Bookshare.org Expands To Serve You
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 funding for this project was authorized under the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act (IDEA), and was awarded by the Office of Special Education Programs
(OSEP) of the U.S. Department of Education. According to OSEP, the purpose of the
award is to provide free educational materials, including textbooks, in accessible
media for use by students with visual impairments and other print disabilities in
elementary and secondary schools and in postsecondary and graduate schools.
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. Bookshare.org will
coordinate with state education agencies, schools and publishers to deliver the
best quality content possible and lower costs to help meet their shared obligation
to serve every qualified disabled student in the nation. The project expects to
make extensive use of textbook files provided by publishers in the recently
mandated National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS), to
create high quality student-ready materials in digital audio, large print or Braille.
"We are going to reach out to every student, every family with a disabled student,
and every school in the U.S. to offer them a chance to join the Bookshare.org community
for free and transform the practice of making books accessible," said Benetech CEO Jim
Fruchterman. "We expect to deliver millions of books to students through this new
program over the next five years, using our very cost-effective online production
and delivery systems."
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