Brain Hive, a pay-as-you-go e-book lending service for K-12 school libraries that launched in August, is adding new publishers' titles to its e-books lending library collection. The Minneapolis service is adding e-book titles from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, Annick Press, and August House, and now offers a collection of more than 3,000 titles.

Launched by the Lerner Universal Corporation, which also owns the Lerner Publishing Group, Brain Hive offers free membership to school libraries which can immediately offer students online lending access to a wide variety of K-12 titles including fiction, nonfiction and graphic novels. The service costs libraries $1 for each title circulated, and libraries can set a budget and monitor usage through a logon and dashboard. The Brain Hive collection includes titles from a wide variety of publishers, including Random House Children's Books, Charlesbridge Publishing, Lerner Publishing, Lee & Low Books, Gecko Press, Open Road Integrated Media, and others.

The company has hired Jill Yngve Nadeau as partner relations manager to support Brain Hive publishers and manage the business development of the company’s content partnerships.

Brain Hive v-p Terri Soutor said talks with publishers continue in an effort to bring more titles into the lending program, in “an ongoing effort to grow the collection.” She also said that Brain Hive is getting traction in the school library market and has signed up about 300 schools around the country. According to Soutor, about 25 schools a week have been joining the service since it began.

“We’ve gotten positive feedback consistently since we launched,” she said “Librarians are excited about having broad open access to our title list without having to make a big upfront financial investment. They’re also getting data on usage and are seeing what students want and using this to build the case for purchasing decisions.”