Good news for local bookworms: New Mexico K-12 students have gained access to 50,000 e-books through a digital company the state partnered with in April.
Rally Reader, a company that provides free e-books to children around the United States, partnered with the New Mexico Public Education Department in June to give families enrolled in the New Mexico public school system access to Rally Reader accounts.
The partnership was established to give New Mexico families access to books year-round even if they don’t have access to a public library, said Janelle Taylor García, a spokesperson for the New Mexico Public Education Department, in an email to The New Mexican on Friday.
“This along with the state’s summer reading program that provides high dosage tutoring to students throughout the summer are additional ways to keep students learning and reading during the summer months,” García said.
As of Friday, students from 85% of New Mexico public schools were enrolled, García said.
“By providing students with year-round access to thousands of engaging digital books, Rally Reader helps eliminate geographic barriers to literacy and ensures that learning can continue beyond the classroom,” García said Friday. “The platform encourages students to build daily reading habits, strengthen comprehension and vocabulary, and develop a lifelong love of reading. Research consistently shows that regular access to books and independent reading opportunities are critical factors in improving literacy achievement and preventing summer learning loss.”
García did not say how much the partnership cost, and that information was not available to The New Mexican at the time of publication.
Background
Despite some recent gains, literacy remains a challenge in New Mexico.
Child literacy increased in the state to 44% among third through eighth graders in 2025, The New Mexican previously reported. But a report by World Population Review in 2026 ranked New Mexico last in literacy in the U.S.
Nationally, a 2025 report by the National Assessment Board said the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2024 showed student progress has continued to decline since the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2024, 40% of fourth graders did not meet the Basic Achievement Level benchmark.
CEO and co-founder Andrea Johnson formed Rally Reader LLC, an eReader app now available for download in all U.S. states, in 2019 to make reading more accessible. The Rally Reader Inc. was established in 2022.
For enrolled New Mexican families, the subscriptions are entirely paid for by the Public Education Department, so there will be no cost to users. Johnson said Rally Reader first met with state education officials in October 2024.
“The goal is to build confident readers who are excited about books and excited about reading, and have that be part of their world,” Johnson said in a Thursday interview with The New Mexican.
Johnson said Rally Reader is backed by research supporting the value of independent and oral reading, especially oral reading with private feedback, citing a report from the National Reading Panel.
How to use it
Parents can enroll their children in the program individually on the Rally Reader website, if their children are enrolled in a New Mexico public school, by entering the students’ information and selecting the school they’re enrolled in. Homeschool families can enroll by selecting the New Mexico Public Education Department option in the drop-down list.
Once enrolled, children can access the Rally Reading library on any Android or Apple supported device.
Parents can enroll up to five children and contact Rally Reading’s Customer Support office to request more accounts. Children in the same family can each check out up to three books at a time and can check out the same books as their siblings.
The books a child sees on their account are based on the grade level their parent says they are enrolled in, and high school students have access to the full library. Johnson said parents approve the books their children check out.
The books available include those published by Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Macmillan Education and Scholastic, providing kids access to a wide range of texts. Johnson said no AI-written books are available on Rally Reading.
Johnson highlighted the oral reading feature on the Rally Reading app, which allows students to read their book aloud and receive corrections from the app to learn how to pronounce the words properly. The app also includes flashcard games to help children learn sight words.
Although the Rally Reader website describes these tools as using AI technology, Johnson said they don’t use generative AI, and all activity happens locally on the user’s device, in an email to The New Mexican on Friday.
“No new content is created. Rally Reader doesn’t generate text, predict what comes next, or do the thinking for a child,” Johnson said.
The app also shows statistics about a child’s reading progress, words they struggle with and how much they read. Johnson said the data helps children celebrate wins with parents and teachers. Teachers can also use statistics in the app to understand their students’ needs better.
While personal information is kept private, Rally Reading does collect information about popular books and trends. Users can see what schools and grades are reading the most that week and what books are being checked out the most.
Project Manager Aracely Diaz, a former third grade teacher who works remotely from California, said she was excited to make reading more accessible, especially because of current challenges to literacy.
“Attention spans are dwindling, the ability to read long form text is being challenged. … And so, it is something that is of so critical value, both for civic engagement and civic duty, and being an active participant in this world, as well as just self-fulfillment,” Diaz said.
