eBooks and Libraries: OverDrive Releases a Selection of 2012 Usage and Collection Statistics

With the Digital Book World conference beginning tomorrow in NYC and ALA Midwinter 2013 getting underway in about 10 days, OverDrive has shared some 2012 usage and collection statistics.
Impressive numbers but also plenty of questions.
For example, we’re interested to see if the growth continues AND if users who borrow once or twice continue to borrow on a regular basis. If not, why do they stop?
Also, we would be like to know what percentage of users who browse don’t borrow a book during that specific browsing session and if users who do borrow a book return them before they timeout (if they’re done with the book).
Finally, what specific devices are being used to access OverDrive content?
Those are a few of the things we would love to know that these statistics don’t address.
Here is what we did learn.

2012 OverDrive Usage and Collection Statistics

Browsing

• 2.7 billion book and title catalog pages (up 65 percent) and generated 192 million registered visitor sessions last year (up 93 percent from 2011) via OverDrive usage in public and K-12 libraries

Partners

• 22,000 public and K-12 libraries use OverDrive services

Collection

• 300,000 titles added to OverDrive’s collection for library’s to select from. Total collection (ebooks, audiobooks, and video) now has over 1 million items.

Discovery and Sampling

• Sampling is up more than 500 percent. OverDrive released the samples in September.

• Discovery has increased by more than 60 percent, with more than 1 billion cover image impressions in Dec. 2012

Mobile

• Mobile visits increased to 47 percent of all visits

• 16 million downloads of the OverDrive Media Console app in 2012

Borrowing

• 70 million digital titles checked out in 2012

More From OverDrive in this announcement.

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