LEONARDTOWN, Md. — At the monthly meeting of the St. Mary’s County Library Board of Trustees at Leonardtown Library on June 13, 2025, the board officially announced that, effective June 30, 2025, county libraries will no longer support Hoopla, a service that provided free, online access to audiobooks, eBooks, comics, movies, TV, magazines and music.
In cutting Hoopla, St. Mary’s joins not only Calvert and Charles counties but also counties across the country, from Minnesota to Mississippi, as many public libraries encounter federal, state and local funding cuts. The board stated that there were two reasons for the cut to the popular service: rising costs and concerns over Hoopla’s allowance of AI-generated content on its platform that could be considered inappropriate for a public library.
Rising Costs
According to the board, the cost of Hoopla in the county had doubled from $40,000 three years ago to $80,000 now, while the regional costs across St. Mary’s, Calvert and Charles counties had gone from $150,000 to $300,000. In contrast to the rising costs, St. Mary’s County libraries only had around 900 to 1,000 regular users of Hoopla, creating a situation which one board member said reflected “a relatively small portion of the library is using a fair chunk of change.”
The reason for the price increase is likely a result of Hoopla’s own success, as it was used so extensively that the cost of each checkout on Hoopla rose as demand increased. In Milwaukee, the cost per checkout rose to $2.38, which ultimately would have cost its libraries $470,000 in 2025 alone.
Platform Issues and AI Content
The board also stated that librarians had come across AI-generated content that would be inappropriate for a public library, and that there was no way in which librarians could sift through “100,000 new titles coming and say ‘Yeah, we don’t want that one.’” One member emphasized, “With all the challenges going on to libraries, we really don’t need somebody surfacing actual content that we would say ‘Oh my god, what is that doing there?’”
There were also concerns about Hoopla’s ability to regularly update its collection of movies, which often failed to include new titles that might have drawn more attention.
Public Response
The county library’s board of trustees noted that it had already received two complaints about the discontinuation of Hoopla, which it was able to address at the meeting due to a joint announcement made two days earlier by Charles, Calvert and St. Mary’s counties, which The BayNet has covered here: Hoopla Ends June 30: Here’s What Southern Maryland Libraries Offer Instead. However, it is prepared for a further wave of complaints when the library stops supporting Hoopla on June 30.
In response, the board outlined other services it will support that will fulfill most of the functions performed by Hoopla at significantly less cost to the county. For eBooks and audiobooks, users can use the Palace Project and Libby, and starting July 1, the county will support Comics Plus, which provides unlimited access to comics, graphic novels and manga with unlimited checkouts and no holds or wait times.
However, board members still acknowledged that the loss of Hoopla was likely to be unpopular, with one member saying, “Again, it’s not something we wanted to do. It was a popular service primarily because there was never any wait for things, but every time somebody checked something out, we were paying and it’s just gotten to be out of hand.”
A Reflection of a Broader Issue
The counties of Southern Maryland aren’t alone in dropping Hoopla; county libraries across the country have been dropping Hoopla primarily due to rising costs, although some have been pushed further, being forced to drop basic services like Wi-Fi hotspots or close due to funding cuts.
As The BayNet reported in May 2025, many county residents came to protest cuts to library funding by the county commissioners. For one speaker, the importance was clear: “I can tell you with absolute confidence that I could never [have read] a fraction of the books that I grew up on if the burden of access fell solely on my parents … I would not be the person I am.”
President of the Commissioners of St. Mary’s County Randy Guy said in response that “this year is probably the worst budget session I’ve been through in 11 years,” noting that what funding the county would receive from the federal government and the state of Maryland was not entirely clear.
Although one recent court decision (Rhode Island v. Trump) suggests that federal grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) will be made available to a handful of states including Maryland despite worries over federal cuts, the majority of the funding for St. Mary’s County’s libraries comes from the county itself. While the county’s budget for the Board of Library Trustees has not technically been cut, when taking inflation rates into account, its value has in fact decreased. From 2023 to 2024, library funding from the county increased by 15.6%, and between 2024 and 2025, it increased by 12.8%. In the upcoming 2026 fiscal year, it is set to increase by 1.2%, which actually represents a decline in value because the inflation rate over the last year has been double that, at around 2.4%.
Regardless of funding, the county’s libraries continue to enjoy widespread support, visited by over 314,000 individuals in 2024, and the mention of library budget cuts routinely attracts public criticism. However, the situation remains unclear. The day after a group of states including Maryland received a favorable ruling in Rhode Island v. Trump, which suggested it would retain its IMLS grants, another court ruled that it would not intervene in the federal government’s efforts to dismantle the IMLS in ALA v. Sonderling. For St. Mary’s County, the fate of IMLS will determine whether or not the county receives around $20,000, which would account for a relatively small but still significant amount for its library system.
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