OverDrive: Sora serves 80,000 libraries
- OverDrive published Sora’s third annual K-12 digital reading report on May 4, built from 4 million student users across the 2024–2025 school year. - The big number is 349 million reading sessions and nearly 60 million checkouts, with ebooks at 85% and audiobooks at 11%. - It matters because OverDrive’s own footprint now spans 92,000 libraries and schools in 115 countries.
School reading apps usually sound boring. But this one is really about scale — and about how much of modern library reading now happens through one company’s pipes. On May 4, OverDrive released its third annual Sora report, using anonymized data from more than 4 million student users to show how kids actually read on school devices and library-linked accounts during the 2024–2025 year. The headline numbers are huge, but the more interesting part is what they say about where digital reading is settling: mostly ebooks, steadily more audio, and a library platform that now reaches 92,000 libraries and schools across 115 countries. (company.overdrive.com) ### What is Sora, exactly? Sora is OverDrive’s student reading app — basically the school-side sibling to Libby, which public library users know for borrowing ebooks and audiobooks. Schools use Sora to give students access to assigned r(company.overdrive.com) literacy platform, not just a checkout button. (company.overdrive.com) ### What changed this week? The news is the new annual report. OverDrive says the 2024–2025 school year produced more than 349 million reading sessions in Sora, nearly 60 million digital checkouts worldwide, and an average of 2.5 millio(company.overdrive.com)ng normal infrastructure. (company.overdrive.com) ### What do students actually borrow? Mostly ebooks. OverDrive says 85% of total checkouts in the report period were ebooks, while audiobooks made up 11% and magazines 4%. That split matters because it pushes back on the idea that student digital reading is turning into mostly passive listening. Audio is clearly important, but the center of gravity is still text on a screen. (company.overdrive.com) ### Why does the 4 million user number matter? Because it means this is not a tiny pilot or a handful of districts with strong budgets. A dataset built from more than 4 million student users is big enough to show real behavior patterns (company.overdrive.com)it’s strongest as a picture of platform activity, not as a neutral verdict on literacy outcomes. (company.overdrive.com) ### Why keep talking about libraries? Because OverDrive’s school story and library story are connected. In January, the company said its broader Libby-Sora-Kanopy network handled more than 820 million checkouts in 2025, including 63.4 m(company.overdrive.com)n education update — it’s another signal that digital borrowing has become a core library service at global scale. (company.overdrive.com) ### Is 80,000 the right number? Not anymore, at least on OverDrive’s current materials. The new Sora release says “more than 80,000 libraries and schools,” but OverDrive’s company profile and a March company post both use 92,000 across the same 115 countries. That looks less like a contradiction than a stale boilerplate number still showing up in some places. (company.overdrive.com) ### So what’s the real takeaway? Digital school reading is no longer a side channel. It’s a mainstream delivery system for books, and OverDrive is one of the companies sitting in the middle of that shift. The report’s biggest message is(company.overdrive.com)bigger. (company.overdrive.com)
