Recent press releases:

Bookshare.org Receives Five-Year $32 Million Award From U.S. Department of Education — October 15, 2007

Palo Alto, CA - October 15, 2007 — The U.S. Department of Education has awarded Benetech's Bookshare.org project $32 million over five years to significantly expand the availability of accessible electronic books and the software for reading those books. Bookshare.org is the world's largest accessible library of scanned books and periodicals.

Working with state and local education agencies, schools, teachers and students, Bookshare.org will give all K-12, postsecondary and graduate students in the United States with qualifying print disabilities access to this library without charge. The award will allow Benetech to add more than 100,000 new educational books to the existing Bookshare.org collection of over 34,000 titles. You can read more about this exciting announcement in the press release here.

Benetech's Dr. Patrick Ball Testifies in Kosovo Human Rights Case — March 21, 2007

The Director of the Benetech Human Rights Program, Dr. Patrick Ball, provided testimony last month for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in its case against six former Serb military and government leaders who are charged with crimes against humanity.

The defendants were indicted together with former Serb and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in May of 1999 in connection with the deaths and displacement of thousands of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo province during the spring of 1999. Dr. Ball originally testified for the ICTY in the trial of Milosevic in March of 2002. Read the press release here.

Bookshare.org Volunteers Scan 30,000 Books — November 8, 2006

Palo Alto, CA - Benetech's Bookshare.org project announced this week that its network of volunteers has succeeded in scanning 30,000 books, creating the world's largest accessible online library. The entire Bookshare.org library can be downloaded to Braille printers, portable Braille devices and software that reads aloud in a synthesized human voice. Among the titles are bestsellers including Criss Cross, the 2006 Newbery Medal winner for children's literature.

Bookshare.org volunteers include Matthew Devcich, 16, of Chantilly, Virginia. Devcich, who has a visual disability, created an Eagle Scout leadership service project that organized 21 mostly teenage volunteers to scan and proofread 24 books. Devcich listens to the Bookshare.org ebooks, allowing him to reduce eye strain while he reads the text online in an enlarged font. Read the press release on Devcich's project here. More information on how you can volunteer for Bookshare.org and the latest titles can be found at the Bookshare.org site.

Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman Receives 2006 MacArthur Fellowship — September 18, 2006

Palo Alto, CA - Jim Fruchterman, CEO of The Benetech Initiative, has been awarded a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each of this year’s 25 MacArthur Fellows learned this week that they will receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” funding over the next five years.  Read press release here.

Route 66 Provides Web-Based Literacy Instruction For Persons With Disabilities — June 26, 2006

Palo Alto, CA - Benetech, the global technology nonprofit, today announced the release of its web-based Route 66 Literacy service. Route 66 is designed to help teachers, volunteers and parents provide reading and writing instruction to people with developmental disabilities. The Route 66 Literacy curriculum can also be used to instruct students learning to speak, read and write English. More information on the service can be found at http://www.route66literacy.org/

Major Omidyar Network Investment Lifts Global Nonprofit to New Level. — March 22, 2006

Palo Alto, CA - Benetech, the global technology nonprofit based in Palo Alto, announced today that it has received a $1.5 million investment from Omidyar Network. This major investment will help Benetech deliver on its ambitious three-year organizational business plan and focus on its grassroots digital initiatives in disability literacy and human rights. Read the Omidyar Network press release.

Accessible newspapers and magazines now available daily. — March 22, 2006

Palo Alto, CA / Baltimore, MD - Bookshare.org and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) have teamed up to make local and national newspapers and magazines available and accessible online to people who are blind or have other print-related disabilities. Read the NFB-NEWSLINE® and Bookshare.org press release.

Palo Alto, CA (9 Feb 2006) The Benetech Initiative today released a statistical report detailing widespread and systematic violations in Timor-Leste during the period 1974-1999. This report provides additional detail to the Timorese truth commission's recently released report "Chega!" ("Enough!"). Benetech's statistical analysis establishes that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of the conflict. Approximately 18,600 (+/- 1000) Timorese were killed or disappeared, while the remainder died due to hunger and illness in excess of what would be expected due to peacetime mortality. Read the Timor-Leste report press release.

