The Palace Project

Lyrasis

About this app

Palace is a free, easy-to-use e-reader app that lets you find, check out, and read or listen to books from your local library.

It’s been said that libraries are “palaces for the people” and the Palace app gives you instant access to your local “palace” any time, right from the palm of your hand.

All you need to sign up is your library card! And even if your library isn’t using Palace yet, you can still read more than 10,000 books--from children’s books to classics to foreign language books--for free from our Palace Bookshelf.

The Palace app is built and maintained by The Palace Project, a not-for-profit division of LYRASIS working in partnership with Digital Public Library of America with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more, visit https://thepalaceproject.org.

Ratings and reviews

App is very buggy. Locks up a lot. Asked for card number just to return a book. Have to reinstall it to get it to function properly. Edit: no longer makes me enter my card number to return but still locks up numerous times during each book. I need to close the app, clear the cache and reopen. Upon restarting it loses the spot where it locked up and returns to the previous location it was upon opening. Not good for driving because of this and just plain frustrating even when not driving.

Great concept, especially the access to titles that Amazon previously prevented libraries from accessing. However the way the app is handling digital licensing is problematic for the users. The amount of times a title can be checked out seems to be reduced from that of other library apps. When the library runs out there's no notificationthe queue remains the same just unmoving. If a user is able to obtain a book, the download time can take well over a half an hour regardless of Internet quality.

I have only recently downloaded the app. I had high expectations though the reviews were quite poor. I am just into Chapter 2 14 minutes and the app has stopped 4 times and doesn't remain at the position when you hit play it goes back to some previous point. I am uninstalling this app and I will wait for the book on Libby. Maybe after a number of updates it will be able to compete with Libby.

What’s new

- Audiobooks: new playback speed controls with a slider and presets, speeds from 0.5x to 3.0x, and adjustable skip intervals.
- Reading: the screen stays awake while you read, and page turns near the end of a chapter are more reliable.
- Also: tap a book's series to find related titles, improved support for large text sizes, and fixes to sign-in on Chromebooks.

For the full list of changes in this release, visit https://github.com/ThePalaceProject/android-core/releases/tag/palace-1.31.4.