Hoopla

Borrow ebooks, audiobooks, videos, music and more. Access thousands of titles on your smartphone, tablet or computer. There’s no waiting to borrow and automatic return eliminates all late fees. Create an account with your library card number.

Resource provided by the Acton Memorial Library

Changes to Hoopla access

Beginning November 3, 2025:

• Acton patrons will still be allowed 8 borrows per month. This number of checkouts has not changed.
• We are implementing a budget cap on our Hoopla service. This means that once the library has spent its budgeted amount on checkouts each day, no more checkouts will be allowed for anyone until the following day, even if an individual has monthly borrows available in their account.

Why make this change?

Hoopla is free to Acton residents, but the library pays per checkout – so as usage increases, so do the library’s costs. 

Although we are thrilled to offer a service that is so well-used, our cost per month has increased by more than 365% since 2016, with no end in sight. 

Since WE love Hoopla and YOU love Hoopla, we want to make sure we can continue to offer the service to as many patrons as we can. This means controlling our costs in order to keep the service sustainable and within budget.

What will this change look like?

When the budget limit for the day has been reached you will see this message, even if you haven’t used all your checkouts for the month:

The collective daily borrow limit set by your library has been reached and will reset at midnight. Please browse and add titles to favorites so you can easily access them after midnight.

When the borrow limit is reached, no one will be able to check out Hoopla items for the remainder of that day; checkouts will resume at 12:01 a.m. the following day.

We understand that this is a big change to Hoopla for our patrons, and that it will be inconvenient for you to sometimes find that the budget limit has been reached for the day. 

Ways to increase your access to Hoopla titles and other digital platforms

• Bonus Borrows are available through Hoopla on the last 7 days of every month. This is a special collection of titles that is available even if you’ve used your regular borrows for the month – and these checkouts are outside of our budget cap and come at no cost to the library. For that last 7 days of the month, you can always check out from the Bonus Borrows collection no matter what.
• In Libby, you can look at titles available for checkout immediately by filtering results to “Available Now.” Our librarians can also help you connect your Libby account to collections from the other library networks in Massachusetts, which should decrease your wait times for most items.
• Kanopy is a video streaming service that gives you instant access to movies, documentaries, and kids’ favorites. Like in Hoopla, titles are always available with no wait times.

We are grateful that so many people like and use our library’s services, and we appreciate your understanding as we work to keep Hoopla’s costs within our budget.