Freckle Report 2021 follows the Freckle Report 2020. It is an analysis of the performance and funding of public libraries in the United States, in Australia and in the United Kingdom It assesses the problems facing the service, the decline in use; the apparent denial of that problem; how library services can sensibly be measured; the pursuit of digital material and the increasingly diverse audiences. The reports contain original research of the most recently available figures about how the public make use of public libraries and how the libraries have responded to the demand for them in recent years In particular it reports how successful the library service in the United States has been in providing digital books, as audio and eBooks, during the Covid 19 Pandemic

This report analyses the historic performance of public library services in the US, UK and Australia. It contains a narrative of the past ten years, showing declines in use and how widely they have occurred. It looks at the performance of different library activities and of different categories of expenditure on libraries It looks at the use of different reading formats that are available and how much they are used in public libraries compared to the wider reading public It identifies the purpose of reading in libraries and what influences people to read their books The report draws conclusions and makes recommendations for improvement.