You have likely seen it all over social media. It seems that Twitter is exploding with tweets about the Openebooks initiative. Being an English teacher who believes reading holds the key to many of life’s treasures, I jumped right in and took a look.

The first thing I did was head over to www.openebooks.net and click get started. Fill out the form to sign up. You will have to fill out some basic data to ensure that you qualify to use the resources for free.

You will get an email shortly with links to get your books. In your email, find the link to fbmarketplace.org.  Log in using the credentials you selected during the sign up process. To get to the ebooks, students will have to install the Open Ebooks app on their mobile device.  Click HERE for instructions.  Students will have to have an access code and pin in order to use the app. To obtain the codes, click NONBOOK ITEMS then OPEN EBOOKS, as shown below.

This will take you to a screen where you can ‘purchase’ codes for various libraries of books.

Simply add the group of books you want to your cart. Now, lessons learned… you get one set of code/pin for each item in your cart. You will be able to see your codes/pins in your purchase history, sort of. I initially requested 50 codes of middle and 50 of high school. I was not able to see all of the codes, as the email never came with the codes. I was only able to see the first 25 codes in my purchase by viewing the order. Moral of the story… order in blocks of 25. You can do that by going to your shopping cart and changing the quantity to 25.

Each code is usable for one student. So, I copied and pasted the codes into a Google doc, and simply delete the code off of the doc when I give it to a student, thus eliminating the possibility of giving the same code twice.

This is the screen the students see when logging into the high school collection.

The impressive part about this is that there are so many great books here to be enjoyed. The app breaks them down into genre/categories, but it is searchable by clicking the magnifying glass at the top.

I issued codes to some of my students yesterday and had them log in. They were in reader heaven. Give it a go, after all, it’s free!

One last, but great thing to note. This is not just for ebooks. You can purchase books at an EXTREME discount here. I was able to find a ton of popular middle school/high school books available for order at a serious discount. Books like The Mark of Athena by Rick Riordan for $.95!

all images from fbmarketplace.org and openebooks.org