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.

My library switched to this from the now-defunct Boundless app, but it has a lot of the same problems as the old app. The audiobook I was listening to would constantly freeze up and lose my place, forcing me to try to figure out where I left off. I'm also dismayed that there's no way to use this on my PC, which is how I listen to the majority of my audiobooks. Here's hoping they fix the problems, because it could be really good, if it worked correctly.

4/7 update: If you renew a loan, from the same library, it doesn't save your spot in the book, FFS! For speeding up audiobooks, you get 1x or 1.25x or faster, no in between. No searching several libraries at once; you have to sign out of the current library to search a different library's catalog. No simultaneous searching a catalog and listening to an audiobook; the player must be open to work. No Android Auto integration. Such a disappointment.

What’s new

- Book details now display the title's language
- Larger, more readable text in the book details view and other areas
- Catalog section titles are now navigable as headings in TalkBack

For the full list of changes in this release, visit https://github.com/ThePalaceProject/android-core/releases/tag/palace-1.27.1.