It had also accelerated a funding crisis. E-book checkout growth and new users on Overdrive both increased more than 50%. Libby downloads increased three times their usual amount beginning in late March. You could use more than one library card. You could download library books to Kindle. You could access the web app anywhere on any computer, and everything synced to a phone app as well. People turned to digital books and were delighted to discover they were so much simpler than remembered. It was the public library's best-kept secret.Īnd then in March 2020, when libraries closed their doors and books sat gathering dust, the Libby app became so much more than a cute reading tool. Libby became a cult favorite for book lovers and dedicated librarygoers, and almost every public library in the country, already dependent on Overdrive for their growing digital collections, loved that they could make reading online a little bit easier. But the app's seamless, user-friendly experience was so exceptional that it spoke for itself. Libraries are never very good at selling themselves, and neither is Overdrive. Overdrive hit just under 200 million checkouts in 2016 in 2020, that number more than doubled, surpassing 430 million.įew noticed when the cute, friendly virtual library app launched in 2017. Overdrive - the digital marketplace for publishers and libraries, and the creator of Libby - was (and still is) clunky, slow and unintuitive.

Not many people even knew their libraries offered digital books. In 2016, just over a quarter of Americans had read an e-book within the previous year, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Public librarians depend on Libby, but they also worry that its newfound popularity could seriously strain their budgets.īefore 2017, e-books were still pretty niche, and checking out library e-books was torture. A user-friendly reading app becomes popular during the pandemic, making books cool again for young readers, multiplying e-book circulation and saving public libraries from sudden obsolescence.īut the Libby story is also a parable for how the best-intentioned people can build a beloved technological tool and accidentally create a financial crisis for those who need the tech most. On the surface, there couldn't be a more wholesome story than the meteoric rise of the Libby app.

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