Almost 40,000 libraries and schools in over 30 countries use OverDrive platform to offer their users books in digital format.
The catalog includes over 2 million ebooks and audiobooks from 5,000 publishers, in over 100 languages. Currently, users are borrowing 12 titles every single second.
OverDrive started distributing digital content to libraries in 2003. The first ebook was checked out on April 8. Since that time, more than 1 billion digital books were borrowed from connected public and school libraries.
The company is celebrating this milestone with an infographic that puts together interesting facts about most popular books and authors.
A section that ranks authors based on the total number of checkouts of their books is extremely interesting, as it shows how popular the service is.
Take a look. Ebooks and audiobooks authored or co-authored by James Patterson were borrowed 20,943,434 times. When you compare this number with how many James Patterson books are available in different formats and languages in the OverDrive catalog (currently, it’s 1,998), you’ll see that on average one title was borrowed 10,500 times.
Nora Roberts is the other author with the number of checkouts higher than 10 million – it’s 11,803,920. The last author in the Top 10, Rick Riordan, enjoyed “only” some 4.4 million checkouts.
It’s interesting that Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl – the most borrowed OverDrive book of all time, didn’t make it to the list of most popular authors.
It you are a reader and would like to borrow library ebooks or audiobooks, check out whether your public or school library is powered by OverDrive.
If you’d want your library to join the network, read the details here.
Top 10 most borrowed authors in OverDrive libraries
| No. | Author | Total number of checkouts |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | James Patterson | 20,943,434 |
| 2. | Nora Roberts | 11,803,920 |
| 3. | Lee Child | 9,945,461 |
| 4. | John Grisham | 9,008,871 |
| 5. | Janet Evanovich | 8,714,341 |
| 6. | David Baldacci | 8,275,703 |
| 7. | Debbie Macomber | 7,867,945 |
| 8. | Michael Connelly | 6,797,864 |
| 9. | J.K. Rowling | 4,449,909 |
| 10. | Rick Riordan | 4,419,877 |
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