Naperville Public Library has significantly expanded their digital collections, adding more than 850,000 new e-books in the past two years as part of an effort to meet growing demand for accessible and convenient reading options.
Digital materials (including e-books, audiobooks) now represent 25% of the library’s total collection, up from just 4% a decade ago. Ashfaq Syed, President of the Naperville Public Library Board of Trustees, believes that it’s indicative of a technological and societal shift.
“People are changing their format; [a] lot of people are moving from traditional books to a digital [format] on their laptops,” Syed said. “They want to read online. They don’t want to carry the books around.”
E-books have “many advantages,” according to Syed. Since they are digital, people are able to check them out even when the library is closed.
“I see the need to adapt to current conditions using current technology,” said Naperville city councilman Paul Leong, liaison to the Naperville Public Library Board of Trustees.
However, the digital additions come at a price: the library spent more than $1.6 million on e-books and other digital materials in FY2023, according to Illinois Public Library Annual Reports. It marks the first year on record that the library spent more on electronic materials than all other collection expenditures combined.
“Electronic materials are much more expensive for libraries to purchase than print materials, so it’s not possible to provide electronic materials at the rate we’d like to, but we are working on allocating more money to electronic materials,” Syed said. “So we can buy electronic things, but to a limit. We cannot buy everything electronic because of the cost.”
Still, Syed believes the cost is worth their benefit. In FY2023, more than 640,000 digital materials were loaned from Naperville Public Libraries, up 25% from FY2021.
“A lot of people have been asking for e-books nowadays,” Syed said. “Things are slowly changing from traditional to e-books, which we are working on, but it will take little time to get everything electronically.”
