Ten Months After Debut, Open eBooks Reaches Milestone, Makes Web Catalog Available, and Adds New Titles

From the Open eBooks Website:

Ten months after its February 2016 launch, Open eBooks has circulated over 1 million books to kids in need through its app. Open eBooks is used in schools, libraries and out-of-school programs in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and and on U.S. military bases.
Readers now have even more choices with the addition of over 250 titles from publisher Open Road Integrated Media.
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New titles now available from Open Road include works from authors Sherman Alexie, Tariq Ali, Caroline Cooney and selections from beloved series like The Berenstain Bears and Franklin the Turtle.
Open eBooks continues to grow its catalog of thousands of popular and award-winning titles, with commitments for additional titles from Candlewick, Hachette, Macmillan, Bloomsbury, and Lee & Low joining publishers HarperCollins, National Geographic, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Cricket.
Supplementing the publisher content available in the Open eBooks collection is a growing selection of public domain titles.
The DPLA Curation Corps of school and youth librarians built a collection of over 250 timeless children’s favorites, such as Anne of Green Gables, The Wind in the Willows, and Black Beauty. These eBook files were donated by the Basque Government, Standard eBooks, and GITenberg, and feature artwork from crowdsourced cover art project, Recovering the Classics.
The Open eBooks site will also feature a web catalog, enabling users with or without a login to explore the growing list of Open eBooks content. Readers who do have Open eBooks accounts can sign in and send eBooks to their devices, which will download as soon as the device is connected to the Internet. Through the catalog users will also be able to explore the Instant Classics library that includes free openly licensed books for all readers to download on a desktop or mobile device.
2017 Goals
Goals for the next year of the Open eBooks initiative aim to increase access to the program, including device expansion to Kindle Fire and Chromebook, and building the availability of eBooks open to all users regardless of income. Since its launch, Open eBooks has made a meaningful difference in the lives of children across the country, especially those in under-resourced homes.
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Open eBooks is a coalition of literacy, library, publishing and technology partners: founding nonprofit partners the Digital Public Library of America, The New York Public Library, and First Book; educational technology company Clever; and content support provided by digital books distributor Baker & Taylor. Open eBooks is not a government program; elements of the project have been supported by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the generous contributions of the publishers and partners.

Read the Complete Announcement

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