Brain Hive Announces New On-Demand E-Book Service for K-12 Schools

A new service from Brain Hive will enable school libraries to add an on-demand e-book lending service for K-12 students and teachers.

The online service, also called Brain Hive, will offer unlimited access to more than 3,000 fiction and nonfiction titles, along with printable activities, teaching resources, and Accelerated Reader quizzes from Renaissance Learning. The entire Brain Hive e-book collection uses MARC records and is searchable within a school library's catalog system. The service will cost $1.00 for each book signed out, with no additional membership fee for schools.

School librarians or principals can activate a free Brain Hive membership for their school. According to a press release, an online setup wizard simplifies the process of activating the free membership, selecting e-book collections, setting a spending limit, and configuring payment preferences.

Students and teachers can search for e-books by grade level and subject. Brain Hive supports searching within books, bookmarking, note taking, ratings, favorites, and book clubs. They can read the e-books through Web browsers on desktop computers, laptops, or mobile devices. A free Brain Hive eReader iPad App will also be available through the Apple App Store. Brain Hive e-books cannot be read on Kindle or NOOK e-reader devices.

Brain Hive is currently being piloted in 20 schools and will become generally available this fall. The service will include select e-books from Random House Children's Books, Charlesbridge Publishing, Andersen Press USA, The Creative Company, Gecko Press, Inside Pocket Publishing, The Kane Press, Learning Publishing Group, Red Chair Press, and Stoke Books. Brain Hive expects to add more children's book publishers to its roster before launching this fall.

Further information and advance registration is available at brainhive.com.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • circuit patterns

    Anthropic Intros Lower-Cost Claude Sonnet 5

    Anthropic has launched Claude Sonnet 5, positioning the model as its most autonomous mid-tier offering to date and a lower-cost alternative to its flagship Opus 4.8 system. The company said the model can plan multi-step tasks, operate tools such as browsers and terminals, and complete agentic work at a level that previously required larger and more expensive models.

  • Abstract Network of Blue and Orange Lines

    Tech Industry Leaders Launch Alliance for AI Agent Security

    NVIDIA and 36 other industry partners are targeting agent security across multi-vendor clouds by combining open technologies for workload identity, agent controls, vulnerability scanning, and software supply-chain security.

  • digital brain integrating legal regulation and security interface

    Survey: Agentic AI Moves from Pilot Phase to Production, Bringing Governance to the Forefront

    A new report from Caylent, an AI-focused Amazon Web Services Premier Tier Services Partner, found that enterprises are already moving agentic AI beyond pilots and into production environments. At the same time, organizations are putting strict conditions around autonomy, making governance and control the next major challenge for enterprise AI adoption.

  • Abstract background with digital shield made of data particles glowing blue blocking against cyber attacks

    AI Attacks Push Organizations Toward Autonomous Cybersecurity Defense

    Artificial intelligence is raising the stakes of cyber conflict as attackers use the technology to accelerate reconnaissance, uncover vulnerabilities, and launch attacks faster than many security teams can respond, according to a new report from agentic AI security company Kai.