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How Digital Lending Service Hoopla Brings Libraries Into Internet Era

Forbes: “Libraries and their digital offerings are one of the most overlooked segments of the ebook industry. Hoopla, one of the digital lending services allowing libraries to offer ebooks and other digital content, has helped drive the unassuming library ebook to success in over 1,600 public library systems. Hoopla Digital’s goal is to enable instantaneous and simultaneous access to library content: By cutting out the waiting period, digital lending services like Hoopla can offer a library user experience with the addition of a little internet-era instant gratification. As a result, the promise of public service that libraries are built on can become even more relevant to an online generation. And with Hoopla’s app, any of the 619,220 titles the service currently provides is just a simple click away.  Hoopla is the digital arm of Midwest Tape, a lending service that has helped stock libraries with physical media like DVDs and audiobooks since its 1989 founding by Jeff Jankowski and John Eldred. Launched in 2014, the service has branched out far beyond just ebooks, handling 296,847 music albums, 20,936 TV titles, 14,501 movies, and 52,944 audiobooks. It added comics as a category in 2015, and already offers a total of 13,164 titles from every major comics publisher. The president of publishing and marketing for Boom Studios, Filip Sablik, told Publishers Weekly last year that the independent comics publisher “hadn’t seen a ton of immediate great returns until we started working with Hoopla,” and that “it’s been surprisingly robust over the past year.” Given the rapid rate of deterioration that a single-issue periodical comic can undergo thanks to particularly enthusiastic library patrons, the digital version can be considered a step up from the physical one…”

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