Carol Daumer Gutjahr was sitting at the airport when she needed to borrow some books for her flight. No problem.
The executive director of the Lake County Public Library, which has nine branches, was able to get what she needed right there at the airport – and without paying airport prices. She picked up her iPad and found what she needed online.
“In the past, I would take three or four books because you just never know sometimes what you would want to read,” she said. She usually packed a few magazines, too, so her reading material could match her mood at the moment.
Digital borrowing is proving popular for many patrons as libraries strive to improve the customer experience.
At the Porter County Public Library System, Director Jesse Butz said total digital circulation – books, audio, databases, video, magazines and music – outnumbered physical circulation in 2024, 504,339 to 455,591.
Ease of e-readers
A variety of factors affected the numbers for physical items. Magazines, DVDs and music are losing popularity to streaming services, Butz said. Library hours were cut 2%, too, as the library system began adjusting to the anticipated revenue drop that Senate Enrolled Act 1 is causing for local governments statewide.
Borrowing electronically can happen anytime, anywhere. Digital audiobook borrowing increased 16% last year. “They’re so very convenient; we’ve got so many commuters in the area,” Butz said. Many modern cars don’t even have CD players built in. Apple CarPlay and its Android equivalent are becoming the standard.
Butz reads almost exclusively on a Kindle Paperwhite, as do his wife and one of his sons.
The other son prefers physical books.
A Kindle is more convenient for Butz, who accompanied his wife to medical appointments. “I was bringing a heavy backpack constantly. I had her book and my book.”
Reading on the phone wasn’t comfortable because of the screen size, so he found an Amazon deal for a Kindle. “No running to the bookstore, no running to the library,”
“I’ll go on the Indiana Digital Library, and we’ll put a bunch of holds on books,” Butz said. “To be able to do that from home is enormously beneficial.”
“You don’t want to take 30 books in your luggage. You want to take one device with a thousand books,” he said.
The Kindle Paperwhite reduces the glare of a regular screen. “You start to have that convenience, and honestly, you don’t miss that book,” Butz said.
Reading a sci-fi book, “I can press and hold and get the definition right there,” he said.
For his digital son, “I think it’s been helping to increase his engagement with literacy rather than video games.”
“They’re not necessarily a replacement for physical if you don’t want them to be,” Butz said.
Snowbirds and other seniors are big fans of e-readers. “They’d load up their Kindles and go on a cruise,” Butz said.
“It is nice to bump up the point size,” Daumer Gutjahr noted, giving the ease of reading a large print book without the extra weight.
Some people prefer to use the theatrical versions of audiobooks, which aren’t limited to a single narrator. “In a way, you have a cast reading to you,” she said.
Indiana Digital Library
Butz was instrumental in making digital lending so easy for nearly all of Indiana’s libraries. He helped set up the Indiana Digital Library, working with the Indiana State Library and Stephanie Murphy, who is now at the St. Joseph County Public Library.
Now, more than 200 libraries across Indiana can borrow digital materials purchased elsewhere.
Lake County Public Library, which has nine branches, is too large to be eligible for participation. Digital lending is popular there, with 785,433 digital loans last year, but the 1,445,919 physical items were nearly double that number, Daumer Gutjahr said.
Crown Point Public Library Director Julie Wendorf said digital lending was up 13.6% over 2024, at 125,932, while physical materials were down 0.4% to 360,569. The drop in physical lending could have been simply the result of days the library was closed for weather or other reasons, she said.
The formation of the Indiana Digital Library was transformative, she said.
“Digital purchasing for individual libraries is quite expensive,” she said. An ebook might cost an individual $14 or $15, but libraries don’t get that price. They buy a license for a year or two, or for a limited number of readers. “The cost of that book might be as much as $80.”
The American Library Association believes publishers are discriminating against libraries, Wendorf said.
Libraries get a discounted price for printed materials. “A library can lend that book until it falls apart,” she said.
Print preferences
Even with the growth of digital, some readers prefer print.
“I find that some of our younger readers are definitely trying to decrease their screen time,” Wendorf said. By young, she’s referring to Millennials and Generation Z. “They’re the ones that have the strongest feelings about reading in print,” she said.
Book collecting is on the rise for readers in that age group.
Daumer Gutjahr admits to a fondness for physical materials even as she uses her iPad to read. “I have a lot of paperbacks at home and hard copies that I love,” she said.
Enticing children to read is important.
