BiblioNasium Aims to Be Goodreads for Kids

With about 75,000 registered users — and growing by 1,000 every week — BiblioNasium is probably the biggest digital book start-up that you’ve never heard of. It’s like Goodreads for kids with tools built in for teachers and parents to monitor and encourage reading and learning.

Most of the site’s users have been signed up in classrooms by teachers who use BiblioNasium to track reading and learning. The kids who sign up can create virtual bookshelves, connect with friends, exchange recommendations and share information about books and reading. Sounds familiar? That’s because you can do all the same things on Goodreads. Except BiblioNasium, unlike Goodreads, is built specifically for kids and, more importantly, is COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) compliant. COPPA is a law that protects young children from online practices by companies that may be considered predatory, like gathering personal information. 

Educators and parents can set reading challenges for kids and monitor their progress, make reading lists and check out “lexile” reports — basically data on what grade level a child is reading at. 

Kids spend nearly eight minutes on the site per session looking at about nine pages during each visit. Over 3,000 schools from 30 countries are currently using the site and about a half-a-million books have been shelved.