July 28, 2020

In November we introduced Hoopla, a service that lets you stream video, music, e-books, and audiobooks.

Hoopla is a pay-per-use streaming service. Instead of paying a fixed monthly fee as we do for Overdrive, the library pays each time someone borrows an item from Hoopla.

We set a yearly budget for Hoopla. We also set a daily budget limit, so we won’t drain the whole year’s funds early.

The COVID-19 spike

Use of Hoopla has spiked since March. Clearly, Hoopla helped many of you get through the time we were closed by providing you with items you could access without coming to the library.

Unfortunately, this increased popularity has meant that customers trying to borrow Hoopla items sometimes see a message saying that the library’s daily borrowing limit has been reached.

We are looking at ways to fairly allocate Hoopla borrowing to prevent you from seeing that message. Our choices are difficult: reduce the monthly limit of four items per customer, or reduce the budget of some other library service and allocate the funds to Hoopla. We’ll make a decision early this month and let you know.

E-media alternatives

Don’t forget that Hoopla is only one of our e-media offerings, most of which allow unlimited use. To see a list of all of them, click here.