OverDrive Shares Some Network Usage Statistics With More to Come

The London Book Fair begins in a few days and OverDrive has announced that during the event they’ll be sharing the first of several “Big Data” reports that they’ll share with participating publishers and libraries.

According the OverDrive, the reports will analyze, “billions of eBook impressions and other data collected from across its network of 18,000 public and school libraries.”

Yesterday, OD shared a few numbers in this news release.

In March 2012, over 337,000 visitors a day from 219 countries browsed the OverDrive-hosted “virtual branch” websites of more than 18,000 libraries to search, discover and sample book content.  This resulted in over 146 million page views for the month, and library visitors stayed on the sites for an average of 9.5 minutes, viewing an average 11.6 pages per visit.  Also in March, OverDrive library catalog browsers viewed more than 636 million title cover images.

In March 2012, “The Anatomist’s Apprentice” by Tessa Harris (Kensington Publishing), released in late December 2011, rose to position No. 131 on the most-circulated library eBooks out of more than 700,000 titles in the OverDrive catalog.  This title ranked No. 168 among more than 84,000 titles placed on hold.  A major factor in the increased popularity of “The Anatomist’s Apprentice” was the fact that this title enjoyed over 511,000 cover image impressions from OverDrive-hosted library catalogs in March alone.

Comment

The OverDrive new release mentions that according to the Pew study released a week ago that, “libraries are a prominent source (21%) for owners of e-reading devices to get recommendations for reading materials.”

By comparison, bookstores are are a source for recommendations (31%),  online bookstores/websites (56%), family members, friends, co-workers (86%).

Another number worth sharing is that a whopping 75% begin a search for something to read NOT at a library/library database but at an online bookstore. Only 12% begin searching at the library.

Our post from last week includes a look at some of the library-related numbers (including tables and graphs) from the Pew report along with some additional comments.

One final comment.

The stats OverDrive shared also point out that, “library visitors stayed on the sites for an average of 9.5 minutes, viewing an average 11.6 pages per visit.”

What we would like more info about is if users are staying for the amount of time and number of page views because of searching problems and/or due to the fact that they’re unable to find anything they want to read that’s currently available.