Heading this year’s list is Lee Child’s newest Jack Reacher novel, The Midnight Line, beating out his own thriller Night School, which slipped one place from its top rank in 2018.

Simon Jones, Civica’s managing director for library and education solutions, says the results indicate the many different ways people are coming to and consuming stories, via film, television, the written page, e-book and podcasts.

It also points to the continued relevance of libraries in the digital age, as popular novels become a source for new film and television projects.

As literature and pop culture merge, libraries have transformed into "cultural hubs, both physically and digitally, to provide a place for book and movie lovers alike to discover new interests and stories", Mr Jones said.

The index showed book borrowing habits continue to mirror retail trends with Australians thirsting for crime, adventure and thrillers. In biographies, Australian and New Zealand readers tend to be drawn to stories of personalities they know, or from close personal experience.

Despite the domination of international writers like Michael Connelly, James Patterson and Child, almost a third of the top 20 borrowed titles were by Australian authors including Tim Winton's survival story The Shepherd’s Hut and Heather Morris' The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

In non-fiction, Australians gravitated to self-help books offering advice to manage money and trauma. For the second year running, Scott Pape’s The Barefoot Investor remains the only non-fiction title in the top 20 most borrowed books and is the number one non-fiction title.

Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying was number eight in the non-fiction category, after shooting to fame through the Netflix series of the same name.

The results reflect the year's bestselling authors but also their backlist, said Sue McKerracher, the Australian Library and Information Association's chief executive. "What we find is people discover an author, they may buy the latest book from the bookshop but they will come into a library and borrow the previous books in that series.

"The thing that we are disappointed about in people's reading habits is that when they get to young adult titles - there are some amazing Australian authors with young adults - but quite often young people are driven by the book-film tie-in and that can mean our own Australian authors miss out."

Off the back of Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman's Emmy winning adaption of Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty's other bestsellers Nine Perfect Strangers (20) and Truly Madly Guilty (18) are in television screen development.

A local movie adaption of Jane Harper’s The Dry (7) is under way with Eric Bana in the lead role while the Jack Reacher series is being adapted to television after a run on the big screen.

The top 10 picture books all featured animals or creatures as the main character and included some old favourites suggesting parents are reading beloved books from their own childhood to their children.