Why is my eBook wait so long?

Library lovers love their Libby! If you’re a big reader, then chances are that you’ve taken advantage of our robust eBook and audiobook collection offered through Libby/OverDrive. You might also have noticed that you must wait for your popular book title to become available. It might seem like everyone should be able to access the eBook instantly, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

If you personally purchase a title on Kindle, then your cost is probably around $10-$30 for an individual title. If you use Kindle Unlimited, then you pay about $12 a month. Audible is another option for purchasing audiobooks and its monthly subscription is about $15 a month. With all these methods, you’re able to read the book immediately. So why can’t you read books immediately with your library card?

The reason is largely due to licensing and purchase agreements set by the publisher when working with libraries.  Every publisher sets its own model. This is why books that are purchased by libraries frequently cost more than what consumers pay. Most models allow one person to read one copy at a time. So, it’s up to the library to buy multiple copies (just like they would with physical copies). Sometimes there is metered access that provides copies for a set period, like 12 months or 24 months. This means that we need to purchase new copies after our license expires. Some titles offer licenses to become a permanent part of our digital collection and don’t need to be repurchased.

Mid-Continent Public Library has a dedicated team that works on selecting new titles to purchase. They must manage customer demand vs. cost and make the best decision possible. There’s a lot of decision making that goes into what books we decide to purchase for the library. The Collection Development team pays attention to book trends and watches out for popular new authors. Some books have become very popular and have a high demand which leads to a longer wait. For example, we experienced a very high demand for The Women by Kristin Hannah. We also saw high demand for Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. Some books remain consistently popular over a long period of time. And sometimes book popularity shifts as trends appear and disappear in the book world.

Librarians can expect to pay as much as $150 per title for an eBook or audiobook. Librarians must use their best judgement to meet demand while simultaneously being strategic with the budget. As a system, we measure our holds ratio when making purchasing decisions. We aim to have one copy available for every ten people. We also allow users to make 50 holds and check out 50 books at a time.

This past fiscal year, we reached 6,000,000 transactions on OverDrive. This is huge!

We care about your feedback when it comes to our eBook and audiobook collection. Whenever you notice that we don’t have the book that you want, you can use the tagging feature on OverDrive/Libby. We consistently check these requests to ensure that we understand what you want.

You might notice that sometimes an eBook or audiobook is available on Audible or another streaming service, but when you check Libby/OverDrive you can’t request the purchase using the tagging method. Sometimes publishers make exclusive agreements with Amazon or other services and choose not to make the book available to libraries. This happened recently when Taylor Swift made an exclusive deal with Target for her physical book titled The Official Taylor Swift|The Eras Tour Book. Another example of this is the Dungeon Crawler Carl which is only available on Kindle Unlimited or Audible.

If you want to read more about how e-book and audiobook pricing impacts libraries, you can read more about it here or here. As always, feel free to visit your local branch to learn more about the many amazing books available for checkout.

Meghan P
Electronic Resources Librarian