OverDrive/Libby Controls 95% of U.S. Public Library Digital Lending, Creating a Single-Vendor Dependency with No Competitive Pressure

More than 95% of public libraries in the United States and Canada rely on OverDrive's Libby app as their sole platform for lending ebooks, audiobooks, and digital magazines, processing over 739 million checkouts in 2024 and 820 million in 2025. Why it matters: a single private company controls the infrastructure through which virtually all public library digital lending occurs, so libraries have minimal negotiating leverage on platform fees, interface design, or data ownership, so if OverDrive changes pricing, terms of service, or discontinues features, libraries have no viable alternative to migrate to, so patron reading data and borrowing habits for hundreds of millions of transactions are concentrated in one company's servers with limited transparency, so the public good of library digital access is dependent on the business decisions of a private monopoly rather than on public infrastructure. The structural root cause is that decades of library technology market consolidation -- including Rakuten's 2015 acquisition of OverDrive for $410 million -- combined with the high switching costs of migrating digital catalogs, patron accounts, and publisher agreements, have created a natural monopoly that competitors like cloudLibrary, Hoopla, and ODILO cannot meaningfully challenge.