Bookshare Celebrates Rapid Growth

By Betsy Beaumon, Vice President and General Manager, Literacy

Bookshare continued its growth spurt last year. Not only have we met many of our goals, we’ve exceeded them.

Just look at the boom in membership alone. We’ve doubled our numbers – from approximately 40,000 to more than 80,000 — and we’re continuing to build on that growth. We also added more than 20,000 books to the collection, with an increasing number coming directly from publishers.

That only tells part of the story. At the end of my first year, I'd like to take this opportunity to reflect on our team's many accomplishments in 2009.

• We began the year with the launch of a completely new website, designed for easy navigation and use.
• We ended the year with more than 1000 textbooks from the National Instructional Materials Access Center (NIMAC) and added support for images in all NIMAC books. Users now can use our new “one-step search” to simultaneously search through both Bookshare and the NIMAC. Depending on the state, any Bookshare Member authorized to download NIMAC books can then request the book or is guided on how to request the book.
• In an effort to ensure all members can access our books in the ways that work for them, we launched two free reading tools, Read:Outloud Bookshare Edition and Victor Reader Soft. We also partnered with Code Factory on their mobile ebook reader and began a project to deliver low cost or free mobile ebook readers in the future.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. is just one of more than 43 prominent publishers that have now granted us worldwide rights to their collections. These reference books will add a wealth of academic resources to Bookshare and enhance the research experience and independent study for tens of thousands of Bookshare Members, many of whom are U.S. K-12 and postsecondary students.
• We’re also expanding internationally with partner agreements signed in countries such as Kenya and Ghana, as well as signing up more than 100 new Bookshare members in India.
• Remember, Bookshare is meant for anyone, in school or not, who cannot read traditional books due to a disability that qualifies under the Chafee Amendment to the United States Copyright act. We ran a campaign (you can read more about that in Pavi Mehta’s piece) over the holidays to try to fulfill the wishes of some of our Members who aren't students. We're still working on that wishlist and welcome donations of any and all kinds.
• We firmly planted our flags in the ever-growing social networking world. We’re on Twitter and Accessible Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Please find us online and join the conversation!
• We now have 19 university partners – and counting. These partners share the textbooks they’ve scanned, increasing the quantity of postsecondary texts available to U.S. students. Our partners include George Mason University, the University of California at Berkeley, University of Idaho and Texas A&M University.
• We're spearheading a project – thanks to supplemental funding from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs– to transform open textbooks into accessible formats.

Look for more progress in the coming year. We will continue to work on making Bookshare easier to use and more accessible. Your interests are top-of-mind! We want to hear from you.

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Introducing Full Text Search

After much hard work and months of testing, Bookshare is rolling out full text search. Your queries will now search the contents of every single book in the library in addition to title and author.

If, for instance, you want to research white tigers, you can simply put quotes around the words, i.e. “white tiger” in the main search box, and your results will show you all books that contain the words “white tiger.”

This new search will be invaluable for everyone, delivering faster results and expanding the use of search as a research tool. A search for “William Shakespeare” will return all books with William Shakespeare in the title or in the text of the book — as well as Shakespeare’s works. If you want to know about a specific line in a Shakespeare play, you can search for just that line. For instance, a search for “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” yields Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Full text search works whether you are using Quick Search, Standard Search or Advanced Search. Full text search works whether you are using Quick Search, Standard Search or Advanced Search. You will help you get the best results if you use quotation marks around a phrase for an exact match as using quotation marks around a phrase for an exact match. The more words you use to conduct your search, the better it works. In other words, the more specific you can be, the better the search engine works.

“I am using the text search, and it's amazing!” says Monica Willyard, a Bookshare member who has been testing out our new functionality. “I just discovered five books that I didn't know Bookshare had in the collection, things I wanted to read about but never found by title or author with the old search. I feel like it's a whole new Bookshare now. I wish I could fly to the Bookshare office and give the engineers a big hug. Be prepared for the Bookshare servers to be very busy when this goes live. Our long-time members will spend hours discovering new books. :)” As always we want your feedback. Please let us know how search is working for you!