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Recent articles and press coverage:

New York Times Quotes Benetech CEO On Charitable Giving For A Financial and Social Return — November 12, 2007

The New York Times has quoted Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman in a holiday Giving Section story on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are using their business acumen to transform their charitable giving to mission-oriented investing for both a financial and social return. The story, "With Sudden Wealth, the Desire for Sudden Impact" includes Fruchterman's observation that an increasing number of people are deploying capital in for-profit initiatives that have a social outcome.

"Within a 10-mile radius of Palo Alto, there are a couple of thousand families that could give $50 million to a social cause and fundamentally change some issue," Fruchterman said. "You could do a lot with $50 million, or even $10 million. You could cure a disease, or revolutionize services to an impoverished part of the world."

Hadley School for the Blind partners with Bookshare.org —November 1, 2007

A local newspaper in Winnetka, IL recently covered Bookshare.org's partnership with The Hadley School for the Blind, which provides tuition-free distance education programs for 10,000 blind students and their families each year. The story notes that Hadley has established a volunteer program that will create a scanned library of recommended reading from Hadley courses and books about Braille. Bookshare.org will include these texts in its online library that lets people with print disabilities, such as blindness or low vision, scan books and exchange them legally through its website. Hadley students have free access to Bookshare.org thanks to a $32 million five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education that gives all U.S. students with print disabilities access to this library without charge.

Bookshare.org Award Covered in the San Jose Mercury News — October 19, 2007

The San Jose Mercury News has published a lively story about the U.S. Department of Education's $32 million five-year grant to Benetech's Bookshare.org project. The article gives well-deserved credit to Bookshare.org alpha volunteer Carrie Karnos and collection Development Manager Claire O'Brien who see to it that Bookshare.org members have access to the latest bestsellers and educational books. Bookshare.org remains the world's largest accessible collection of scanned books and periodicals for use by those with a qualifying print disability such as blindness, severe dyslexia or a mobility impairment. The story quotes Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman who notes that thanks to the grant, Bookshare.org will likely be adding more than 500 books a week to its site, or more than 100,000 new volumes over the next five years.

Stanford Magazine Profiles Jim Fruchterman —July/August 2007

The Stanford Magazine has published a profile of Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman entitled Geeks For Good. Fruchterman was a PhD student at Stanford and together with another Stanford student, built a reading machine for the blind that became the first of many social technology projects from Benetech. The article presents Benetech's Bookshare.org, Route 66 Literacy, Miradi, Martus and Human Rights Data Analysis Group projects which "harness Silicon Valley's engineering expertise for social benefit." It also talks about the landmine detector project, which was recently put on the back burner at Benetech because of political difficulties getting access to and exporting the needed technology. The article concludes with Jim's vision of giving back to society through technology delivering social benefits.

Benetech CEO Co-authors Groundbreaking Paper on Expansion Capital Strategies For Social Enterprises — April 3, 2007

Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman has co-authored a groundbreaking paper that analyzes the financial challenges faced by maturing Social Enterprises that seek access to expansion capital. Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Addressing the Critical Gaps in Risk-Taking Capital for Social Enterprise was co-written with Jed Emerson, a Senior Fellow with the Generation Foundation of Generation Investment Management and Tim Freundlich, the Director of Strategic Development at the Calvert Social Investment Foundation.

Benetech Tools Highlighted In Guatemala Police Archive Project — March 3, 2007

The San Francisco Chronicle has published a feature article highlighting Benetech's role in providing technology tools to collect, organize and back up data from the ongoing Guatemalan National Police Archive project. The story, Guatemala Struggles To Find War Crimes Justice, notes that the recovered police records could provide critical information about the estimated 200,000 people dead or missing during Guatemala's 36-year civil war and help bring perpetrators to justice.

