Anchorage's library puts Hoopla on a budget with new borrowing limits

Anchorage Public Library cardholders who reach for Hoopla — the app that lends movies, audiobooks, e-books, music and comics — may now find it has gone dark for the day, with a message to come back tomorrow. The service resets each morning and switches off once the system reaches a daily spending cap, first-come, first-served. Patrons also get half of what they used to: the monthly limit dropped from eight items to four in January.

The squeeze comes from how Hoopla is built. Most library lending runs on a fixed number of copies the library owns or licenses, which is why patrons wait in line for popular titles. Hoopla skips the line: its catalog of more than 500,000 titles is instant and waitlist-free, but the library pays every time someone borrows something. The more people use it, the more it costs — and by late 2025 it was running Anchorage more than $27,000 a month.

That is the number the new limits are built to bring down. The library has asked the Anchorage Assembly to approve $150,000 to keep Hoopla going from May through December, a sole-source deal with Midwest Tape, the platform's only provider. Spread across those eight months, the contract works out to about $18,750 a month — roughly 30 percent below the old burn rate. The daily shutoff is just the enforcement: once the day's money is gone, the digital doors close until morning.

Demand hasn't cooled. Even under the tighter rules, patrons have checked out more than 31,000 items this year, and the first-come, first-served cap means access can now hinge on timing — log on after work on a busy day and the service may already be tapped out. The library, which has funded Hoopla in each of the past two years, says it will assess whether the limits are working after at least six months. The Assembly has yet to vote.