The Toronto Public Library (TPL) has become the first system in the world to hit 50 million digital checkouts since its launch.
As reported by CTV News, Beth Godlewski, a senior collections specialist at TPL, spoke about the record and how TPL got there.
The library launched its online book-borrowing system in 2007 using OverDrive. It took five years to hit one million borrowed books, but digital book borrowing skyrocketed shortly after. In 2020, TPL said it set a record with eight million borrows.
Godlewski said TPL broke that record the next year, with 9.8 million checkouts. Moreover, she said that TPL was “close to a million ahead of anybody else.”
“We’re leading the world. Have been for nine years straight,” Godlewski said. “What can we say? Toronto, we always say, is a city of readers.”
For those wondering, the 50 millionth digitally-borrowed book was ‘A Town Called Solace,’ by Canadian author Mary Lawson.
Godlewski told CTV News that the pandemic helped spur an increase in borrowing ebooks and audiobooks. Digital checkouts spiked about 30 percent between 2019 and 2020. There’s also been uptake from borrowers who hadn’t used TPL’s physical collections, and Godlewski noted that baking and crafting books became much more popular too.
In total, there are about 230,000 books in the TPL’s online collection.
The library also shared with CTV News what the top borrowed ebooks of all time in Toronto were:
- The Goldfinch
- The Girl on the Train
- Becoming
- Educated: A Memoir
- Where the Crawdads Sing
- The Handmaid’s Tale
- Talking to Strangers: What we should know about the people we don’t know
- Gone Girl
- Little Fires Everywhere
- The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
If you haven’t tried OverDrive for borrowing digital books, check out MobileSyrup’s guide on how to use it here. You can access OverDrive through smartphone apps like Libby or on e-readers.
Source: CTV News
