Oct

OverDrive Furthers Educational Reach with New General Manager

OverDrive, which powers ebook lending for over 19,000 customer libraries, announced today that it is broadening its educational library focus with the addition of a General Manager of Education and Chief Sales Officer position over K-12 libraries.

Don Fabricant, an educational industry veteran with experience at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Eduventures, and Thomson Learning, will oversee operations involving the adoption of digital lending for school libraries, addressing the challenge of lending to larger patron audiences and across a wide variety of student-owned devices.

“I want to build on our success in public libraries and optimize our offerings for the school market,” said Fabricant in a press release today. “School eBooks are an unstoppable trend, and we’re excited to get more students reading with the best eBook-lending platform and the most content from pre-K through high school.”

“We’re developing new tools based on EPUB and HTML5 open standards that will help teachers deeply integrate eBooks into the curriculum and empower school librarians to make targeted collection-development decisions.”

The adoption of OverDrive-loaned ebooks into public school curricula around the country stands to be a tremendous money saving measure for school systems, which translates into a savings for tax payers, over the traditional option of purchasing print editions of books for–or by–every student. OverDrive currently holds over 800,000 titles in its library catalog, not all of which are suited to public education, but the platform currently supports over 3,500 school libraries’ digital lending needs.

Mercy Pilkington (1086 Posts)

Mercy Pilkington is a young-adult author and a teacher in a correctional facility. She does not have a single textbook in her classroom. With the top-of-the-line technology at her disposal and the low reading ability of many of her students, there’s no need for standard paper texts. Instead she relies on e-readers, iPads, desktop PCs, Polycom video conferencing equipment for virtual field trips, live streaming for science demonstrations, and text-to-speech read-aloud software to teach English and science. Within the next ten years, public school classrooms across the country are going to look a lot more like Mercy’s classroom because the educational possibilities with these kinds of technologies are limitless. Have a question? Send an email to mercypilkington@yahoo.com