Children’s material accounts for 60% of circulation at the Crown Point library, up 2.8% over 2024, Wendorf said. Printed material is the big driver.
“We’ve seen that growth for a number of years,” she said. “We like to see that pattern building.”
Changing the visitor experience
At the Porter County Public Library System branches, the way children’s material is being displayed is changing, starting with the Hebron branch.
At Hebron, picture books are grouped by topic. “It won’t just have words; it will have pictures of dogs and cats and superheroes,” Butz said.
“Right now, we sort them by the author’s last name. So if you say I want dinosaur books, what a patron would have to do is search ‘dino.’ As a system, we’ve got 4,342 books on dino. If I want to see where a book is, this book right here, I have to go to the Valpo branch in the picture books section, I have to look for VAISB. That’s the author’s last name. That’s how I find it. So if I want that one title, outstanding, very easy to find. But what happens if I want the next title? This one is WHEEL, so I’ve got one in V and one in W,” and so forth. “Each one of them will be in different sections as we go. They’re all over, 4,000 of them.”
“That’s not how kids browse,” Butz said. “We want to give agency to each of these kids. We want them to be able to guide their literacy journey and experience it, and we want them to have fun,” he said. “But they just want dinos. They’re obsessed with dinos. So let’s give them the dinos, not have them do a scavenger hunt where they may or may not find these books.”
“I’ve seen it in my own library when a kid put his arm around all these books and dumped them into a wagon, just giggling hysterically the whole time,” Butz said.
The picture books are being displayed like albums at a record store. Kids can flip through them and see the covers without having to pull each book off the shelf first.
Letting books put their best face forward rather than just displaying their spines is important to Butz and, he believes, to library users.
He’s discarding the Dewey decimal system to group material by genre, like mystery and science fiction. Shelves at the Valparaiso branch have large labels to guide people to the section they’re interested in, much like at a bookstore.
“You don’t browse Dewey. That’s why bookstores don’t use it. It’s designed for librarians who are trying to put something on a shelf, find it and put it back right away. Most people don’t look like that. They come in, and they want to browse their genre,” Butz said.
“Personally, I’m a sci-fi and fantasy guy. I won’t leave these three rows the whole time I’m here. So why should we design this whole collection around the librarian, when it’s for the convenience of the patrons that we really want you to do?”
“Before, you wouldn’t enter these stacks unless you knew the exact title you’re looking for. Now you’re invited to come in, you’re invited to explore, invited to find new materials,” Butz said.
That helps the customer, but it also affects how the books are organized by librarians for easy retrieval and shelving. The new taxonomy will work like a cookbook: French, author’s last name. “As long as you can get to your zone, it’s going to be more intuitive than ever,” he said.
Explore and discover
Inside the stacks, zigzag shelves allow some of the books to be judged by their covers rather than by their spines. “We’re partnering with the career and technical team over at Valpo Schools, and they’re going to build these so we’ve got more of them,” Butz said.
“You can look all the way through. It makes it feel lighter, airier, more comfortable,” he said. Less claustrophobic, too.
“If you can’t find a book here you’ve never seen, you’re just absolutely not trying,” he said.
Next month, the Porter County Library Board will be asking permission to buy new shelving to make the arrangement work.
Butz has other changes in the works, too.
Already, the entry doors automatically slide open when a visitor approaches. That’s in response to the patron who said when she pushed the button for the door to swing open, it started closing by the time she could get her walker through it.
The main lobby will be remodeled to remove the large circulation desk and have two pods for borrowers in its place. That opens up space to display more materials.
Tables in the reference area will be replaced with study carrels that give more privacy, scattered throughout the library. Café tables are already by the windows so patrons can have more light when they’re sitting to chat or read.
Spending more time at the library means being exposed to more books.
“By doing the displays the way we have, and doing what we have with the classification changes, I think it’s going to be so much easier and accessible,” Butz said.
“Librarians struggle with this a little bit because we think it’s easy to find. There’s a system; look it up, and it should be where it’s supposed to be.”
“You don’t think about displays and the wayfinding and the habits of the patrons. What we’re trying to do is divorce ourselves from us as librarians and focus on us as human. How do we interact? When we go to a store, what do we look for?”
“I just want to see something I’ve never seen before. I want to hunt. It’s very rare that I see the exact same book that I wanted that moment, so I use that as a discovery moment,” Butz said. “I think that’s what we haven’t had before, is the ability to explore and discover.”
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.