What Your Library Actually Pays OverDrive

Vendors don’t usually let you see the invoice. So when a library’s OverDrive bill turns up in a public board packet (with the formula attached), it’s worth reading line by line. This one is from Davis County, Utah, and it lays out, in the library’s own documents, exactly how much it pays OverDrive and why.

The number the board approved for 2026: $122,640.39.

The bill is built from your patrons’ reading

Davis County belongs to the Beehive Library Consortium, a shared OverDrive buying pool run by the Utah State Library. The consortium agreement spells out how each member’s share is set, and it isn’t a flat fee or a per-title price. It’s usage. In the agreement’s own words, a library’s contribution “will be based on [the library’s] percentage of the total OverDrive circulation from the previous calendar year.”

Here is that formula with Davis County’s real numbers:

• Davis County’s 2024 OverDrive circulation: 1,127,583 checkouts
• The whole consortium’s 2024 circulation: 7,034,987; so Davis County’s share is 16.03%
• The consortium’s total 2026 OverDrive budget: $765,153
• Davis County’s portion: $122,640.39 (16.03% of that budget)

Read it the right way and it’s startling: your OverDrive bill goes up the more your community uses OverDrive. The library’s deputy director told the board exactly that: Davis County “has the heaviest amount of usage in the Consortium… which is why the cost has increased.” Borrowing is the thing libraries exist to encourage. Here it is the thing that runs up the tab.

It is also the opposite of the story OverDrive tells publishers. OverDrive funds research arguing that library lending drives discovery and sales: the “showroom” pitch. Its own pricing assumes the reverse: every checkout is a cost to be paid for. A library that succeeds at its mission simply pays more for it.

Two collections, and a “credit” that isn’t one

A member library’s money doesn’t all go to the same place. There are two collections:

• The shared (state) collection: the Utah State Library picks and buys the titles, the consortium owns them, and every patron in the state can borrow them.
• The local “Advantage” collection: the library picks and buys the titles itself, the library owns them, and its own patrons get priority.

The agreement’s “Additional Financial Information” line reads: “We receive 50% as credit towards purchasing titles for Overdrive.” That sounds like a discount, or a match from OverDrive. It is neither. It means Davis County chose to split its payment: half to the state’s shared selection, half back to its own Advantage account to buy titles it controls. The library still pays the full $122,640.39. The “credit” is purchasing control over half of it, not money off.

And that 50% is new. Until recently Davis County got back only 25% for its own patrons; the other 75% bought state-selected titles “without a Davis County advantage.” Because heavy use was driving the bill up, the library negotiated the split to 50/50, described in the minutes as a search for “a solution that was more fair to our patrons.” Put plainly: a library paying $122,000 a year had to push to control half of its own money.

The part nobody mentions: it’s mostly audiobooks

One more line from the same meeting. A trustee asked what share of the books-and-materials budget goes to audiobooks. The answer: almost half. The fastest-growing, most-marked-up digital format is quietly taking over the materials budget. That’s its own story, and one this site is still reporting.

The same story, a bigger library

Davis County’s formula explains how the bill is set. A second library, in another state, shows what it adds up to over time. Spokane Public Library laid out its own numbers in a public post, and they’re worth sitting with. Spokane spends more than a third of its $1.5 million materials budget on OverDrive content alone, the same lopsided share Davis County is wrestling with. Its average eBook runs about $40 and its average audiobook about $73, three to four times what the physical book costs. And unlike the print copy it keeps “forever,” the digital license has to be renewed on a schedule.

The clearest number is the one about what disappears. Since subscribing to OverDrive in 2012, Spokane has spent $3.3 million to buy or lease roughly 87,000 copies. Because the licenses expire, it currently has just over 42,000 still on the shelf. It paid for eighty-seven thousand and kept forty-two. The other forty-five thousand evaporated on schedule, to be repurchased if the library still wants them. That is the treadmill in one line: you don’t buy the book, you rent the right to lend it, and the rent comes due again and again.

And the per-title math is brutal at the front of the holds queue. To buy enough copies of one popular novel, Kristin Hannah’s The Women, to clear its hold list, Spokane reported it would cost $21,718. For one title. As the American Library Association’s Alan Inouye put it, the prices are “assigned to libraries by publishing companies who fear unlimited access to eBooks would damage sales.” Libraries are less than 2% of digital sales, so they largely pay what they’re told.

Where one ebook’s money actually goes

The consortium bill is one altitude. Drop to a single book and the same logic shows up in miniature. Take one popular ebook at roughly the going library rate (about $55 for a two-year license) and follow it. Treat this as one worked example, not the whole market: every publisher prices and splits differently, and there are discounts we can’t see. The money splits roughly three ways, and the person who wrote the book gets the smallest piece. Change the numbers and the split recomputes.

What to take from the desk

If you sit inside a consortium like this, three things are worth knowing in writing:

• Know your formula. Ask whether your contribution is set by circulation share, and what the consortium’s total OverDrive budget is. If it’s usage-based, model what happens to your bill as your digital circulation grows. It will.
• Know your split. Ask what percentage of your payment comes back to your own Advantage account versus state-selected titles. Davis County’s jump from 25% to 50% started with asking.
• Name it for your board. “Our OverDrive bill rises with our patrons’ reading” is a sentence trustees should hear before they approve the next one. It turns the line item from a service you buy into a meter that runs.

None of this is hidden, exactly. It’s in the board packet, the agreement, the minutes: public record, if you go and read it. Most people never do. That is the whole reason to put the receipt on the table.