Some wonderful news!  First Lady Michelle Obama’s video below announces a significant new initiative designed to address the challenge of providing children living in low income households with equitable access to digital reading materials.

Open eBooks, is a free app, offering thousands of popular and award-winning titles, available without checkout or cost.  It targets all students–prekindergarten through high school–and works across a variety of devices, including tablets donated as part of the President’s ConnectED Initiative.

Open eBooks involves a strong coalition involving the Digital Public Library of America, The New York Public Library, and First Book, with  support from Baker & Taylor.  The project is also supported by the generous commitments of publishers with funding provided in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The books for the collection collection were selected by the DPLA Curation Corps, established to ensure a diverse, compelling, and appropriately targeted set of thousands of titles—something from which every child could read, enjoy, and learn.

The following publishers are providing access to their titles, a catalog of eBooks valued at more than $250 million:

• Bloomsbury: Providing unlimited access to over 1,000 of its most popular titles.
• Candlewick: Providing unlimited access to all relevant children’s and young-adult eBook titles in their catalog.
• Cricket Media: Offering full digital access to all of its market-leading magazines for children and young adults, including Ladybug and Cricket.
• Hachette: Offering access to a robust catalog of their popular and award-winning titles.
• HarperCollins: Providing a vast selection of their award-winning and popular titles.
• Lee & Low: Providing unlimited access to over 700 titles from this leading independent publisher of multicultural books.
• Macmillan: Providing unlimited access to all of the K-12 age-appropriate titles in their catalog of approximately 2,500 books.
• National Geographic: Providing unlimited access to all of their age-appropriate content.
• Penguin Random House: Committing to provide an extensive offering of their popular and award-winning books.
• Simon & Schuster: Providing access to their entire e-catalog of books for children ages 4-14, comprised of 3,000 titles.

How to get started:

The program is available to adults who work with children in need through their libraries, museums, schools, shelters and clinics, out-of-school programs, military family services, faith-based programs, and early childhood programs.

To qualify, first sign up with First Book and then request access to Open eBooks for the children you serve. (Check out the Registration FAQs.)

Before registering you will need to know:

• The approximate percentage of children you serve who come from low-income families, and the basis for this estimate (free and reduced lunch, census data or similar information)
• The breakdown of students you serve by grade level (i.e., 20 3rd graders, 100 4th 5th and 6th graders, etc.)

After you register, students download the free Open eBooks to their devices from the App Store or Google Play and input an access code. Users will be immediately able to borrow up to 10 eBooks at a time. Each borrowed book will be available for 56 days before it must be renewed.

Please help spread the word, the books, and the opportunity to all children who could be reading right now!