In 2021 I realized that if I switched my podcast listening to audiobooks, I could dramatically increase the number of books I've "read" each month. Initially I was going to use Audible but remembered my good local library, the Chicago Public Library, had to have offerings and I was not disappointed. It had over 17,000 audiobooks! But being the curious data analyst I am, I was curious how the CPL compared to other libaries out there. Turns out despite being the 3rd largest city in the US, it has the 116th largest eBook/Audiobook library! To get the full inventory I scraped Overdrive to see if there were any interesting trends in the data. I wrote a basic script to iterate over Overdrive's websiteids to get the following data points:
- Total number of items by type of item and category (Fiction/Non-Fiction, Juvenile/Young Adult/Regular, as well as by specific category like mystery, romance, etc...)
- Called Google's API to determine the state/country of each library
- Included for the sake of comparison Overdrive's listing of their 1+ million checkout libraries to get an idea of any relation between size of collection and number of checkouts
For the top libraries, I checked their websites to see if there was a means for non-residents to get access and updated mobileread's wiki with the details, see bottom
Complete Data - Sort by state,
The top ten libraries with the largest collections on Overdrive:
| Library Name | State | Country | Million Checkouts | ALL FORMATS Total | EBOOKS Total | AUDIOBOOKS Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles Public Library | CA | US | 10 million checkouts | 543,578 | 430,459 | 108,737 |
| Sno-Isle Libraries | WA | US | 3 million checkouts | 398,988 | 276,404 | 118,200 |
| National Library Board Singapore | Singapore | SG | 9 million checkouts | 325,885 | 273,265 | 50,916 |
| Livebrary.com | NY | US | 3 million checkouts | 322,971 | 239,358 | 83,612 |
| King County Library System | WA | US | 7 million checkouts | 298,932 | 221,054 | 73,541 |
| CLEVNET | OH | US | 4 million checkouts | 295,941 | 220,797 | 70,770 |
| MELSA: Twin Cities Metro eLibrary | MN | US | 9 million checkouts | 293,978 | 231,353 | 58,980 |
| Auckland Libraries | Auckland | NZ | 3 million checkouts | 291,148 | 225,285 | 63,534 |
| Toronto Public Library | ON | CA | 9 million checkouts | 277,630 | 223,346 | 51,019 |
Some interesting observations on the data:
- The best deal for non-residents is to get the Brooklyn Public Library card for $50/year. The tenth largest library on Overdrive and many other libraries charge much more than this.
- Many libraries allow access to anyone who lives in the state, for instance several of the largest libraries in California, Washington, Ohio, New York, Texas are this way. It's worth checking the libraries in your state to see if they offer any reciprocal memberships.
- The libraries with the highest proportion of their collections being audiobooks are those for the blind, such as Listening Books, National Council for the Blind of Ireland, or Christian Record Services for the Blind which when one thinks isn't too surprising, but then there's also the Inglewood Public Library with 48k audiobooks making up 74% of its collection
- Libraries with the highest proportion of their collection as Fiction (w/ a total collection of over 1000 books): Itochu Chemical Frontier Corporation - 99.98%, Stadtbibliothek Wuppertal 99.6%, Izumiya Workers Union - 99.4%
- Libraries with the highest proportion of their collection as Non-Fiction (w/ a total collection of over 1000 books): DPEP Tech & Digital Knowledge Center, Monetary Authority of Singapore, Better Health Library, Marine Institute, Nisshin Seifun Labor Union, Azusa Sekkei Co., Ltd, Newschool of Architecture and Design, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (all 100% of their collections)
- Libraries with the highest proportion of their collection as Juvenile/Young Adult (w/ a total collection of over 1000 books): NC Kids Digital Library (98.9%), Fujian Juvenile & Children's Library (98.1%), Jiangsu Children's Digital Library (96.1%)
If anyone wants to run the scraping script: Scraping Script
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