The Digital Toolbox — Lessons and Trends in Digital Lending in 2021 Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Director and Business Development Executive, OverDrive Professional, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>
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s 2021 concluded, OverDrive Academic took a deep dive into data points that emerged over the course of the year from our academic library partners. Here we’ll examine digital trends we expect to continue to be impactful in 2022: the growing use of audiobooks by students, how new digital lending models are quickly being adopted, the most popular genres and the most popular titles.
Audiobook Popularity Continues To Surge As I previously detailed, audiobooks continue to gain traction with students. A telling data point that always amazes me is how well audiobooks circulate in comparison to eBooks. Most colleges and universities have 8x-10x as many eBook titles in their OverDrive digital collections as they do audiobook titles, yet despite that disparity in selection and availability, eBooks outcirculate audiobooks by a relatively small margin (1 audiobook circs for every 1.2 eBooks). Let’s dig in a bit more on how the most popular audiobooks compare to the most popular eBooks. The previous paragraph compared circs by format for eBook and audiobook collections in hundreds of colleges and universities across the OverDrive Academic network. We also compared the difference in circs when looking at the same title in both formats as well as the top 20 and top 50 most popular circ’ing titles in both formats, and audiobooks still dominate in terms of circulation. For the top 20 most popular titles in 2021, audiobooks had 28 percent more circs than eBooks. For the 50 most popular titles, audiobooks outperformed eBooks by 24 percent. There were 10 titles on both the audiobook and eBook top 20 most popular titles list. Matching up head-to-head with the option of audiobook or eBook, audiobooks outcirc’d eBooks by 21 percent for the same titles. For academic libraries, there is little difference between fiction and nonfiction audiobook circulation. Nonfiction represented 53 percent of circs compared to 47 percent for fiction in 2021. However, looking at the top 10 BISAC subjects by circ, it’s totally dominated by fiction, with the lone exception being Biography & Autobiography/Personal Memoirs. An incredibly interesting fact that speaks to the pull of fiction in the audiobook format is that the 20 most popular audiobook titles included all seven Harry Potter titles, and none appeared among the 20 most popular eBook titles.
Lending Model Options Expand Efficiency While audiobook as a format is bringing more students to digital collections, having options for lending models is making it easier and more cost effective for academic libraries to expand what they can offer. OverDrive advocates for our publishing and supply partners to make their titles available in multiple lending models. Doing this empowers our academic library partners to use their budget efficiently and confidently by adding new and diverse content with minimal investment and risk if it’s not used as anticipated. When it comes to lending models, academic libraries strongly prefer two things: simultaneous use (SU) and perpetual access
Against the Grain / February 2022
(two different, and separate lending models). In 2021, OverDrive saw circs of SU titles grow by 33 percent. There are many valid reasons why colleges and universities value these lending models, as they can be an inexpensive way to provide unlimited access to specific content that can support specific courses or, with the single title example, a way of offering an all-campus read for an incredibly reasonable price. However, the SU must be offered not with perpetual access but with specific time period access to provide more financial certainty for publishers. Fortunately, there are lending model options that bridge the divide, giving institutions the flexibility and access that SU provides while still being acceptable for publishers. Below I’ll provide “From titles on OverDrive-specific examples, while noting other platforms will have contemporary similar options. Learning the availwomen and able options from your vendors will thrillers to help your library best serve students and faculty while getting the most historical fiction out of your budget dollars.
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One option OverDrive offers is life, more and the ability to select from SU titles more academic organized by individual publishers that work like a subscription. These libraries are titles are bundled by participating meeting the publishers for a flat annual fee based holistic needs on the size of the academic library’s of students user population. An example from the OverDrive catalog of one puband cultivating lisher-aggregator that represents learning and 600+ quality publishers: Unlimited curiosity with SU for any 25 titles selected from a catalog of 24,000 titles for an annual eBooks and cost of $749 for Tier 1 schools, which audiobooks. ” serve up to 2,000 students. Another publisher has a uniquely innovative approach in which they offer a collection of 2,000 titles with SU for one month and the cost ranges from $3.98-$110.00 per title. This applies to a Tier 1 school, with larger schools receiving different rates. OverDrive has also seen an increase in popularity in the Cost Per Circ (CPC) lending model, with use up 52 percent in 2021. CPC titles can be added to a college or university’s digital collection, and they only pay a low fee (on average of $2-$4 per circ) when a title circs. This means an academic library can add hundreds or even thousands of titles at no up-front cost. An example to illustrate the power of CPC: 1,000 management titles could cost $50,000-$75,000 to purchase under traditional lending models. Those 1,000 titles in a digital collection used to support a business program may only circ 200-300 titles in a semester. In that case, with the average CPC price of $3 per circ, the cost would only be $600 -$900 to provide students and faculty access to more than 1,000 titles. OverDrive enables colleges and universities to limit the amount of spend for CPC, so budgets remain fixed and predictable.
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