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Elgin County
photo of a woman reading a book on an ereader taken from the perspective over her shoulder

Level Up Your eBook Game

Why level up?

We’re glad you asked! We absolutely want you to keep reading. We can show you exactly how to level up your digital reading and manage your holds like a pro, or like a librarian! There are a few things you can do to improve your own digital reading experience and help our other readers along the way.

So you know all about Libby and hoopla. You’re already an ebook reader, and you always have an eAudiobook queued up to listen to on your commute or when you’re walking the dog. Now you’re ready to Level Up your digital book game.

With the tips below, you’ll be able to manage your holds better, help out your fellow readers, and be a good library neighbour.

Level Up your Libby game:

Tags are your best friends! Use them to create a wishlist, a to-be-read list, or even a suggest-to-that-one-friend list. Instead of placing a hold on a title you’re not ready to read yet, tag it!

  1. Tap the Tag icon under the option to Read Sample/Play Sample
  2. Choose from already created tags or tap the + sign to create your tag
  3. Give your tag a name and an optional description
  4. Tap Go/Create and you will now see the name of your new tag beside the title
  1. Manage your tags at any time from the tag icon on the menu at the bottom of the screen, from here you can see all the titles tagged
  2. Change tags to Regular or Notify Me tags
  3. Tap ACTIONS to Rename, Export, or Delete tags

Find out why we’re asking you to be a good library neighbour.

Bonus tip:

Also, return your ebooks once you’re done with them if you finish them before the due date. We know that it’s super convenient that ebooks and eAudiobooks automatically return on their due date, requiring no action from you. But if you finish reading a title before its due date, return it early so that the next person waiting for it can start reading it as soon as possible!

Level Up your hoopla game

The great thing about hoopla is zero wait times. If the title you want to read is there, you can start it immediately if you want to! That’s because we only pay for the titles you borrow. So if you find a title you’re interested in, but you don’t want to start it right that second, there’s a better way to keep track of it than just borrowing it anyway. And it helps us when you’re a good library neighbour.

When browsing the hoopla catalogue, you’ll notice a heart symbol for each title.

  1. Tap the heart symbol to favourite the title (note: hoopla is a U.S. based service, so they spell favourite without the U)
  2. The heart will now be red
  3. Later, when you want to start reading something immediately, you can find all of your favourites by tapping on My Account
  4. Tap on Favorites and choose something to borrow

Be a Good Library Neighbour: Helpful Habits for Libby and hoopla

We are so happy that our digital collections in Libby and hoopla are so popular! Elgin County’s digital reading has been growing steadily and there are now over 2x as many digital checkouts of ebooks and audiobooks as there was pre-pandemic! This is wonderful news! But with increased use comes increased costs.

So we’re asking you to be a good digital neighbour and we’ve got some tips for you to level up your digital reading game and become a Libby and hoopla pro.

Speaking of costs, many people are surprised to know that libraries often pay a very different price for e-books and e-audiobooks than we do for print books. For libraries, the cost for these formats can be up to three times the cost of the print version. Not only that, library pricing for e-books and e-audiobooks is often much higher than prices for individual consumers.   

Take, for instance, Kristin Hannah’s popular title, The Women. (Our most checked out book of 2024.) You can see in the chart below the disparity in cost between library and consumer prices.  

In addition to the increased price, libraries don’t own the digital books we lend, like we do our print books. We purchase licenses for a set period of time or a set number of checkouts. When licenses expire, we have to repurchase any title we want to continue to make available. As you can see in the chart above, the eAudiobook licenses for The Women only lasts for 24 months, or 2 years. So 2 years after purchasing the title, we will need to repurchase it and pay the $85 again. And that $85 only buys us one copy of the title. So it means that only one person can read it at a time. We call that one-copy-one-user.

As a result of the increase in use and high prices, our total spending for Libby and hoopla has increased 138% and 57%, respectively, from 2019.

What do holds have to do with the cost of library books?

When a hold is placed, it tells us that there is demand for that title right now. To try to keep wait times as short as possible, we buy additional licenses based on the number of holds. Believe it or not, adding additional copies to meet demand is actually the largest part of the work we do with Libby!

Looking at The Women again, we would need to spend nearly $7,000 to meet demand for the book in 2024, and even more as everyone reading this rushes to place it on hold.

The good news is, if we can all be good digital neighbours and use our holds for books we really want to read right now, wait times will be reduced and funds can be redistributed to increase the number of titles available in the collection.

Hoopla doesn’t have holds, why do we need to be good digital neighbours with hoopla?

One of the great things about hoopla is that everything is available immediately. There is no waiting for that book you want to read right now! That’s because instead of buying licenses, we pay each time you borrow a title. We’ve seen a remarkable increase in use, which is so great! But it means that our hoopla costs are now more than double what they were in 2019. So one way to help us out is to only borrow what you’re reading right now with hoopla.

How do I track what I want to read without placing holds?

By using the tips we’ve mentioned above, you will be able to track the titles you want to read, without placing a hold on the item. You can absolutely place holds on books you want to read as soon as possible, we don’t want you to stop using the holds feature in Libby! We just want you to know that you can also use the tags and favourites to keep track of titles you want to read one day in the future.