25-NOV-2019 - Coming soon: Hold Redelivery

In early 2020, to give readers more control over their holds, we’re replacing auto-checkout with a new feature called hold redelivery. Hold redelivery will allow users to suspend a hold even after it’s made available to them, while maintaining their place on the wait list. By enabling users to pass on books they don’t have time to read to the next person in line, wait lists will move more efficiently and connect more users to the right book, at the right time.

As a result, in the OverDrive APIs, we’re deprecating the auto-checkout option for holds, since users will soon have to choose whether to borrow, suspend, or cancel their available holds. If a user takes no action on a newly available hold, their hold will be suspended automatically one time for 7 days. If they take no action a second time, their hold will be cancelled automatically.

When a hold is automatically suspended (due to inaction) or a user opts to have it redelivered, it will appear as a hold suspension in the APIs.

After this change, when you place a hold through the Holds API, the auto-checkout parameter will always be set to false. Existing holds with auto-checkout set to true won’t be auto-checked out to users. As a reminder, the auto-checkout field is optional, so you can completely omit it from POST requests going forward. If you’re not currently using the auto-checkout parameter, nothing will need to change for your integration.

We’ve updated our Holds API documentation to reflect the changes. You can also see the changes in the integration environment now and start developing against it.

If you have any questions or concerns about hold redelivery, please submit them to our support team through the Developer Portal.

As always, thanks for being an OverDrive API partner,

-The OverDrive API team