I apologize for not spreading the news better, but starting this month we will no longer be offering e-books and audiobooks in the Hoopla collection. The reasons for this difficult decision are budget cuts and the costs of these titles in Hoopla compared to the cost in OverDrive. The key factor is that Hoopla charges per checkout of any item. Whereas we pay one price for access to an OverDrive title. When we compared the cost and the usage of both services Hoopla was costing significantly more than OverDrive and getting only a fraction of the usage. If we had kept the availability as it was, it is forecasted that Hoopla would have grown to be over 10% of our materials budget, which is much greater than the percentage of total usage Hoopla provides. We are planning on funneling some of the money that we are saving on Hoopla into buying additional copies and titles for OverDrive. We are working towards reducing the wait time for OverDrive holds to be fulfilled.
As a side note, the remaining formats in Hoopla, music, movies, and comics, have cost us significantly less than e-books and audiobooks. The content of these collections is also, generally, unique to Hoopla, which is why we are maintaining them for the foreseeable future.
As you know by now, budget cuts are leading us to review all our renewals very carefully. The subscription we had with Rbdigital was rather expensive, especially considering that the number of library customers using it was relativity low. Therefore we changed the subscription plan to one that has fewer titles (the top 250 titles) and costs less.
We will be taking some of the money that is saved to purchase audiobooks titles that are exclusive to Rbdigital, including Daniel Steel and Alexander McCall Smith. Please note that these title will be one copy/one user, which means that if all the copies are checked out you will be able to place a hold on the title. This change will take place at the beginning of September. Please be patient with us as we build a smaller, but more unique collection.