Twenty five thousand free books for teachers and students. I'm Rich Dmiro. This is rich on Tech Daily. Recently, I've been testing out a new app called Epic. This is sort of like Netflix or Spotify, but for books more than twenty five thousand of them, to be exact. And here's the interesting part. You can subscribe for eight dollars a month at home, but if you're a teacher with a classroom and students, you can get access to all of these books for free, the same exact experience, but
free when you're in the classroom. So we visited a classroom at Aolian elementary school in Whittier, California, where Epic is being used, and it works just like it does at home, except all the kids get to access this for free. So Epic is an app. It's in the app Store. You can download it to a variety of devices. We saw it running on iPads and chromebooks. My son has also been using it at home on an iPad
with a test account. And basically, it's a bunch of books kind of organized in very so you can organize by topic, you can organize by reading level, you can organize by age, whatever you want, and there's tons of stuff to find in here, twenty five thousand books for major publishers, including HarperCollins, McMillan, National Geographic Kids. A lot of the big series are in there, but you do
have to pick and choose and find stuff. Not every book imaginable is in here, but there's definitely enough to make up for the fee of eight dollars a month if you're paying at home, and it's certainly good enough for free at school. And one of the features that I really like are the quizzes. My son also really likes these, So after you're done reading a book, there are quizzes at the end, and these can test your kids reading proficiency. Another feature parents and teachers will like
and kids is the read to you feature. So this is where kind of like an audiobook, but the books read to you, but they highlight some of the words as they go along, so kids can become more confident readers. Another feature parents will like. You can get weekly report cards, so you can see in an email what your kids
are reading. The email will include the books that they've looked through, how many pages they've turned, how long they spent reading all that good stuff, and the co founder Kevin Donahue of Epic and a Skype interview, told me that this is all about seeing how the child is improving with their reading and showing the parent some of the interests their kids has around reading. I thought it was really interesting some of the books that my kid was reading it was based on stuff he was learning
in the classroom. He went home and then looked up books on those same topics. I thought that was really interesting. So, again, Epic is completely free for kids while they're in the classroom, and the way they do this is the teachers basically log in and then they share some sort of code with the kids that only works while they're in the class. But if you want to do this at home, you can get a subscription for about eight dollars a month.
Seems like a pretty good deal considering Netflix a little bit more than that. But I also found a bunch of deals, like a special teacher offer at six dollars a month, And I think, you know, six bucks a month for all these books is not bad, especially if you've purchased books for your kids. They can get pretty expensive at the bookstore. So when it comes to privacy, since this is geared for kids twelve and under. I
had to ask about the privacy aspects. There are no ads on Epic and there is no social networking aspect. Kevin Donahue again, the co founder, told me they don't enable kids to connect or chat or message each other. It's really just a content consumption platform. And so when I talked to the teacher at aol in elementary, I asked what is the downside to Epic, and the teacher, Han Buie told me she said, if there is one downside,
it's that the kids just want to keep reading. And I think that sounds like a pretty good problem for teachers and parents. All right, If you want to get a link to Epic and check it out, you can go to my website. Just go to Rich on tech dot tv. Again, the app is called Epic. It's got a big exclamation point at the end. You can search for it in the app store, check it out for yourself, or tell your kids teacher about it so they can get access for free at school. Thanks so much for listening.
The best thing you can do for me is to rate and review the in the Apple Podcasts app. I really do appreciate that that way Apple shows it to more people. I'm Rich Damiro. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.