16-MAY-2025 - Coming Soon: Adding Content Accessibility Statements and Removing Star Ratings

Dear OverDrive API partner,

In the coming weeks, we’ll be making the following updates to our APIs:

Remove star ratings

We’ll remove star ratings from the Search and Metadata APIs. The starRating field will no longer be returned in API responses and can’t be used as a sort option for the Search API.

Add content accessibility statements for EPUBs

We’ll add content accessibility statements to responses in the Metadata API. These statements are provided by publishers and give details about the accessibility features that are available for an EPUB title (such as alt text, navigation options, and different ways of reading).

Accessibility statements must be displayed for titles if available. Please note that the information is only applicable to the EPUB format of a title. If users want to download this format, they’ll need to go through Libby or their library’s OverDrive website.

See this document for guidelines on displaying accessibility statements.

These updates are now available in the integration environment for testing. We are planning to release them to our production environment on June 16, 2025. If you have any questions, please contact support.

As always, thanks for being an OverDrive API partner,

The OverDrive API team