South Australians have more reading time on their hands than ever right now. But just because libraries around the state have had their doors forced shut, doesn’t mean they can’t continue to keep you well-stocked with reading material.

“We’re loaning out thousands more items than we were a week ago,” Emily Wilson tells The Adelaide Review. As a Collection Development Librarian for the state’s Public Library Services, Wilson has spent the last two and a half years beefing up the state’s collection of ebooks, audiobooks and other digital materials for just such a moment.

“When it started in 2011, it started out small,” she says of South Australia’s ebook service. “Over the years it’s grown from a collection size of about 5000 to over 87000 items,” she says. “That’s 69220 ebooks, and 17919 audiobooks.”

Accessibility has always been the driving force behind the collection, particularly for visitors who can’t visit a physical library. A month ago, that generally meant shift workers, regional borrowers, the ageing or unwell. But with the latest COVID-19 measures shuttering libraries around the country, that’s a demographic that has grown rather all-encompassing.

“Now, that’s everybody – we’re all disenfranchised and remote populations, so the digital collections have become important for everybody in lockdown,” she says. “We see that from the stats as well, just from the amount of new users daily, and the amount of holds.

“Loans are up by around 30 per cent; over the past fortnight we’ve had 200 per cent more new users joining each day. We’ve got about 2500 unique users each day loaning over 4000 titles a day.”