If you’re someone who frequents a North Carolina public library — especially in an urban area like Raleigh or Charlotte — you might be all too familiar with searching the catalog for a buzzy book, only to find the waitlist is hundreds, if not thousands, of people long.
Local library employees say the entire country faces this issue, but North Carolina’s booming population and the growing number of library patrons in the state make it especially challenging.
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Even worse than the waitlist for physical copies is the one for e-book and audiobook versions. E-content has unique barriers, including costing libraries up to three times the price of a physical book, that make it difficult to keep up with the heightened demand.
Population, library and book usage trends
“Yesteryear,” a 2026 novel by a debut author that examines “tradwife” influencer culture on social media, has been a viral sensation since its spring release. As of mid-August, all 232 of Wake County’s physical copies are checked out, and more than 1,700 people are on the waitlist between standard and large print copies. At Charlotte Mecklenburg Libraries, 376 print copies are checked out and almost twice as many holds are in place.
If waitlists get so long that the ratio of holds to total copies exceeds a certain threshold, Selection Manager for Wake County Public Libraries Dan Brooks told Carolina Public Press, the libraries decide to purchase additional copies. For children’s books, that’s about one copy for every five holds, but the ratio is a bit higher for adult titles. Harold Escalante, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Assistant Director of Collections and Access, told CPP its ratio for print titles is four to one.
Celebrity book club picks like Jenna Bush Hager’s “Read with Jenna” and Reese Witherspoon’s “Reese’s Book Club” consistently generate long waitlists, especially if they’re thrillers, Brooks and Escalante said. Others can go viral any day and take library managers by surprise.
“Some titles, like 'The Correspondent' or 'Yesteryear,' which did end up being one of the book club picks, just sort of build more slowly over time, but then just keep building and building with higher momentum,” Brooks said. “We just have to keep buying more copies until we get to that ratio.”
WCPL patrons might be familiar with the branch’s “Lucky Day Collection.” Each month WCPL chooses four to six books to buy an extra 75 to 125 copies of that aren’t used to fill holds. Instead, they are distributed among the 23 locations to be put on the Lucky Day display, available for checkout then and there.
It’s a way for readers to get their hands on the most sought after titles without having to wait for their turn on the hold list — and it helps shorten the waitlists, even if by a small margin.
But the e-content waitlists often go above and beyond. In the case of “Yesteryear,” more than 5,000 patrons are waitlisted for a copy of one of the 452 e-books or audiobooks in Wake County. In Charlotte, for 585 e-book and audiobooks, there are over 4,500 holds.
With around 66 people moving into Wake County per day, the libraries subsequently have new patrons coming in to register for a library card every single day, Brooks said. This heightened demand can be noticed most by the surge in e-content checkouts.
“We’ve definitely seen a huge increase in our digital e-book and downloadable audiobook usage,” Brooks said.
“From 2019 to 2026, it’s been a 200% increase. We circulated about 1.1 million in fiscal year 2019, and then over 3.5 million in fiscal year 2026. The whole issue with e-books and long waits and more demand than libraries can satisfy is not unique to Wake. It’s a national phenomenon happening.”
Through migration alone, 135 people move to the Charlotte region per day on average, with Mecklenburg County leading the pack. Charlotte currently ranks as the United States’ 14th-largest city, and it could move up the list if growth trends continue.
Population growth can impact the resources libraries have available, however not every new resident will become a cardholder, Escalante wrote in an email. It’s something Charlotte Mecklenburg considers, but it’s not always a driving force for purchasing decisions.
While population growth is part of North Carolina’s story, President and CEO of the Urban Libraries Council Brooks Rainwater told CPP there’s generally been more usage of libraries since the pandemic, so local libraries could still be seeing an increase in patrons even if their area isn’t experiencing significant population changes.
Research the ULC released in 2024 found that while in-person visits were still lower than they were pre-pandemic, they were rising again quickly — responding libraries reported a 24% increase from 2022 to 2023. And in the same timeframe, use of meeting rooms and digital resources increased by 52% despite the lower attendance.
“If you look at baseline numbers from coming out of the pandemic to now, we’ve been seeing more and more people return to the library,” Rainwater said.