Benetech's Bookshare.org Service Profiled On CBS News — February 22, 2007

Benetech's Bookshare.org project was profiled in a feature story on the CBS Evening News today. Appearing as part of the CBS "American Spirit" series on innovations that scale to meet social needs, the program, entitled Tech Entrepreneur Helps Blind To Read, included Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman, Bookshare.org Customer Service Manager John Glass, Bookshare.org volunteer Carrie Karnos and Bookshare.org members Brian Miller and Priscilla McKinley of Alexandria, Virginia. Miller was pictured listening to his daily newspaper via Bookshare.org enroute to work on the Washington D.C metro. CBS producers say they have received many calls in support of the program. Benetech congratulates all those who appeared in the broadcast and helped to make millions of CBS Evening News viewers more aware of the Bookshare.org community.

• View CBS Evening News Interview Tech Entrepreneur Helps Blind To Read
• View CBS Evening News Internet Coverage
• View additional interview footage A Different Measure of Success

ITWorld Article Highlights Martus Project in Guatemala — February 7, 2007

The IDG News Service has posted a story about the Guatemalan National Police Archive project and its use of Benetech's Martus software. The story, Digging For the Truth which appears in the IDG publication ITWorld, features Jorge Villagrán of the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman Office which is examining the archive to determine the role of the National Police in Guatemala's 36-year armed internal conflict. Villagrán introduced the Martus tool to manage, analyze and encrypt a portion of the estimated 80 million documents in the archive. The story quotes Tamy Guberek, Benetech's Latin America projects coordinator, who notes that the Guatemalans were keen to secure their information with Martus. "They're very strict on data security," said Guberek. "They've taken a huge initiative to understand the tool and get the most out of it."

AccessWorld Interview

An interview with Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman is featured in the January 2007 issue of AFB AccessWorld. Celebrating the Naming of a Genius: An Interview with Jim Fruchterman covers Fruchterman's 2006 MacArthur Fellowship and the expansion of Bookshare.org. Writer Deborah Kendrick also touches on Benetech's Route 66 Literacy service and Fruchterman's dream of of an inexpensive cell phone that delivers audio books and GPS coordinates. AFB AccessWorld: Technology and People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired, is published by the American Foundation for the Blind.

Network Philanthropy — January 21, 2007
Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman is quoted in Network Philanthropy, a feature story that appeared this week in West, the Los Angeles Times magazine. The article, written by New American Foundation Fellow Douglas McGray, profiles the work of venture philanthropy pioneers Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll. Benetech receives support from the innovative foundations launched by these two technology entrepreneurs, The Omidyar Network and the Skoll Foundation.

Bookshare.org Volunteer Praised By Hometown Newspaper — December 6, 2006
Bookshare.org volunteer Matthew Devcich, who created an Eagle Scout service project that scanned and proofread 24 books, has been profiled by his hometown paper. The Fairfax County Times published a story entitled, "Helping Everyone Read," which described how Devcich recruited a group of volunteers to scan in his favorite books on thoroughbred racing. We congratulate Devcich for this well-deserved recognition.

"There is nothing wrong with a normal Eagle Scout beautification project, but he really went above and beyond to find something that will impact countless of people," said Debra Wright, a Boy Scout mother and volunteer for Devcich's project who was quoted in the story.

Benetech's Jim Fruchterman Profiled By IEEE Spectrum — December 2006
The IEEE Spectrum magazine has published an extensive profile of Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman in its December issue. Together with an introduction by Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry, the story "Doing Well by Doing Good," offers a detailed history of Benetech, its current projects, and Jim's role in promoting social entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley.

The IEEE Spectrum story quotes Chris Eyre, managing director of the Palo Alto venture capital firm Legacy Venture, who notes that 30 years from now, Benetech may be viewed in the same light as Fairchild Semiconductor which spun off many other companies and creative people who made their mark on the high tech community. "But why shouldn't Silicon Valley do for the social sector what it did for the private sector?" asks Eyre in the final sentence of the story. "Perhaps once again, one smart engineer with a little Palo Alto company will change the world."