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Bookshare News From Iowa and Other States

By Kristina Cohen, Education Program Manager

Iowa Sets Goal of Registering 100% of Qualified K-12 Students

Iowa's Department of Education is launching a drive to encourage every single school district in the state to sign up qualified students for Bookshare memberships.

The program, called The 100% Campaign, launched with a special joint training session for Area Education Agency Directors (chief administrators, special education directors, media directors, and instructional services directors), who are now qualified to help other districts sign up for and use Bookshare.

Bookshare also offered a series of three online trainings for district personnel to help them understand how to sign up students for memberships and how they can download and read books. These webinars are recorded and are being transcribed for continued use. School Districts are now beginning to sign up because the 100% Campaign has created awareness for the value of Bookshare.

A special education teacher in Williamsburg, Iowa who already uses Bookshare commented on the benefits to his students. "Bookshare provides qualified students a new multi-modal reading and learning experience," says Kurtis Broeg at Williamsburg Jr. and Sr. High School, referring to texts that are offered in both audio and print formats. "Required reading assignments in junior and senior high school can be long and difficult for average readers. For struggling readers, it can be nearly impossible to have a successful reading experience. Bookshare has transformed my students' reading experience and has saved me countless hours of searching and locating required books."

Twenty States and two territories have named Bookshare an Authorized User

Bookshare is very excited to announce that 20 states and two territories have named Bookshare as an Authorized User of the National Instructional Materials Access Center (NIMAC). That means that K-12 classroom teachers in those states will find it very easy to request and receive — directly from Bookshare — NIMAC textbooks for their students with print disabilities. In states where Bookshare is not a NIMAC Authorized User, Bookshare functions as an Accessible Media Producer (AMP) of NIMAC-sourced textbooks. Educators in those states may contact their state’s NIMAC Coordinator to request that a NIMAC-sourced book be assigned to Bookshare for conversion. Once the book has been added to Bookshare, educators may download it directly from the website.

All K-12 educators can search Bookshare for NIMAC textbooks and download them for qualified students. If a textbook is in the NIMAC but is not yet in Bookshare, those from states that have named Bookshare as an Authorized User of the NIMAC can directly ask Bookshare to retrieve the book from the NIMAC and convert it to a student-ready format. In other states, Bookshare guides educators to ask their state Authorized User to assign the book to Bookshare. In all cases, Bookshare will have the book ready for download within 1-2 weeks – a very fast turnaround.

States and territories that have named us an Authorized User include: California, Colorado, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, New Hampshire, New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington, Guam and Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

Currently Bookshare has the largest collection of digital versions of NIMAC-sourced textbooks in the nation. We reached our goal of 1,000 NIMAC sourced textbooks by the end of 2009.

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Thank You, Bookshare Volunteers

By Pavi Mehta, Volunteer Coordinator

Bookshare couldn’t do all that it does without the steady support of its volunteers. During this holiday season we were thrilled to find an unexpected way to recognize some of our behind-the-scenes heroes.

As you know, Bookshare often must purchase books to be scanned and added to the collection. Given the delightfully wide-ranging reading tastes of our Members, we constantly strive to include and increase the selection of books across all genres. However, given the sheer volume of published books and the limitations of our own resources, we simply cannot make available every book that Members request. That’s why, during this past holiday season, we invited well-wishers to help us add requested books to our collection.

One of Bookshare’s friends and supporters, Carol Lake, responded to that invitation with an amazing gesture of generosity.

Carol’s monetary donation allowed our most active volunteers — those who have directly contributed 150 books or more to the library — to request any book they would like to see added to the Bookshare collection.

This gift allowed volunteers to request 57 books. These specially- requested books are already on their way into the collection and some of them, thanks to the concerted efforts of Bookshare employees Lindsie Verma and Carrie Karnos, are already available for download. For example, Members can already download this wonderfully unlikely trio of books, "No: The Only Negotiating System You Need for Work and Home," "Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha," and "The Everything Guide to Writing a Romance Novel."

As we enter 2010, Bookshare continues to look to its community of dedicated volunteers for strength and support. This special web of virtual partnerships has been and continues to be an enormous treasure, for which we are immensely grateful.

