Digital Culture News: A bookworm’s dream-come-true: Estonians and e-residents of Estonia can now borrow books from the ECT virtually

Estonians are big readers and in addition to hoarding e-book and paper books, they also still lend a lot of books from the libraries. Luckily for us, the Estonian Central Library (ECT) has started a new e-book lending system, that comes handy during this lock-down situation as a result of the coronavirus (covid-19) pandemic.

ELLU is a digital library for patrons of Tallinn Central Library. E-books in ELLU are predominantly in Estonian. A small collection of e-books in English and Russian are also available. It is also available for e-residents of Estonia, so we urge you to try it out. All you need to know is here:

• You need to be a registered patron of Tallinn Central Library and be familiar with the e-book borrowing conditions. Read more about how to get a library card here.
• You may use a computer, a laptop, a tablet or a smart phone with an Internet connection. E-books borrowed from ELLU cannot be read with an e-reader.
• Five titles may be borrowed at a time. The lending period is 21 days.
• Borrowed titles will be automatically returned at the end of the lending period. You may also return the title early, to free up space in your ELLU account. It is possible to borrow the same e-book again the next day. This gives other patrons an opportunity to borrow that title.
• E-books in ELLU can have up to five simultaneous users. If the library has purchased two copies then up to ten users can borrow and read the e-book.

In order to borrow and read e-books you need to sign in with your personal identity code and the password of your My ESTER account (given to you upon registration as a patron).

You may browse e-books by subjects or by using the search option. It is possible to search by title and author or to use the extended search. The extended search link can be viewed by clicking on Search (Otsi). Each e-book has a publicly available preview.

For a pleasant reading experience it is advisable to use the latest versions of the most commonly used web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge etc).

Stay safe and healthy and keep that mind wondering in positive directions and imaginary worlds!