Bookshare.org milestones

Bookshare.org hits 35,000 Books!


It's always exciting when we hit another milestone like this. The milestones are going to be coming ever faster, now that we have the Bookshare.org for Education project (funded by the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. Department of Education). We're committed to increasing our rate of title growth by a factor of four or five while improving quality.

Mr. Jim and Ms. Lisa go to Washington


Lisa Friendly and I just spent a fascinating week in Washington. Apparently, winning a competition for the largest award made by OSEP in memory (ever?) caused quite a stir. Although we are well known in the national and international disability field, it's been about ten years since I spent much time in DC (last time was the original Section 508 federal advisory committee in the 90s). We need to now spend a lot more time acquainting Washington decision makers about why OSEP made an inspired choice in selecting Bookshare.org as the provider of books for print disabled students nationally.

We spent time talking with OSEP and our new partners from the University of Guam. We'll be working for Guam to help set up a system for assistive technology and media for disabled students with nine Pacific island entities. I'll be traveling to the region in February and am really looking forward to finding out where things actually are on Chuuk or Pohnpei (or Guam), and how we can be most helpful.

We also met with many other groups, such as publishers, lobbyists, educational researchers and state education agency leaders. The week kicked off with a major meeting hosted by the National Federation of the Blind around increased access to ebooks by blind people. That's an issue I'm quite passionate about.

Big challenges. Big goals. Big opportunity to change the world with technology!

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