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Publisher Partnership Update

By Robin Seaman, Publisher Liaison

Relationships with publishers are now a major source of content for Bookshare. We now have more than 45 publishing partners — from all sectors of the publishing world — contributing digital files. There will be more.

Each publisher we have a relationship with agrees to give us digital files of books they publish; these relationships result in a lot more books for Bookshare Members. Combined, these publishers have generously contributed 20,000 digital files to Bookshare. We hope you enjoy their books!

The new publishing partners include publishers from every category: general-interest trade publishers, university presses, children’s book publishers and educational publishers serving K-12 and postsecondary students.

We're also seeing real momentum from university presses and K-12 supplemental publishers that create materials for library and classroom use. They're signing up and spreading the buzz to their publishing friends about their contributions to Bookshare for individuals with print disabilities. Special thanks to Garrett Kiely at the University of Chicago, Michael Ross at Encyclopaedia Britannica, Neil DeYoung at Hachette, and Bill Evans at Evan-Moor, who have been forward-looking as the first among their colleagues to sign up with Bookshare.

Here are a few of the leading publishers who’ve signed on:

Trade Publishers

• Simon and Schuster
• Random House
• Hachette Book Group (Little Brown and other renowned imprints)
• HarperCollins
• O’Reilly Media
• F+W Media
• Berrett-Koehler
• Scholastic

University Presses

• Columbia University Press
• MIT Press
• NYU Press
• University of California Press
• University of Chicago Press

Educational Publishers

• ABC-CLIO
• Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Evan-Moor Publishers
• Flat World Knowledge
• Mason Crest Publishers
• National Science Teachers Association Press

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Open Content Textbooks Made Accessible

Open content textbooks are emerging as educational resources. These freely accessible online texts are not necessarily accessible, however. Bookshare plans to make open content books accessible. We have two early initiatives underway to convert open content into accessible formats for individuals with print disabilities. We're spearheading a project, thanks to supplemental funding from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), to transform a collection of open content K-12 textbooks into formats that our Members can read.

We’re also partnering with a postsecondary publisher, Flat World Knowledge, to create accessible formats of their open content textbooks.

The initial planned conversion of open content textbooks, which are distributed freely under a license selected by the author, are math and science textbooks reviewed by the California Department of Education. These textbooks will be available in the accessible DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) format, combining highlighted on-screen text with high-quality computer-generated voice, and BRF, a digital Braille format for use with Braille displays or embossed Braille.

Under the terms of the OSEP award, the accessible versions of these books will offer a choice of digital book files with or without images, including detailed math and science illustrations and image descriptions.

Bookshare also will convert the expert-authored, open content college textbooks that Flat World publishes. By giving digital files directly to Bookshare, our Members who are eager for access to postsecondary texts will have immediate access to these valuable books.

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Rewarding Reading

By Mario Oliveros, Partnership Program Manager

Announcing the Winner of the Bookshare Reader’s Voice Contest

Drum roll please. The grand prize of the Fall 2009 Reader’s Voice Contest goes to high school student Tony James. Tony, a student at Gowanda High School in New York State, won the contest by downloading, reading, and reviewing more than 50 Bookshare books in three months!

A Bookshare Member since 2007, Tony is clearly an avid reader. He particularly enjoys suspense and thrillers. Give him anything by Dean Koontz and Stephen King, and he'll eat it up. “These books have the right level of intensity for me; plus the language is sophisticated,” says Tony. He currently reads books using the reading devices Braille+ from the American Printing House for the Blind and a BrailleNote from HumanWare.

Tony can now add the Victor Reader Stream, the prize he won, to his collection of ebook readers.

Contestants for the Readers Voice contest came from U.S. schools with a Bookshare organizational membership. From August 1 to October 31, contestants downloaded, read and reviewed as many Bookshare books as they could. They were competing not just for the glory, but for a great prize: the person who submitted the most reviews was promised either a ClassMate Reader or a Victor Reader Stream from HumanWare.

Honorable mentions go out to Brianna Murray, who came in second place, and both Jose DelOrden and Brandon Biggs, who tied for third place.

Congratulations to all and watch for future contests!

