Concord library patrons will see a change in audio- and e-book services, among other media, starting Wednesday.
When the city finalized its budget for the 2026-27 fiscal year, it sought ways to tighten its belt without cutting staff positions in any departments. The library’s budget took a $38,000 cut, requiring that it end its subcription to Hoopla, a platform that provides a broad array of audiobooks, videos, music and e-books.
Library Director Todd Fabian said Hoopla first became available to Concord patrons in 2018. Despite being “popular,” it proved to be a “volatile” database to manage, he said.
“It is a per-use, kind of like a per-checkout model, so we don’t have a rolling annual contract,” he said. “It’s a monthly contract, and you essentially pay for what your users check out during the previous month. Then in the checkout totals, the prices of items might be different because there’s different tiers of content.”
As the platform grew in popularity, the library restricted the number of checkouts per user first to five, then to three, while also limiting the higher-priced premium content people could access. In 2025, Concord patrons made 19,700 total checkouts through Hoopla, Fabian said. That number was about 5,000 when the platform first became available in Concord eight years ago.
Audiobooks were the most popular item among Concord users, Fabian said.
While Hoopla offered a wider range of choices across media, patrons have other database options to fill similar needs, especially for audiobooks and digital reading material, in part thanks to a partnership with the NH Downloadable Books Consortium.
Libby is one such option, with audio- and e-books available to download for free with the use of a Concord Public Library account.
The library website also points users in the direction of free resources for audio- and e-books accessible without a library card, including Open Library, Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, Librivox and Digital Public Library of America.
The change did not come as a surprise to Fabian, who has tried to keep his budget as “conservative” as possible over the past few years.
“As there were discussions about staff cuts and personnel cuts in the city, I certainly knew that we would be looking at items like a database like Hoopla,” he said.
Ward Three City Councilor Jennifer Kretovic said she is working to find a donor to offer continued financial support so that Hoopla services can continue. However, given that talks are ongoing, she said it’s too early to share more information on that front.
Fabian, for his part, said that if funding returns in the future, he’d be interested in looking into another database, or a combination of databases, with as many offerings as Hoopla but more stable funding models.
Even the two dozen or so other databases to which the library already subscribes have more reliable costs that are more “budget-friendly,” Fabian said.
“Other databases that don’t have this model,” he said, “they have a more consistent pricing model, so we can promote them and we know that we can afford them. It’s not a sort of an inconsistent pricing platform.”
