Libraries Are “Going Digital” on Four Cents of the Dollar
Of every dollar a public library spends, about four cents buys everything digital — databases, Hoopla, OverDrive, every ebook and audiobook, combined. It’s the one line on the budget you can’t follow to the end.
The short version
Of every dollar a US public library spends, about four cents buys everything digital — ebooks, audiobooks, databases, and apps like Hoopla and OverDrive, all of it added together (IMLS, FY2023).
Most of the dollar is people. About two-thirds, 66 cents, is staff. Another 23 keeps the building open. That leaves roughly a dime for the whole collection, and four cents of it for everything digital.
Those four cents are split across a dozen vendors, so any single one — say OverDrive, the company behind Libby — is only part of it. And even that part can’t be traced: OverDrive discloses no US public-library revenue, and its owner, the private-equity firm KKR, reports one firm-wide number.
TL;DR
Digital is four cents of your library’s dollar, split across every database, app, and ebook vendor. Follow any one slice and it disappears into a private-equity black box.
What I found
The number that stopped me wasn’t the twelve-week waitlist. It was four cents.
That’s how much of every dollar a public library spends actually buys digital material — every ebook, audiobook, database, and app like Hoopla or OverDrive, all added together. It comes straight from the federal survey libraries file each year (IMLS, FY2023). Here is the whole dollar, by where it goes:
| Where every operating dollar goes | Per $1 | FY2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Staff — salaries and benefits | 66¢ | $10.1B |
| Building, utilities, programs, everything else | 23¢ | $3.5B |
| Print materials | 5¢ | $0.75B |
| Everything digital — ebooks, e-audio, databases | 4¢ | $0.67B |
| Other physical formats — DVD, audio, microform | 1¢ | $0.17B |
Follow the money and digital barely registers — less than print, a rounding error next to payroll. The library is still overwhelmingly what it has always been: a local building full of people who help you, paid for close to home. Close to two-thirds of every dollar is wages and benefits, money that stays in your community.
The digital collection everyone argues about — the waitlist, the licensing fights — is a fight over four cents, and those four cents don’t even go to one place. They’re split across database subscriptions, Hoopla, OverDrive, streaming services, and the rest, so any single vendor is a slice of a slice. Take the most familiar one. A large share of ebook and audiobook lending runs through OverDrive, the company behind Libby, not a public utility but a holding of KKR, a private-equity firm that managed more than $700 billion as of its 2025 reporting. The reason a digital file has a waitlist at all is that libraries don’t buy these books, they license them: a title might cost $55 for a two-year term, or break after 26 checkouts, after which the library buys it again. The wait is a budget limit, not a server limit.
Now try to follow that slice to the end. A single library’s OverDrive bill sometimes sits in a board packet or a city checkbook, if you go looking. But what OverDrive earns across all of its libraries, and how much of that KKR keeps, appears nowhere: OverDrive discloses no US public-library revenue, and KKR reports only one firm-wide number that folds OverDrive in with hundreds of other companies.
“You can sometimes see your own four cents leave. You cannot see where they land.”
This isn’t a heist. There’s no evidence anyone broke a law or gouged anyone — the opposite, if anything: the publicly traded owners of library vendors mostly had a flat-to-down year, and the library cuts that made news in 2025 traced to property-tax and state-budget fights, not vendor pricing. The smallest line on the library’s budget is also the one the public can’t follow to the end.
Receipts · sources
Who owns it. OverDrive is owned by the private equity firm KKR, which agreed to buy it from Rakuten in December 2019 and completed the deal on June 9, 2020, investing through its Americas XII Fund (OverDrive; KKR; Library Journal). KKR managed more than $700 billion in assets as of its 2025 annual reporting (KKR & Co. Inc., SEC filings).
The expiring license. Big Five library ebooks are licensed, not sold: Penguin Random House capped its adult ebook price to libraries at $55 on a two-year license (American Libraries / ALA, 2018); other publishers meter by checkouts (HarperCollins’ 26-loan model) or by time. Still roughly $48–68 for a two-year term in 2024 (ReadersFirst). The hold queue is a function of how many simultaneous licenses a library can afford, not how many readers want the book.
The money. US public libraries spent about $1.6 billion on their collections in fiscal year 2023, the most recent national figures the federal survey publishes (it lags about two years): from the IMLS Public Libraries Survey. IMLS’s own benchmarking tables put the distribution of the $15.2 billion in total operating spending at 66.2% staff, 10.4% collection, and 23.3% everything else (Table 9), and split the collection 47.0% print / 42.2% electronic / 10.7% other formats (Table 11) — which is how electronic works out to about 4¢ of every operating dollar. The wages-versus-benefits split (roughly 47¢ / 18¢) is not in those tables; it comes from summing the FY2023 public-use data file directly. That electronic line is IMLS’s “operating expenditures for electronic materials,” which the survey defines to include “e-books, e-serials, government documents, databases ... electronic files, reference tools” — so ebooks, e-audio, and database subscriptions all sit inside it. The OverDrive/KKR slice is an estimate, not a confirmed figure — on the order of a few hundred million dollars a year — precisely because OverDrive discloses no US-public-library revenue and KKR reports only firm-wide totals. The inability to confirm it is the finding, not a gap in the reporting.
The honest complication. In their most recent annual reports filed with the SEC, the publicly traded owners of public-library vendors had a mixed-to-down year on a GAAP basis: Clarivate (which owns the Innovative library system) reported a net loss; KKR’s and Constellation Software’s net income fell year over year; only Blackstone’s rose. The 2025 library cuts documented in the press traced to property-tax and state-budget politics, not vendor pricing (see, e.g., WyoFile on Wyoming’s property-tax cuts). And roughly 80% of 2025 local library funding measures passed (EveryLibrary, compiling Library Journal).
The frontlist is a law problem. The one route to owning rather than licensing digital books, controlled digital lending, was held not to be fair use by the Second Circuit in Hachette v. Internet Archive (Sept. 4, 2024), which found it a “competing substitute” for the ebook-license market (opinion, 2d Cir.; Authors Alliance).
What this is not. This is not a claim that KKR, OverDrive, or any owner is doing something illegal, or that profit is being extracted from libraries. The opposite, mostly: the library businesses are small inside these owners, and their reported profits last year were flat or down. The point is narrower and on the record: the ownership, the price, and the flow of money are structurally hidden from the people who fund and use the library.
How these filings are sourced: Method.
Filed June 2026. No corrections to date.
New filings
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