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Professional Development Workshops Are Here

by Terri Icasiano

Bookshare now offers on-site Professional Development Workshops. While we always have offered and will continue to offer free online webinars, many educators will benefit from a hands-on, on-site workshop. These new workshops offer staff development that will have long-lasting impact on teachers and improve the reading experience for students with print disabilities.

The experienced instructors leading these workshops understand print disabilities and bring relevant expertise and related technology experience into their instruction. They will use effective teaching strategies that challenge and engage all learners.

The workshops, “Assistive Reading Tools for Students with Print Disabilties” and “Bookshare in Depth,” cover:

• how assistive reading tools help students with print disabilities
• how to access and integrate accessible instructional materials into the classroom for qualified students
• how to equalize education for students with print disabilities
• how to improve student outcomes through technology
• how to empower students with books and technology
• how to encourage independence

Learn more: http://workshops.bookshare.org

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The Low Down on Downloading

We’ve had some questions from Members about downloading policies and procedures. The best resource for this information is the Bookshare site: check out Downloading or the downloading FAQ.

For those of you who are not yet Members, here are a few basics. To download copyrighted books, you need to be a Member and you need to be logged into the site.

Please remember that only Bookshare Members are eligible to read copyrighted books under the United States copyright law. That means, unfortunately, that if you’re a parent, teacher or aide, you must download books only for the person who is a Member. Even if you have an account for a student or your child, you cannot download books for yourself.

The good news is that if you’re not a Bookshare Member you can download any of our freely distributable books, including thousands of books that are no longer under copyright. We have more than 4,000 freely distributable books. So feel free to download classics such as “Jane Eyre,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or “Anna Karenina.”

To read accessible books from the Bookshare library, you will need some kind of access technology, such as a hardware device or software reading tool. If you do not already have software for reading DAISY books, you can download one of the free tools available with your Bookshare membership on the Reading Tools page.

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Upcoming Webinars and Conferences

Bookshare Membership Basics

Learn about the many benefits of Bookshare and how easy it is to complete your membership. Register today!

• Tuesday, February 2, 2010 (3:00 p.m. PT, 4:00 p.m. MT, 5:00 p.m. CT, 6:00 p.m. ET)
  Register here.
• Wednesday, March 3 (1:00 p.m. PT, 2:00 p.m. MT, 3:00 p.m. CT, 4:00 p.m. ET)
  Register here.
• Tuesday, April 13 (3:00 p.m. PT, 4:00 p.m. MT, 5:00 p.m. CT, 6:00 p.m. ET)
  Register here.
• Tuesday, May 18 (1:00 p.m. PT, 2:00 p.m. MT, 3:00 p.m. CT, 4:00 p.m. ET)
  Register here.

Bookshare in Action

Learn some quick and easy ways to maximize your Bookshare membership. Register today!

• Wednesday, February 17, 2010 (1:00 p.m. PT, 2:00 p.m. MT, 3:00 p.m. CT, 4:00 p.m. ET)
  Register here.
• Thursday, March 18, 2010 (3:00 p.m. PT, 4:00 p.m. MT, 5:00 p.m. CT, 6:00 p.m. ET)
  Register here.
• Wednesday, April 21, 2010 (1:00 p.m. PT, 2:00 p.m. MT, 3:00 p.m. CT, 4:00 p.m. ET)
  Register here.
• Thursday, May 20, 2010 (3:00 p.m. PT, 4:00 p.m. MT, 5:00 p.m. CT, 6:00 p.m. ET)
  Register here.

Conferences

Visit Bookshare at these upcoming conferences:

• Assistive Technology Industry Association 2010 (ATIA), January 27-30, Orlando, Fla., Booth 1019
• The Council of Administrators of Special Education, Inc. (CASE) Winter Institute, Jan. 27-29, Clearwater, Fla.
• Learning Disabilities Association 47TH Annual International Conference, Feb. 17-20, Baltimore, Booth 400
• The sixth annual Tools for Life: Secondary Transition and Technology Fair, March 1-2, Boise, Idaho
• CSUN, California State University, Northridge Conference on Disabilities, March 22-27, San Diego, Calif, Booth 712

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