OverDrive Is Selling Publishers the Data of How Deep Your Patrons Read

BLUF

OverDrive just launched Amplify, a publisher intelligence product built on behavioral data from hundreds of millions of monthly reading sessions across Libby and Sora. What readers search, borrow, and how far they read is now packaged and sold to publishers. OverDrive says the data is aggregated and anonymized. They do not define either word.

TL;DR

OverDrive launched a product called Amplify that sells publisher intelligence built from your patrons' reading behavior. The quiet part is being said out loud and monetized - Your library is the data source. Your patrons are the product.

My version

I was deep down the Librar Labs research hole when I stumbled upon an ad in Publishers Weekly. One thing I learned in legaltech marketing is that you can buy these trade publication sponsored posts that look like real articles, interviews, thought pieces. They're designed to match the look and feel of the real thing. The tell on this one is at the bottom: “Sponsored by OverDrive.”

In my career as a public librarian and vendor, I have never heard nor used the term “post-acquisition performance data.” Because in the Libby and Sora apps, performance data is reader behavioral data. And we don't track reader behavioral data. That's why the phrase sounded so out of place.

But inside Libby and Sora, anything you do can be turned into a number. A search, a borrow, how far you read before you set the book down: each one is a data point that gets measured and tracked.

In OverDrive's own Publishers Weekly spotlight, Potash spelled out what's for sale:

“We can now report to a publisher patterns in how readers move through a title. By studying reader behaviors across billions of data points, which sections hold attention, how long completion takes, where sessions end without finishing, we generate findings that help publishers target underperforming segments of their catalogs or validate their sales and marketing campaigns.”

One more time for the folks in the back. They said they can report to publishers, in their own words:

• Which sections hold attention
• How long completion takes
• Where sessions end without finishing

This is exactly why my family does not use the Libby or Sora app.

Who runs this now

Three weeks after that presentation, OverDrive announced that Potash was done being CEO. After 40 years, the founder moved up to chairman on June 23, and the new chief executive is Marc DeBevoise: former CEO of CBS Interactive, former Chief Digital Officer of Paramount, former CEO of Brightcove. A week into the job, he told the tech newsletter Lowpass: "AI is the new frontier for us."

Read that resume again. It is not a library resume. It's a streaming-and-audience-monetization resume, and it now sits on top of the company that just told publishers every borrow is a data point.

I'm not claiming a sale is coming. Nobody outside KKR knows that. What the record shows is narrower and still worth saying plainly: KKR has held OverDrive since 2020 inside a fund raised in 2017, funds that age get harvested, and the owner just swapped a founder for an operator whose specialty is getting more yield out of an audience platform. Amplify was announced under Potash. Whatever gets built on top of it belongs to DeBevoise.

Filed June 2026. No corrections to date.