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In the United States alone, there are 10 million people who are blind or visually impaired, as well as others who have print disabilities or learning disabilities that prevent them from reading traditional printed material. About 95 percent of all print publications — including textbooks, popular novels, magazines and daily newspapers — are simply unavailable to print disabled adults and children. This limitation was a fact of life until Bookshare.org was launched nearly four years ago.
How Bookshare.org Works
Literacy isn't just an issue of acquiring the knowledge of how to read, but also of being able to accommodate or remove physical impediments to reading. Bookshare.org offers access to the printed word to segments of the community who traditionally have faced limitations. About 95 percent of Bookshare.org members are legally blind or dyslexic, while the remainder live with physical disabilities that prevent them from turning the pages of a book.
The Bookshare.org concept is simple:
- Utilizing the provisions of copyright law that permit the reproduction of publications into specialized formats for the disabled, Bookshare.org is a web-based library of digitally scanned books, created and shared by members of the blind, visually impaired and reading disabled community.
- Established as a subscription-based service, members pay a $25 set-up fee and $50 annual subscription to access any of the more than 33,000 books in the collection.
- Hours of scanning and preparation by parents and school staff to provide accessible books to the print disabled community is dramatically reduced.
- Using Bookshare.org’s digital books, users can easily navigate to specific pages or search for keywords, making them much more useable than books on tape.
Aided by assistive technology tools, such as screen reading software, members log onto the Bookshare.org website. Members download books of their choosing from the online catalog. A seven-point Digital Rights Management plan including encryption, watermarking and fingerprinting ensure that the copyrighted books are available only to qualified members and stay within this community.
Publications are organized just as they would be in a physical library — by title, author, and subject. Members access the books in a variety of ways: print the books in Braille, read the books using refreshable Braille devices or listen to books using a software DAISY player in combination with a screen reader. For its members, Bookshare.org provides a download of the Victor Reader Soft Bookshare.org Edition, a software DAISY player from Humanware.
Sustainable Business Model
Like all Benetech initiatives, Bookshare.org is structured to be a sustainable business model. In addition to member subscriptions fees, additional support comes in the form of cash donations and in-kind assistance. The financial goal of Bookshare.org is to be operating at or above break-even.
Measures of Success
Bookshare.org’s success is fueled by excellent relationships with publishers (allowing us to encourage them to donate digital copies of books to Bookshare.org at the time of release) as well as authors, teachers, government agencies, and people with disabilities. Bookshare.org is further strengthened by its ties to Benetech, which serves on the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) advisory committee (etext standards for K-12 textbooks) and works closely with assistive technology vendors, publishers and leading technology firms such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
The end result: Bookshare.org has been able to make a dramatic impact on the lives of people with vision and reading disabilities. They can now participate in everyday activities that the rest of us take for granted:
- People with print disabilities can enjoy the daily newspaper while commuting, just like the general population.
- Print-disabled children can participate in playground discussions of the latest Harry Potter book with their classmates, because they have access to the book at the same time.
- Duplication of effort in scanning and editing books is reduced.
These and the many life-enhancing stories we receive from members are the most important and meaningful signs of success for Bookshare.org.
Bookshare for Education (B4E) presentation 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.
Problem: Less than 5% of all published books, including textbooks, popular novels, magazines and daily newspapers, are available in formats that are accessible to people with visual or reading disabilities.
Solution: Bookshare.org is making a growing number of books and newspapers available online for easy, instant, independent access to those people with print disabilities.
Bookshare.org has already demonstrated tremendous success:
- Our average user downloads 76 titles per year (vs. less than two for other accessible content providers).
- Trade books include best sellers, literature, series and collections.
- California adopted textbooks for grades 6-8 are now available. More than 500 post-secondary scanned textbooks used nation-wide.
- Production costs as low as $6 for novels and $50 for proofread textbooks makes Bookshare.org content very inexpensive to produce and distribute.
- Staff and volunteers using high-speed scanners can make new books available on Bookshare.org within a few hours. More than 200 active volunteers scan and proofread new books, evaluate new member submissions and organize new offerings.
- Books are produced in formats that are flexible enough to work in any way a print disabled user needs and prefers.
- Bookshare.org’s partners in the publishing industry directly deliver newly published books, providing equal access for people with disabilities.
- Bookshare.org currently has over 1,100 books in Spanish, and we are purposely growing our ability to provide books in languages other than English.
- Dozens of periodicals are available on Bookshare.org in etext through an agreement with the NFB-Newsline® service run by the National Federation of the Blind.
Visit the Bookshare.org website to learn more.
