Readers Have Borrowed More Than 1 Billion Books Through OverDrive

Readers Have Borrowed More Than 1 Billion Books Through OverDrive Library eBooks Overdrive

Overdrive just announced on their blog that they have loaned a billion ebooks since they first started lending ebooks in 2003.

From OverDrive:

One billion. It’s a defining number that’s hard to fathom yet understood as a massive milestone. There are very few things that can use the number 1 billion to describe what they represent. Recently, digital library checkouts through OverDrive became one of them. On February 10, Team OverDrive watched as our all-time checkouts surpassed 1 billion, officially joining the three comma club.

We’re proud of this accomplishment, but it’s not something we ever could’ve reached on our own. The librarians and staff at the 40,000 library and school partners we work with around the world deserve all the credit for spreading the word and evangelizing the joys of digital reading. Because of their tireless work, this isn’t the end of a journey, but rather the first step toward billions more moments of reading happiness. At PLA this week, we’ll be celebrating our Billion Book Bash with hundreds of our closest librarian friends. If you’ll be in Philadelphia for the conference, we hope you’ll join us.

A billion is a lot, but I think it's worth noting that OverDrive would have reached this milestone years ago if the major publishers had adopted reasonable policies on library ebooks.

All 5 of the major publishers either charge ridiculously high prices in the ebook market, or limit checkouts, or both.

If they had had their way we would never have reached this milestone.

 

 

 

Nate Hoffelder

View posts by Nate Hoffelder
Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader: He's here to chew bubble gum and fix broken websites, and he is all out of bubble gum. He has been blogging about indie authors since 2010 while learning new tech skills at the drop of a hat. He fixes author sites, and shares what he learns on The Digital Reader's blog. In his spare time, he fosters dogs for A Forever Home, a local rescue group.

3 Comments

  1. Carmen Webster Buxton20 March, 2018

    Looks like it took off in 2010! At that rate, they could hit 2 billion in another 3 or 4 years.

    Reply
  2. […] Overdrive books its billionth checkout (20 March 2018)  The Digital Reader Overdrive just announced on their blog that they have loaned a billion ebooks since they first started lending ebooks in 2003. […]

    Reply
  3. […] just hit its one billionth book loan since the platform launched in […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Scroll to top
https://the-digital-reader.com/2018/03/20/readers-have-borrowed-more-than-1-million-books-through-overdrive/
the-digital-reader.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-13
55213
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GHNGEJ76B64HFISNXOTND2ZMTQ4D6E5W
<urn:uuid:41c2be36-9660-4c3e-81ff-d857cfb81cff>
2019-03-18T23:59:52Z
104.27.129.155
text/html
sha1:XQHJ4FC3EUKULWG7RTHVMNSD5QA3RLN3
<urn:uuid:6d9a2e1f-a90d-4296-96b2-0694952a85e8>
https://the-digital-reader.com/2018/03/20/readers-have-borrowed-more-than-1-million-books-through-overdrive/
response
<urn:uuid:d0e352d1-6bbd-4780-a3df-0d41424974be>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-13
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-140-246-66.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/