Books

OverDrive Debuts E-Book Service for Elementary Schools

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 03/14/16

OverDrive, a company that provides an e-book and audiobook platform for schools, has launched K-5 QuickStart, a collection of 200 e-books designed to help encourage reading among students in elementary school.

The result of partnerships with companies including "Dawn Publications, Lerner Publishing Group, Britannica Digital Learning and ABDO Publishing," according to a news release, K-5 QuickStart offers "Read-Alongs such as A Promise Is a Promise, The Mallory Series and Noisy Bug Sing-Along, picture books and other engaging titles. These e-books are instantly available with simultaneous access for every K-5 student in class, at home and everywhere, both online and offline."

Using OverDrive Read, the company's browser-based e-reader, students can access the books without any downloads or additional software from multiple devices.

"We worked with leading publishers and authors focused on promoting reading to develop a collection of great e-book titles, all available anytime, anywhere," said Brian Potash, manager of education sales at OverDrive, in a prepared statement. "Read-Along e-books powered by OverDrive are seeing tremendous success in school catalogs across the country and now young readers in K-5 QuickStart can easily follow along with these interactive titles that combine the colorful text and images of an e-book with highlighted words as the narrator reads.This helps readers better understand sentence structure, language flow and syntax."

K-5 QuickStart is available to an entire school for a $499 annual subscription.