“We’ve also been seeing usage patterns change, where more people are renting rooms within the libraries. It can be really difficult in some library branches and central libraries to actually find room rentals because everybody is going there to work remotely or using them to meet with friends or other things.”
‘Disappearing, limited-access content’
Demand for digital items has steadily risen, especially since the pandemic, Escalante wrote. The challenge for keeping e-content available consistently is “always going to be the increasing cost of digital licenses.”
The ULC and other national library organizations recently spoke out about the strain the licensing process and cost of e-content is putting on local branches. An open letter to book publishers says while individuals pay $13 for an e-book on average, which they maintain access to in perpetuity, libraries often spend upwards of $55 for a singular two-year license.
“Many libraries are now spending 50% or more of their collections budgets — taxpayer funds — on disappearing, limited-access content, giving them less ability to support lesser-known authors and smaller publishers,” the statement reads.
“Meanwhile, wait times for readers of all ages have exploded, as libraries spend more to get less in our digital collection.”
Audiobooks of thrillers from popular authors like Stephen King or Ruth Ware can be more than $100 per copy, but most others are between $50 and $75, Brooks said. E-content is usually provided with metered access, meaning libraries can distribute the book for 12 to 24 months or up to a certain number of checkouts.
Licensing is set by publishing houses, namely the “big five” — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan Publishers and Hachette Book Group — as well as e-book distributors like Hoopla, Overdrive and Libby. Copyright laws function differently for digital content versus physical books, which is why the pricing structure varies, Rainwater said.
Just keeping up with expiring titles and purchasing additional copies to bring the wait down to a reasonable timeframe takes up about 75% of WCPL’s weekly spending, leaving around 25% of the budget for new titles, Brooks said.
The cost can lead libraries to remove e-content from its collections if they aren’t getting enough use. At WCPL, they track how many checkouts content receives and use that to help determine whether it’s worth renewing for another cycle.
“If it’s a title we’ve owned for three or four years, but it was only checked out 20 times last year, that might not be high enough to renew it, given the demand of the newer, more popular titles,” Brooks said.
“So we will have to remove things from the collection on the digital side, versus, if you get print copies, they’ll last until they fall apart, so they can stay in much longer than 26 checkouts or 12 months.”
One advantage of digital items is that they are returned to the library and fill the next hold automatically, Escalante wrote. Plus, they are never lost. This helps patrons move through the hold list more quickly than print titles. But still, they have to think and buy strategically.
“To overcome some of the challenges of high-cost licenses, we make sure we are choosing the license that makes financial sense,” Escalante wrote.
“We are also exploring some cost per borrow models to address demand quickly.”
Meeting in the middle
Wait times for e-content have gone up tremendously across the country, Rainwater said. Library budgets can’t always align with the whims of reader trends, and if budgets aren’t expanding, the hope is that book publishers seize the opportunity to increase access by making e-content more affordable for libraries.
“There’s only so much money that can be spent on e-content, so the wait times go up and up because we can only afford to buy so much of this material,” Rainwater said.
“The only way that you can solve this is either to get better usage terms, better contract terms, rethinking the way that we have our relationships with the big five publishers in particular, or if local governments want to spend more money on e-books — and to me it feels like the amount we are spending now is more than fair. There’s got to be a way that we can meet in the middle.”
It would be preferable, and a more responsible use of taxpayer funds, for e-content to be licensed by number of checkouts instead of by time, Rainwater said. Otherwise, libraries are using precious funds for items they aren’t getting full use of. He also suggests libraries having the option to pay a premium for older titles to keep them in perpetuity in order to both build and sustain their collections.
It’s a misconception that libraries and book publishers are in competition with one another, Rainwater said. Libraries can be a first-stop for readers looking for books to add to their personal library or experimenting with a new author or genre before purchasing. Plus, they really have the same goal.
“Collectively, we in the library field as well as the publishers want to see more people reading,” Rainwater said.
“Libraries as a location are a place where people come in and read and often buy books. It’s not as though the people coming to libraries only utilize libraries for reading. That is where the preponderance of people that do read go. We have author talks all the time, and then people go out and buy those books.
“So … there’s a misnomer within the publishing industry that somehow there’s competition rather than all of this is truly a complementary business environment where everybody wants to make sure people have the access to reading.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.