Jim Fruchterman Urges Silicon Valley To Address Global Concerns — November 13, 2006
Benetech Founder and CEO Jim Fruchterman published an OpEd in the San Jose Mercury News urging Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and technologists to apply their skills to solve pressing social problems. Fruchterman's essay, Build Great Companies, Then Help Build A Great World points to current projects launched by high-tech philanthropists and encourages social entrepreneurs to link up with like-minded people. Fruchterman will be speaking at the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit: Sharing Technological Innovation for Global Benefit at Santa Clara University on November 16. More information on the summit is available at www.scu.edu/sts/Events/rios/.

Benetech Attracts Increasing Local And National Press — October 12, 2006
Palo Alto, CA - Since Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship last month, both he and Benetech have been the focus of increasing media coverage. In addition to reports about the MacArthur winners in The New York Times and USA Today, profiles of Jim have appeared in San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News which published a news story on the three Bay Area MacArthur winners, a business section feature story and an exceptional column by Mike Cassidy entitled An Executive Does Well By Helping Others.

Betsy Corcoran, a columnist at Forbes also wrote about Jim noting that he is "one of a handful of people at the forefront of starting not-for-profit technology companies."

This month, the Social Enterprise Reporter published Jim's essay entitled High Tech Approaches for Building Social Enterprise. NewsForge has published an informative story about Benetech's use of free software. Just this week, Patrick Ball, the director of Benetech's Human Rights Program was interviewed again by NPR for a story about the Johns Hopkins University report estimating that 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. Watch for upcoming stories about Benetech in Science Magazine, Wired Magazine, the IEEE Spectrum magazine and the Bloomberg.com financial news site.

Wired — February 9, 2006
The citizens of East Timor who perished during Indonesia's brutal 24-year occupation of their island nation might have died unaccounted for, but a group of determined programmers and statisticians refused to let that happen. Read Wired Magazine's story on how Benetech's HRDAG documented over 102,000 civilian deaths in the former Portuguese colony.

KPIX (CBS 5) Newscast — August 9, 2005
San Francisco-based television station presents a news story that highlights the work of Benetech’s Bookshare.org. Read KPIX broadcast transcript.

Wall Street Journal Online — August 5, 2005
Article by Carl Bialik: Counting the Civilian Dead in Iraq. Features quotes from Benetech’s Dr. Patrick Ball. Read the Wall Street Journal Online article.

San Francisco Chronicle — July 15, 2005
Article by Maura Thurman: Books ripped up, fed to online library for the blind. Focuses on Bookshare.org library containing more than 24,000 books. Read "Books ripped up..." article.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Newsletter — Summer 2005 Article highlights Benetech's Human Rights Programs and the impact they are having throughout the world. Read the MacArthur Foundation Newsletter.

View entire Articles and Press Coverage Archive.

Recent presentations:

Bookshare.org for Education (B4E) Presentation to OSEP — November 2007

Presentation by Jim Fruchterman and Lisa Friendly to the Office of Special Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education, which awarded Benetech $32 million to provide Bookshare.org to every student with a print disability in the United States.

View presentation here
PowerPoint version

World Summit on the Information Society — November 15, 2005

Text of remarks by Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, Tunisia. The focus of the speech was on building a global digital library for people with print disabilities.
Read Jim Fruchterman's speech to the World Summit on the Information Society (PDF)

View entire Presentations Archive.

Recent white papers:

Comments on Accessibility of Google Print and Google's Library Project

Google's recent announcement of massive library digitization partnerships has generated a huge amount of interest and angst in the print disabled community, and brought focus on the Google Print program. This short white paper aims to illuminate the issues and set the stage for future discussions with Google. Google has not approved this paper, although we hope they will use it as a tool in advancing accessibility.

Download the article (PDF)

View entire White Papers Archive.