I didn't realize I was under a deadline...! I assume the book will disappear from the app after that??)  

Anyone else use NetGalley? 

(A version of this post also appeared under "Right now," also posted this morning -- but I thought it might be buried there, so I decided to use it as my #MM post today too.  :)  )  

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here

2 comments:

  1. I hadn't heard of NetGalley. Sounds intriguing. Of course, you do such good book reviews it's no wonder you were approved!
    I used to have a Kobo (my very first e-reader), but it was too long ago to be helpful! Good luck in downloading it.

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  2. The deadline piece is why I don't use NetGalley. It made me anxious. And I felt like it was kind of crappy — operating like a library in its temporary nature but expecting a review from me. So I went with not using NetGalley and instead just trying to get on the hold list early at the library.

    I once had someone tell me that I won a book for attending an online event. Cool! It was even a book I wanted to read. But then the "gift" was on NetGalley and expired after a few weeks. And I had to agree to post a review. Uh... that's not a gift :-)

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