Two weeks ago we were thrilled to join The New York Public Library, First Book, and Baker & Taylor in announcing the launch of Open eBooks, an app containing thousands of popular and award-winning titles that are free for children from low-income households. You may be wondering: what was DPLA’s role in all of this?

Since our launch almost three years ago, the Digital Public Library of America has sought to maximize access to our shared culture. Thanks to our many library, archive, and museum partners, we’ve been able to share over 11 million items, including a wide range of artifacts, documents, artworks, photographs, audiovisual materials, and, of course, many books.

February 23, 2016 – Open eBooks, a new initiative and e-reader app that will make thousands of popular, top-selling eBooks available to children in need for free, is launching today. First Lady Michelle Obama is releasing a video today raising awareness of the new opportunity for children. The initiative is designed to address the challenge of providing digital reading materials to children living in low-income households, and offers unprecedented access to quality digital content, including a catalog of eBooks valued at more than $250 million.

Come work with us! We’re pleased to share an exciting new DPLA job opportunity, Ebook Project Manager. The deadline to apply is August 31. We encourage you to share this posting far and wide!

The DPLA will lead an open call on Wednesday, July 15 at 2:00 PM Eastern to discuss and field questions about the DPLA Open Ebooks Initiative.

As part of the White House’s Open Ebooks initiative, DPLA is calling on librarians and other information professionals to help coordinate books for inclusion in the program to help connect children with ebooks. We are seeking motivated, engaged community members who have experience with building and organizing children and young adult book collections, who have time to spend building out the first two collections.

Washington, DC—Today President Obama announced a major new program, with the Digital Public Library of America as a core partner, that will provide children from across the country with greater access to thousands of ebooks. The initiative will include ebooks from DPLA’s extensive collection of openly available content as well as contemporary titles from publishers, which are being generously donated as part of the effort and available for free to students from low-income families. The publisher commitments include $250 million in ebook donations. DPLA’s national network of librarians will help coordinate books for inclusion in the program, and to connect to children and libraries across America.

Through generous funding of the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, the Digital Public Library of America convened a two-day working meeting comprised of a diverse group of stakeholders to understand the current ecosystem for ebooks and unbundle pieces of this ecosystem to address the challenges ebooks present for libraries.

The Digital Public Library of America and HathiTrust have had a strong relationship since DPLA’s inception in 2013. As part of our ongoing collaboration to host and make digitized books widely available, we are now working to see how we can provide our services to exciting new initiatives that bring ebooks to everyone.

At the DPLA, we are particularly enthusiastic about the role that our large and expanding national network of hubs can play. Many of our service hubs have already scanned books from their regions, and are generously sharing them through DPLA. Public domain works are being aggregated by content hubs such as HathiTrust, with more coming online every month. It is clear that we can bring these threads together to create a richer, broader tapestry of ebooks for readers of all ages and interests.

At its DPLAfest–taking place on October 24-25 in Boston—the Digital Public Library of America introduced a new way to browse over a million online books it has added to its collection. DPLA Bookshelf lets the user scroll a visual representation of a bookshelf that provides all the instantaneous power the digital world provides.

We recently spoke with Michael Kelley, executive editor of news and features for Library Journal, about current events in the library ebook market.

Amazon and OverDrive, the most prominent distributor of ebooks to libraries in the United States, will be teaming up to provide access to Amazon’s Kindle book collection for some 11,000 public and school libraries.