What happens when technology can do great things for humanity, but doesn't make a lot of money? Technology and social entrepreneur Jim Fruchterman explores the social good side of technology applications: how to get great tech tools to the people who often need them the most, but are least able to afford them!
A Call for Millions: Ending the Global Book Famine for the Blind
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There’s a global book famine afflicting people with disabilities. They lack the books they need for education, employment, and social inclusion. Billions have been spent addressing the problem over the past decade.
I have good news: For $5 million a year, we can build a global library that provides tens of millions of people around the world who are blind, low vision, or dyslexic free access to books that will work for them.
Benetech has already solved this problem for students in the United States. Our Bookshare library has over 550,000 books that have been delivered digitally over 10 million times. Bookshare adapts to the needs of all readers with a disability that makes reading hard, whether they read with their eyes, ears, or fingers. We’re already delivering services at scale in three other countries—Canada, the UK, and India.
Very few philanthropic opportunities come with the chance to solve a global problem with modest risk. This one does. We just need the resources to scale.
Why is a global solution to the book famine possible now? How can we solve a centuries-old problem for so little money?
We have the technology. Cheap devices and internet connectivity mean everything is digital. Our books will play on whatever tech the reader has in hand, even a $10 MP3 player.
We have the ebooks. The Global Treaty for the Blind makes it legal to create ebooks for people with disabilities without having to pay a royalty or getting permission. Publishers already contribute most of their ebooks to us for free, but The Treaty allows for crowdsourcing books at scale through a Napster-inspired model (but legal!).
We can scale quickly. We’ve already built the library in the cloud, meaning we can scale infrastructure at the click of a button.
We have a new business model. Free service with a “pay what you can” request (like Wikipedia’s) is a sustainable nonprofit model. The majority of donations stay local, sourcing content in local languages and creating jobs. We have hundreds of thousands of ebooks in a dozen languages already available globally.
We have baseline funding to sustain the core platform: we can serve the rest of the world for less than it costs to deliver the service in the U.S. because we rely on the community to build the digital library.
Helping people with disabilities, especially those who are blind, is a social issue of biblical proportions. We are now on the brink of solving this problem for tens of millions of people around the world. Let’s seize the opportunity!
Read my recent posts that provide guidance and ideas for successful tech philanthropists:
I believe in the power of books to change the world. That is not a particularly radical belief among librarians, but I hope to make you believe even more in the power of books. Literacy and access to knowledge underpins just about every social good, from education, to economic development, to health, to women’s empowerment, democracy and respect for human rights. Today, we are poised at a moment in time where we can transcend the limitations of past book technologies and bring the power of books to all humans. To bring the power of books to everybody on this planet, we must make books truly accessible. Love of the print book. It made me who I am. I’m a big fan of the printed book and always have been. However, as a technology, printed books come with serious challenges for some communities (like blind people) that technology can unlock. Consider the issues with printed books. First, they are place-based. In order to read a printed book, you must have physical access to it....
Vinod Sena in memoriam I had a very unfortunate reminder of the fragile state of each human being this week. Just after returning from India and Bangladesh, I received word that one of my key contacts and hosts had suddenly passed away. Professor Vinod Sena was a retired professor of English literature at the University of Delhi. Visually impaired his entire life, he was a tireless advocate for the blind and visually impaired as well as a shining role model. He has been described as the pioneer of Talking Books in India, and had been campaigning for a copyright law change to make it easier to provide access to accessible books. While I was in India, I picked up the newspaper and saw that he had just received a Helen Keller award for his work. I know that the advocates for the blind and visually impaired will continue his work, initially with a heavy heart, but with the confidence that they are following in the footsteps of a great man.
10X: ten times the impact. That’s what’s been on my mind lately. How can our existing successful programs reach ten times more people? How can we use technology in a new way to improve people’s lives that is an order of magnitude better? Can we help stimulate the creation of far more technology-for-good ventures? The Benetech team has already accomplished great things for our users, but there is so much more we can do. Technology currently serves privileged groups through tools that provide access to education, literacy, health, and justice. But what about everybody else? While it’s not a panacea, technology has been the engine of so many improvements in society. The time has never been better to think 10X bigger! I have disruptive approaches to social innovation in mind, with an increasingly connected society where the cost of prototyping and deploying new products is extremely low, and where innovation is no longer the sole purview of well-funded for-profit corporations. We del...
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