RISOCKS

Questions and Answers

• Does RISOCKS include the free starter package of 170 multi-user fiction eBooks?  No.  The starter collection is only available through July 31 of this year, so your district could sign up now for the starter collection and then move to RISOCKS.
• Will we be able to get usage statistics?  Yes (more details coming),

• Prices increase dramatically for large schools - they go from paying $100 for BookLynx to $1000 for Sora.  How is Sora worth so much more?  BookLynx was set up originally to give every RILINK member a way to try out eBooks with their students and teachers for a minimal cost.  We would have to go to some sort of enrollment-based cost if we were staying with BookLynx to make it a viable size for our students and teachers.  We can mostly only rent, not purchase, due to publisher restrictions, titles for a particular number of months or a certain number of circulations before they expire.  This means that the budget for our shared collection must be much larger to renew items that we want to keep in the collection while continuing to add new items.

• Are the ebooks being purchased by RISOCKS going to be multi-user?  Some of the titles will be multi-user, but the majority will not due to the cost and publisher restrictions.  Based on usage, multiple copies of some titles will be available.  You can see a list of the current simultaneous (SU) titles in RISOCKS here. We can explore adding other publisher series of SU titles as we grow RISOCKS.  Once everyone joins, there will be a much larger collection.  Holds are monitored so that copies can be added for reduce wait times for popular titles.

• How is RISOCKS  better than buying $1000 worth of library books for our own school?  Gives students and teachers access to the collection outside of the physical library with access to a greatly expanded collection, beyond what any one school could afford to provide.

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