Epic is Epic

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Epic Books has rightly been called the Netflix of children’s ebooks & audio books. It’s a fathomless source of both schlock and gold with an interface that insists on being in control of the browsing experience.

Who should be interested in this? Parents are the primary target — whereby Epic will get a standing order for roughly US$7/month and children get 24/7 access to 25,000 “high-quality kids’ books, videos & more!” But teachers get a sweet deal via free educational accounts which allow them to set up student logins for their online “classroom” — which is free and available for children to access during school hours 5 days a week (where “school hours” seems to mean not after 5pm at night). The child will then presumably pressure the parents to pay for the out-of-hours experience…..

This is not a library tool. It’s designed for a teacher and a classroom, where you set up readers inside your online reading “classroom,” though you can import students from Google Classroom. The material is mainly suitable for primary school children, though there is enough stuff to get a middle-school teacher excited. Heavy on the non-fiction, quite a bit of graphic novels, and lots of picture books. Some videos, too. It’s a badge / motivation environment, with lots of flashing progress notifications.

Teachers can create “collections” — which is the only way to keep track of the good stuff. And new titles are released each week. Some stuff is also probably being removed each week, but it’s hard to know.

Check out some collections below I’ve created to introduce people to Epic. (My profile lists all my public collections — see Ms. Day — and I don’t know why they think I’m based in New York!).

If you want to log in to my trial classroom, use the Student Login - Class Code: pww7754:

I’ve made some other collections with middle school students in mind: