Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

When we submitted our proposal to the competition to provide accessible books to U.S. students with print disabilities, I told my team that if we won an award, I'd cook smoked lobster for the whole company. Today's that day! We're just three weeks into this new world for Benetech. I think we've signed up more schools and students for Bookshare.org in the last three weeks than in the last three years! We're hiring like crazy: we have more than ten job openings posted. We issued our first official press release about the award and immediately had a great article in the San Jose Mercury News. The same article was on the cover of the Palo Alto Daily News with a great picture of Claire O'Brien, our newly promoted Collection Development Manager, scanning a book. 99,999 more books to go! So, as we celebrate this great award, we're also busy thinking about how we will dramatically improve the availability of quality textbooks and education materials to stud...

We just did a site upgrade on Bookshare.org : our third in as many months. Among the dozens of improvements in this update are two that I'm particularly jazzed about. The first is the initial international changes as we take Bookshare.org global. Users with disabilities outside the U.S. can easily see which books have global permissions, which are required when we can't rely on our copyright exemption (which only works inside the U.S.). Now that it's easy to see which books are available, we need to ensure that we add many more books with these permissions. Crucial first steps on the road to taking this service global! The second one may not sound like a big deal, but we greatly simplified the process of signing up for Bookshare.org for schools. This is crucial as we continue to rapidly expand into serving students. It used to take lots of handholding from Susie Mckinnon, our Bookshare.org sales manager, for schools to sign up. Now I'm getting delighted emails fr...