Libby Isn't Your Library. It's a Private Equity Asset.

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• Claim: One private-equity firm, KKR, owns both OverDrive (maker of the Libby app) and the publisher Simon & Schuster.
• OverDrive → KKR: Acquired 2020
• S&S → KKR: Acquired October 2023, $1.62 billion
• Sources: KKR press releases; Washington Post; Publishers Weekly; Library Journal
• What it establishes: common ownership. It does not establish coordinated pricing or data practices.

Ask a patron where they get their library ebooks and a lot of them will say "Libby."

Not "OverDrive," not "my library's vendor." Libby.

It is worth separating the app from the institution. Libby is a product made by a vendor; the library is the public institution that licenses it.

Libby is the reading app made by OverDrive, the dominant digital-lending platform for U.S. public libraries.

In 2020, Rakuten sold OverDrive to KKR. The acquisition is documented by both OverDrive and KKR; the sale price was not officially disclosed.

Your library is not the owner of Libby. Your library is a customer of it. The distinction is the whole thing.

The other company KKR owns

In October 2023, KKR completed a $1.62 billion acquisition of Simon & Schuster, one of the Big Five trade publishers, from Paramount.

One private-equity firm therefore owns both the platform through which libraries license ebooks and one of the publishers whose ebooks they license. That is a documented ownership structure. It is not evidence that the companies coordinate prices or terms.

When the Simon & Schuster sale was announced, Library Journal raised this same ownership question and noted KKR already owned OverDrive.

Why a library should care

Ownership does not tell you the quality of a product or the intent of the people who build it. It does tell you where to look for incentives, accountability, and contractual protections.

For example, OverDrive introduced Amplify, a service that uses aggregated reading activity from Libby and Sora to provide analytics to publishers. Whether a particular library's activity is included, and on what terms, is a contract question worth asking directly.

This is not an argument to cancel Libby. It is an argument to treat it as a vendor relationship: know the owner, read the terms, and decide what protections your library needs.

What libraries can actually do

Three questions for a board packet or renewal meeting

1. Who ultimately owns this vendor, and what has changed since our last renewal?
2. Does our contract allow our usage data to feed an analytics product, and can we opt out?
3. If we leave, what data do we receive back, in what format, and what does the vendor retain?

One useful distinction: Libby is the reading interface. Your library is the staff, collection, public funding, and privacy obligations behind it. Keeping those roles separate makes better questions possible.

Sources

1. KKR completed its purchase of OverDrive from Rakuten on June 9, 2020 (OverDrive; KKR press release).
2. KKR completed its acquisition of Simon & Schuster from Paramount on October 30, 2023 (Paramount announcement; Publishers Weekly confirmation).
3. Library Journal on the common-ownership question; the companion Amplify reporting on the analytics product.

How these filings are sourced: Method.

Filed July 2026. No corrections to date.

Disclosure: I build library software. To understand how these systems work I took them apart and rebuilt them: L/30, a library system, and MetisLib, a lending co-op. Both are open source, both run as sandboxes, and neither takes real patron data or is sold to anyone.