E-Books | News

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

• By Leila Meyer
• 06/05/12

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.