Hoopla has been around for a number of years and currently they have a catalog of 15,000 audiobook titles. Hoopla deals with over 100 libraries in the US and charges no licensing fees with setting up the system, which is quite appealing to the average library. How does Hoopla make money? The company has employed the Pay Per Use model, which only charges the library when a specific title is checked out by a patron. In order to scale their business they have just announced they are now offering e-books & digital comics.
Hoopla is currently offering 5,509 e-books and 579 comics from an assortment of publishers. They currently don’t deal with any of the Big 5, so you won’t find anything from the New York Times bestseller list. Instead, the bulk of their e-books derive from Dundurn, Tyndale, Chicago Review, Rosetta and Orca.
It remains to be seen if this expanded catalog will appeal to libraries not doing business with Hoopla. I think it helps, but won’t be a deciding factor until they can offer e-books from major publishers and give a better value proposition than Overdrive, 3M or B&T.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
