Using circulation data drawn from more than 10,000 public libraries, media app Hoopla Digital has compiled its 2025 digital trends report, which the year’s top titles leaning toward romantasy and thrillers of the past five years.
In a press statement, Hoopla Digital founder Jeff Jankowski noted “an 11% increase in total content borrows and 80 new library partners,” and the company reported that audiobook borrowing had increased 18% year-over-year in 2025. The platform offers more than 2 million titles across formats including e-books, audiobooks, music, TV, movies, comics, and manga, and most content may be borrowed instantly without holds or waiting.
Hoopla’s top five audiobooks for 2025 were Suzanne Collins’s Sunrise on the Reaping, Freida McFadden’s The Tenant and The Crash, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing. Its top five e-books included Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money, Patrick King’s Better Small Talk, Joseph Nguyen’s Don’t Believe Everything You Think, Rowling’s first Harry Potter book, and Karen Slaughter’s Pretty Girls. Expanded lists of most-borrowed audiobooks, e-books, and comics are available on Hoopla’s website; comics and manga are kept separate from e-books on the platform because consumers tend to search for them by publisher and because the action-view experience differs from traditional e-book reading.
Several children’s titles have performed well, with two of Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid titles—the original and #19, Hot Mess—among the most-borrowed e-books next to Jory John and illustrator Pete Oswald’s The Bad Seed Goes to the Library. Further down the list, Hoopla pointed out Gertrude Chandler Warner’s Boxcar Children series, a backlist mystery staple that is doing remarkably well among young readers in the digital space.
Hoopla also tracks banned or challenged titles popular among its users, including series by Collins, Rowling, and Sarah J. Maas, plus Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell’s 1949 dystopia was among Hoopla’s most-borrowed audio- and e-books of the year.
VP of content Brad Rose spoke with PW about Hoopla Digital’s audiobook and e-book collections for libraries. Audio has been Hoopla’s biggest category, with a “growing pool of listeners,” he said, along with changing “perceptions of the format and a lot more content coming into the space. We’ve increased the breadth and depth of our catalog dramatically.”
Library lending appeals to Hoopla users, Rose noted, because they can experiment: “If you only get one credit a month on Audible, you want to be pretty sure that’s the one you want. And if you’re a big fan, I think you’re listening to more than one a month.”
Hoopla also has increased the number of publishers available, Rose said, and one of their newer partners is Podium, home to several backlist audiobooks by McFadden along with Callie Hart’s new Brimstone and Quicksilver. “Not only is Podium a great publisher, but the genres they tend to publish—the romantasy, the sci-fi—have resonated with libraries,” Rose said. “Their being so series-focused, and having that deep backlist within series, allows consumers whether retail or library to dive deep.”
Self-published authors have been gaining followings through Hoopla too. “We have north of 325,000 unique audiobook SKUs and we couldn’t possibly market all of those, but there’s so much organic discovery” through Hoopla, Rose said. “People search and discover, and we have well over 200,000 unique audiobook SKUs checked out. A lot of those are indies that in many cases weren’t available in libraries before, everybody from Freida McFadden right on down the list.”
Another rising category “that cuts across audio and e-books” is world languages, Rose said. “The library space is where consumers go to look for German, French, Spanish, whatever it may be.”
In the year ahead, he said, “We’ll continue focusing on the early reader piece, children’s in general, world languages, and partnering with our publishers, because that’s what our customers need. Libraries focus on diverse needs, and we’re bringing in as much high-quality content as we can.”
