Seattle library checkouts, August 2026
Seattle Public Library patrons checked out 888,922 items in August 2026, up 8.0% from a year earlier: 300,071 physical items and 588,851 digital ones. The series counts checkout events rather than borrowers, and it runs back to 2005 — long enough to show the 2020 branch closures as the cliff they were.
Splitting the line is what makes the recovery legible. What came back after 2020 is not what left: physical circulation never returned to its old level, while e-book and downloadable-audio checkouts kept climbing, and the digital half now carries 66% of the total.
Read the 2024 hole as an outage, not a verdict on the library. A ransomware attack over Memorial Day weekend 2024 took down the catalogue, the public computers and the e-book platforms, and services came back only in stages over the months that followed. Checkouts that could not be made — or could not be recorded — are simply missing from the count, so the dip and the rebound either side of it are the systems going down and coming back.
Source: Seattle Public Library, Checkouts by Title, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata tmmm-ytt6), split on the dataset’s usageclass field. Auto-generated each build.