The answer to the library question depends entirely upon where you live. There is a fair chance that your library belongs to a local consortium that would allow you to use another system's online collection, but I'd have to know what community you lived in to be able to tell you.
Who did you speak to at your local library? If you spoke to a circulation desk clerk, the odds are that that person has no idea about consortium privileges. Call your HQ library and speak to the Head of Reference if there is such a person, or if not, to the Library Director. Senior staff should definitely know what your local options are.
It is quite common for smaller rural and/or municipal libraries to band together to set up a consortium and pay a small fee to a larger system in a nearby metropolitan area in order to let their patrons use the large system's Overdrive account and any research databases that they have. It usually costs the small library a few thousand dollars a year, MUCH less than it would cost them to set up their own accounts for their patrons, and the contributions cover the larger system's added cost for providing the service as a consortium rather than a single system. Some libraries parse out that participatory fee and charge their patrons a recovery fee, if that is the only way that they can afford to do so, but many manage to come up with the money out of collections funds. (Example: say that the large system needs $5K per year to give the small library access. If 500 of the small library's patrons sign up to use the service, it will cost each of those patrons $10/year. Normally the fee will be set at about twice the actual cost, because the odds are very good that the number of users will end up at least doubling after the first year, and the more traffic those users generate, the more copies/titles that the larger system is going to need to add to their subscription in order to satisfy demand. Most public libraries on Overdrive have ~60% of their subscribed titles in use at any given moment.)
