 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
About Bookshare.org |
 |
|
||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Bookshare.org dramatically increases access to books for the community of visually impaired and otherwise print disabled individuals. This online community enables book scans to be shared, thereby leveraging the collections of thousands of individuals who regularly scan books, eliminating significant duplication of effort. Bookshare.org takes advantage of a special exemption in the U.S. copyright law that permits the reproduction of publications into specialized formats for the disabled.
Who can benefit from Bookshare.org?
Bookshare.org also serves organizations such as the state, local and federal educational system, the rehabilitation system, libraries, specialized nonprofit agencies and various governmental units that provide accessible materials to people with disabilities. Schools or groups can sponsor independent access through subscriptions, or through institutional access, download books themselves to deliver directly to qualified individuals signed up under their account. Copyrighted digital books are available for download to people who submit proof of a disability that affects reading. Find out more about individual subscriptions or School and Group Accounts. Excellent or Good quality books from the Bookshare.org collection can be ordered in embossed Braille, to be mailed to anyone in the United States, without requiring membership. Find out more about ordering embossed Braille books.
School and groups accounts can be set up to enable Institutional Access, whereby the school downloads the book and delivers it directly to the qualified student signed up under the account. Bookshare.org is a web-based system supplying accessible books in digital formats designed for people with disabilities. These digital formats are the NISO/DAISY XML-based format for the next generation of talking books, and the BRF format for Braille devices and printers. Access to copyrighted books from Bookshare.org is limited to people with bona fide print disabilities and the schools and nonprofit organizations serving them. An array of security protections and Digital Rights Management solutions ensure that these books are available only to authorized users. Read more about legal information. Individual subscriptions cost $25 to sign up, $50 for the annual subscription. Bookshare.org's goal is to break even financially with modest membership fees and extensive volunteer support from its community of members and supporters. Find out more about subscriptions. Institutional Access book packages are available at $300 for 30 books, $450 for 60 books, and $600 for 100 books. Schools and students with qualifying disabilities in the United States have free access to Bookshare.org as of October 1, 2007, thanks to the generous support of the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. federal Department of Education. Use the code "OSEP" when signing up for Bookshare.org for either a subscription or Institutional Access account and we'll confirm your eligibility. The Bookshare.org collection is built and shaped largely by its community of members and supporters. By scanning a book to submit to the collection, a Bookshare.org volunteer or member can provide access to that book to other members. If you have digital copies of books that you have scanned in for your own use, you can submit them and enable others to benefit from your scanning effort. Find out how to Submit a Book. We also accept original digital copies supplied directly from the copyright holder. For more information, visit our information page for authors and publishers. Finally, to help increase the awareness of other accessible books that do not originate from Bookshare.org, we list accessible books from other providers. These are called "Remote Books" and are indicated as such when the collection is searched. We refer you to the book provider's web site to find out detail about ordering the book. These providers may have different requirements and fees that are outlined on their web sites. How is Bookshare.org different than NLS or RFB&D? Bookshare.org provides a vast library of downloadable books in digital text formats, as opposed to providing mainly human narrated audio. Bookshare.org books can be easily used as digital audio using synthetic speech, large print and/or Braille. Both the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped of the Library of Congress (NLS) and Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D) offer high quality digital book services. Contract narrators at NLS and volunteers at RFB&D record the audio books. The majority of books on Bookshare.org are there because an individual with a disability decided to share that book with the rest of the community. Our low-cost, volunteer-led process allows us to accept any title into the collection that we are legally permitted to accept. This user-centric approach puts our members in charge of collection development. Our members also include a wide variety of educational institutions, and our objective is to ensure that the need for high quality educational materials and textbooks is fully met with a minimum of duplicated effort. Bookshare.org has a wide range of book quality in our collection, and each book is labeled by quality. We initially accepted a number of lower quality scanned books, with the quality designation "Fair." Now that we've established a collection of over 30,000 books, we've shifted our focus to mainly acquiring very high quality books (labeled "Excellent") that have been proofread or which have been supplied by publishers. We have an active volunteer program to systematically upgrade our older, lower quality scanned titles and no longer accept low quality scans into the collection. We are also looking forward to a new, richer set of books based on content that is provided to us in the NIMAS format, the national format for educational materials in the U.S. You, your school or your family are all welcome to help join in making Bookshare.org better. Bookshare.org is unique in being able to use virtual volunteers. Anyone in the United States can volunteer from their home to help build the best library for people with print disabilities. Benetech, a leading nonprofit social enterprise, is sponsoring the Bookshare.org initiative. Benetech melds the mission and heart of social activism with the powerful methods and tools of the technology community. Benetech develops socially beneficial and affordable products and services that are not financially attractive to for-profit companies, and supports them through a combination of revenues from our customers, philanthropic funding and payments from third parties. For more information, visit www.benetech.org. Benetech's origins start with its Arkenstone project. In 1989, a group of visionary Silicon Valley engineers and executives asked themselves a profound question: "Why couldn't the far-reaching power of the PC with voice synthesis be combined with scanning technology to create a usable, affordable reading machine for the blind?" The market was small and for-profit companies were not interested. Benetech was formed as a nonprofit enterprise to bridge the gap between "the possible and profitable." During Arkenstone's 11 years, Benetech sold literacy products under the Arkenstone brand in more than a dozen languages to over 35,000 individuals in 60 countries. The goal from the beginning was to empower people with vision and learning disabilities to use state of the art technology to achieve independence and high performance in the workplace. During this time, 99 percent of the nonprofit's budget came from product sales. Today, Benetech has become one of the nation's most successful examples of high technology social enterprise, using an innovative business model to achieve major social objectives in education, employment and independence. The Arkenstone product line was so successful that it was purchased by a for-profit company and was thereby assured expansion capital and sustainability. The income received from the sale of Arkenstone provided the core initial capital for Benetech and the seed investment for Bookshare.org. |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Bookshare.org was created and is maintained by Benetech, a nonprofit organization, and is Bobby-approved. The Bookshare trademark is used under license from its registered owner, Follett Library Resources division of Follett Corporation. |
 |
||||||||