What's New for Development Partners - July 2015

Back-to-School with Bookshare Webinars

Are you interested in participating in some webinars focused on Back-to-School with Bookshare?

  • Our training department is currently scheduling webinars where partners can show off how their tools integrate with Bookshare to deliver a great reading or study tool experience.
  • We have a few slots left, so if you are interested in participating, please contact training@bookshare.org

Organizational Members Can Have their OWN Bookshare Login's Now!

I wish that I could promise exciting development news like this that impacts our members who are using reading tools like yours EVERY month!

  • You may have heard that Bookshare empowers Organizational Members (e.g. students) to be given a username and password by their sponsors (educators), so that they can access titles which have been previously downloaded for them, or have been assigned to them on Reading Lists. 
  • We piloted this capability during the spring and found that the idea was getting traction, but the main question we received from educators and development partners alike was “Can these members log into their reading tool with this username or do they still have to get an Individual Membership (IM) to be able to do that?”

I am pleased to share the news that as of mid-July, Organizational Members can use their own username and password and our Bookshare API calls will support them in a similar manner as on the Bookshare website.

What does this mean for you?

As with last month’s update, there is nothing that your development resources need to do, unless your reading tool expects a fully-formed email address as the username.  See notes below regarding the changes made to our API calls.

API Changes by Bookshare that Support Org Members using Reading Tools:

User Info – now authenticates against a username for IM’s, Sponsors or for OM’s.

  • Please note that the username for an OM does not have to be a full email address, just a unique username

Book List Response – continues to perform the checks as to whether a particular title is available for this particular user to download, but the key difference is that now for OM’s, the only books that are available for download are those that:

  • have been previously download FOR that OM by a sponsor, OR
  • has been included on a reading list that a sponsor has created and assigned to this OM, OR
  • is freely available (e.g. not copyrighted)

In the example from Read2Go shown in the left column, the three titles appear as availble because:

  • The title “Darkling” by K.M. Peyton was downloaded in the past for this account by a sponsor, so it is available for this student to access via this reading tool (while other titles of the same name by other authors are not available to this OM account holder).
  • The two Dracula titles are available to the OM as well since they freely available

User History – now includes all titles that the OM has accessed via his/her own account AND those titles downloaded FOR the OM by a sponsor. 

  • The same holds true for IM’s who are also Org Members (teachers don’t do as much downloading for their org members who also hold an Individual account, since those students have been more self-sufficient, but it can happen).
  • Note, we do not yet have Reading List API support, but it is back on the roadmap!  It will be made available on our new API framework; more information about that later…

Questions?

Please feel free to contact partner-support@bookshare.org if you have any questions or thoughts about this update.  Emails to this address will go into Salesforce and then can be best answered by someone in our Technical Support team, or by the Partner Program team.