With my local library they have one "digital branch" serving a county wide library system that has 41 B&M branches so even with multiple copies waits can be long sometimes even though they get multiple copies on a lot of titles. It would be nice if they'd get more copies, but the cost of just offering Overdrive can be pretty expensive even before "buying" books, audiobooks, etc. and then often times a digital copy costs them more than they pay for a physical paper copy. Plus I'm sure they're trying more for number of different titles (they have just over 22,000 titles) than multiple copies at this stage of things.
This article might be of interest to some, it's about the Salt Lake Public Library and the costs of offering ebooks...
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The Salt Lake Library pays $12,000 a year for the OverDrive online checkout service, then pays a fee per title to rent out books to patrons.
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Digital copies of new titles purchased from Overdrive tend to be on average about $8 more than a print edition and can jump as high as $75.99 for popular titles.
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For example, if the library wants to purchase five titles of John Grisham’s “The Litigators,” then it would have to pay $184.95 at $36.99 per book.
Print copies of the same book cost $28.95.
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http://www.deseretnews.com/article/7...for-print.html