While some libraries across the U.S. are worrying over which books to ban, many others are finding their catalogs overrun by extremely problematic titles — antivaxx ideals, Holocaust denial, white supremacy, you name it. That’s because Hoopla, a bulk ebook subscription service, has been adding these books to its extensive leasing collection, a new investigation from Motherboard reveals.
Hoopla is a service used by libraries to add large numbers of ebooks to their own collections, rather than selecting and leasing each ebook individually, as services like OverDrive allow for. There’s a cost-benefit to this methodology, but it also takes control away from the library and puts it into the hands of this third-party company. More than 8,500 public libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand utilize Hoopla.
