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Big grant gives free 'books' to disabled
$32 MILLION BOOSTS ONLINE ACCESS
From
the San Jose Mercury News
October 19, 2007
By Kristina Peterson
When Palo Alto resident Carrie Karnos landed the latest Harry Potter book minutes after its midnight release, the first thing she did was chop off its spine.
Then she scanned, proofread and uploaded the book onto Bookshare.org, where by about 4:30 a.m. around 600 blind or dyslexic people immediately began reading it.
Users download the books as digital files and listen to them with a voice synthesizer or read them on special Braille computers or via enlarged type.
The Bookshare volunteer said she would have posted the volume earlier,
were it not for the quirky Potter printing details. "J.K.
Rowling uses a funky font and I had to make sure everything went through,"
she said.
This week, Palo Alto-based technology non-profit Benetech announced it will be expanding its Bookshare.org project, the world's largest collection of scanned books and periodicals, through its first federal grant.
The U.S. Department of Education has awarded Bookshare $32 million over five years to open up its collection of more than 34,000 volumes free of charge to all blind or dyslexic students from kindergarten through graduate school.
"We believe this project could potentially benefit thousands of
students . . . by exposing them to an Internet library with a multitude
of books, magazines and newspapers in accessible formats,"
Patty Guard, acting director of the Department of Education's Advertisement
Click Here Office of Special Education Programs, wrote in an e-mail
Thursday.
The 5-year-old Bookshare already has 6,000 to 7,000 users, but that should increase to about 100,000 as a result of the grant, said Bookshare CEO Jim Fruchterman, who last year won a MacArthur Fellowship for his work.
He describes the site, which he thought of after watching his son download music from Napster, as "Amazon.com meets Napster meets Talking Books for the Blind - but legal."
"I said we could use this same idea to help blind people scan books for each other," Fruchterman said. More than 90 percent of the book scanning is done by volunteers, the majority of whom are blind or dyslexic, he said.
Copyright laws permit non-profits to scan books, though Fruchterman said Book-share's international launch this month has them navigating a whole new sea of copyright issues in England, India and South Africa.
Once uploaded to the site, books can be downloaded by users as digital files. They can listen to them with a voice synthesizer, see the pages in an enlarged size or read them on special Braille computers, Fruchterman said.
On Thursday, collection development manager Claire O'Brien fed a copy of "The Things They Carried" through the company's single scanner at its Palo Alto office.
Because of the grant, the company will be able to buy several more scanners and increase its staff from 25 employees to 40, Fruchterman said. "The amount of items we can process will increase by two or three times," O'Brien said.
Bookshare will likely be adding more than 500 books per week to its site, or more than 100,000 new volumes over the next five years, Fruchterman said.
The books vary in subject and length and include each month's New York Times bestsellers, recommended school reading lists, spy novels, non-fiction, books in Spanish and textbooks.
Fruchterman said one user had been reading one science fiction novel per day for 10 years before donating all 2,000 books to the site. And users often purchase books online and have them sent straight to Bookshare, O'Brien said.
On Thursday O'Brien was copying "Robert's Rules for Dummies," a book of parliamentary procedures, for a federal bureaucrat. "I told him I'd get it to him as soon as possible," she said.
Reprinted from MercuryNews.com.
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We welcome your media-related inquiries. Please contact Ann Harrison via email at ann.h@benetech.org or by phone at 650-644-3442.
