Last December, Follett Content and Sora, the student reading app from OverDrive, announced a partnership that will transition Follett customers to accessing digital content through Sora. “I believe that there is a place for both print and digital books in K–12,” says Follett Content CEO Britten Follett. “Sora’s the right partner to be able to deliver a fantastic reading experience, and that allows us to focus on delivering print materials as efficiently and effectively as possible.”
According to Renee Davenport, Sora’s VP of education, the arrangement puts the app in a unique position to provide a broad range of student support by offering print books alongside the company’s portfolio of digital offerings—e-book, audiobook, read along, and video, via streaming app Kanopy. “Students need access to all of those formats, because that’s the real world moving forward,” she says.
The first phase of the new partnership is underway and involves customer matching. “We’re connecting with our existing customers and their customers, to see how we can make it easier to support whatever needs they have,” Davenport says. She and her team attended a Follett national sales training meeting in early February. “We talked about our value propositions, around print and digital, really taking the Follett team into Sora and showing specifically, from a digital perspective, how we can support every learner,” she adds. As examples she cites tools that can help a student who is not reading proficiently access content on grade level, or translation tools—with access to more than 100 languages—that can aid multilingual students whose first language is not English.
Davenport recognizes librarians’ concerns about funding e-book access. While she’s unable to comment on the possibility of honoring discounts that customers may have received previously with Follett, she says the relationships that OverDrive has with publishers and the variety of lending models the company offers set it apart in addressing prospective customers’ financial constraints. “We have even launched subscription models for that exact reason. They’re all access modeling, and the price point is one that we can customize. Through our teams, we’re able to listen to what customers’ needs are, and we are always able to figure out a solution for their students within their budget.”
