Just Askin': How many books were checked out of the public library last year?
The Enquirer's Just Askin' series aims to answer the questions that no one seems to have an answer for, not even Google.
Question: How many books are checked out from the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library in a year?
Short answer: A lot.
Long answer: Library spokesperson Libby Scott put her crew to work to give us a peek at the community's library system last year by the numbers.
In 2022, there were 17,035,087 items borrowed from the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library.
Patrons checked out more than 9.3 million actual books from the library's 41 branches. That required 3,138,670 customer visits. Top fiction checkouts included John Gresham's "Sparring Partners," Dolly Parton's "Run, Rose, Run" with James Patterson and David Baldacci's "Dream Town."
The library had 419,597 active cardholders in 2022 but they don't all go to a neighborhood branch. Some are online patrons who made 4,381,939 digital checkouts last year and more than 2.1 million of those were ebooks. Digital audiobooks are also popular as patrons borrowed more than 1.5 million of them.
The Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library received the prestigious Five-Star Library award by Library Journal in 2021 and, it’s one of only two libraries nationwide with nine consecutive years at this top level. You should check it out. Here's the 2022 annual report.
Do you have a question for Just Askin'? Send it to us at cinlocalnews@enquirer.com.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Just Askin': How busy is the Cincinnati public ibrary?
