Dear Library Lovers,
I’ll cut to the chase and give the bad news to our hoopla ebook users: Greendale Library will discontinue our subscription to hoopla at the end of 2025. But don’t worry, there are plans in the works to expand the size of the Libby collection at a fraction of the cost of hoopla through something called a Lucky Day Advantage Collection. It’s projected to be available to Libby ebook users in Milwaukee County in early 2026.
Heavy hoopla users probably guessed hoopla discontinuation was coming when we decided to reduce monthly checkouts for 2025 from 4 to 2. Though we hoped this change would help reign in the ballooning cost of increasing hoopla use, the handwriting was on the wall that the hoopla pricing model would eventually exceed a reasonable budget.
Greendale Library was an early adopter of ebooks 10 years ago. In 2014 we subscribed to a collection of 93 ebooks through something called “CloudLibrary” when the Kindle ereader was starting to be widely adopted. It was clunky to get access to the ebooks, the ebook purchase prices were higher than we were accustomed to, and people just weren’t ready for ereading. The service was discontinued after one year due to low use!
Then in 2019, the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium invested State money into an ebook resource called Wisconsin’s Digital Library. The effort took off and the joint collection continues to this day in the form of the Libby App. Now a collection of over 350,000 digital books, audiobooks, comics, and magazines can be borrowed by Wisconsin public library cardholders. Though hoopla offers many advantages over Libby, Libby continues to be the primary resource that Wisconsin readers use to get ebooks.
Use patterns show that the more ebooks we make available, the more they will be checked out. In the 10 years since Greendale’s experiment with CloudLibrary, ebook use has grown to 13% of our overall checkouts. In some communities like North Shore and Milwaukee that amount is over 25%! We know that availability and convenience are important drivers of use. For this reason we’re committed to increasing ebook collections in a sustainable way, and hoopla, though super convenient, simply isn’t sustainable.
We certainly offer apologies to those of you who are heavy hoopla users. But focusing our resources on Libby is the smart choice, as well as taking a deeper look at how we allocate our book budget going forward.
I look forward to seeing you at the library!
Brian Van Klooster
Library Director, Greendale Public Library
