Hoopla Transition

We are sad to announce that Portsmouth Public Library will no longer offer Hoopla Digital as of September 1. 

Users will continue to have four borrows per month through the end of August, at which point Hoopla Digital will no longer be accessible with your Portsmouth library card. 

If you use Hoopla and keep track of favorites or your reading history, we suggest you log in before the service ends and record this information elsewhere. If you'd like more information about how we came to this decision, please read on! If you have any questions, please email libinfo@portsmouthnh.gov

The library offers a host of digital services which supplement our print and physical materials, all free to the public. Funds for these third-party services come from the library budget. Each of the services we offer use a different payment model for library clients. In our other biggest service, Libby, which includes eBooks, audiobooks, and magazines, and is shared with libraries across the state, content is licensed and limited to a certain number of users. This is why Libby users must place holds on items (like traditional library books) and are notified when a book becomes available to read. More on this in a moment! 

Hoopla's model makes a wide variety of content available at any time - no holds or wait times - which we recognize is much more convenient for borrowers. However, Hoopla charges the library directly whenever an item is borrowed by a user. This model is significantly more expensive and has become more expensive over the nine years we've offered the service. Pricing for digital materials like eBooks and audiobooks is set by publishers. Unfortunately, costs to temporarily lease content are much higher for libraries than for individual users. You can read more about this from the Timberland Public Library. 

Over time, the cost to the library to provide Hoopla with this model has risen to more than half of what we spend on books and other physical materials. Inflation costs, decreased federal and state funding, and a tighter municipal budget all mean this is an unsustainable cost for the library. Many libraries nationwide are making similar changes. 

We are very sorry to deliver this news, as we know this is a beloved service for many of you - and for many of our staff! As stewards of a public service, we take seriously our responsibility of delivering high quality services that educate, enrich and entertain our community, and this change will allow us to use our budget more effectively in service of that mission. 

We are diverting a portion of the funds spent on Hoopla to buying more licenses in Libby, which will mean more titles will have “copies” available only to Portsmouth library cardholders, resulting in shorter wait times. In this way, we hope to increase both scope and availability of the content available through Libby to offset the loss of Hoopla's catalog. 

In addition, did you know you can suggest we purchase specific content in Libby, just as you can for books and other materials? Simply fill out our Purchase Suggestion form online and we will consider. 

On a final note, we encourage you to explore some of our other digital offerings during this time - including Kanopy for films, unlimited access to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Transparent Language for language learning, and Creativebug and Linked In Learning for courses in arts, crafts, business and technology. All free with your library card! 

Yours, 
PPL