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 is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.
