Introduction to Hoopla for Android

Hi, this is Dan Griffin at Hoopla. In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to browse, search, borrow, and play content on your supported Android device. If you haven't already done so you'll need to install Hoopla on your phone. Let's start by going to the Google Play Store and then we're going to search for Hoopla Digital. Once you find it you can just choose to install. Once you're registered for an account on Hoopla you're ready to start browsing and borrowing content. If you aren't registered you can sign up for a new account either on the web or through the mobile app. If you need help getting registered click the button on the screen to go to the registration tutorial. When you install the app for the first time you'll need to log in with the username and password you selected. Once you've done this, the app should remember you. You won't need to re-authenticate very often. The first time you open various screens on Hoopla you may get short tutorials or requests from Hoopla for certain permissions on your phone. We suggest that you allow these to make sure that you’re getting Hoopla's full functionality. With the Hoopla mobile app we can do several things. We can browse for content, we can search for specific content, we can add something to our favorites list (meaning that something we want to watch later), and then of course we can actually borrow content and play or read it. Let's take a quick tour. Let's start at the home screen. This is a great launch point to begin browsing. I want to draw your attention to the top of the screen where it tells you how many borrows you have remaining this month. Your total allowed borrows is set by your library. In my case I have 4 remaining. Your borrows reset at the beginning of each new calendar month. So if your library does 10 per month like mine does then you'll get 10 more on the first day of the next month. At the top of the screen you'll see that I can choose ‘audio books,’ ‘movies,’ ‘music,’ ‘comic books,’ ‘e-books,’ and ‘TV.’ Let's click on e-books. E-books are just like regular physical books but the text is shown on your device. Through Hoopla you have access to hundreds of thousands of e-books instantly and you can take them with you wherever you take your phone or tablet. You'll see that you can browse by genre, recommended, featured, or popular. Let's see what's popular. Let's take a look at Radium Girls. This looks like something that I'd like to read at some point but maybe not today, so I'll choose to save this one for later. I can do that just by clicking on the little heart. I'll just use my back button to go back and this time I'll choose Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I think I'll save this one for later as well. Let's click the back button again to get back to our home screen and let's take a look at what we have on our favorites list. If we're ready to borrow any of these now we can do that just by clicking ‘Borrow.’ Let's borrow an audio book that I already had on my favorites list called A Long Way Home. Once I've borrowed it it'll show up on my home screen as content that I currently have borrowed. But on mobile you have another option that we should talk about, you have the option to either play it screaming or to download the content to your device. If you download it over Wi-Fi, that content will be on your phone and you won't need to use any of your cellular data plan later. Personally I love doing this with music and movies to play on planes or for my kids to play in the car. Let's hit the back button and this time I'll show you how to search for specific content. To search just click the search icon in the top right. Let's see if we can find an album by country star Randy Travis. I'll just type in his name and when you see Hoopla find it below you can just click to take the suggestion. Hoopla will found tons of Randy Travis albums. So the process here is the same. We can find one we like and then either play it now or save it for later. Don't forget you can also download music albums now to play offline later. Finally, I want to show you how to view comics on your Android device so let's click back and this time choose comics. And today I think I'll borrow The Flash from The DC Rebirth Series. Let's choose to go ahead and borrow and then download that title. If I open that up and scroll through obviously some of these would be very hard to read. But the nice thing is that by double clicking on the picture, Hoopla will allow you to step through the story panel-by-panel in either portrait or landscape orientation. So that's a quick tour of Hoopla on Android. I hope you enjoyed it. Now go find some great content to borrow on Hoopla.