Category: book Nook
Forwarded from Jim Fruchterman:
I'm happy to share incredible news, which will transform Bookshare.org.
On Friday, the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. federal Department of Education made a major five-year award of $32 million to
Bookshare.org.
This funding is to fully support all schools and students with
qualifying print disabilities in the United States, K-12 and
post-secondary, with access to the entire Bookshare.org collection of accessible electronic books and to software for reading those books. As of October 1, 2007, we will cease charging these schools and students anything to join Bookshare.org as members.
In this initial news flash, I can't begin to share with you all of our plans for Bookshare.org now with this funding. But, we are planning on adding more than 100,000 new educational books and materials to our existing collection of over 34,000 titles. We are going to reach out to every student, every family with a disabled student, and every school in the U.S. to offer them the chance to join the Bookshare.org community and transform the practice of making books accessible. We are going to coordinate with schools and publishers to deliver the best quality content possible and lower their costs in meeting our shared obligations to serve every student with a disability in the nation. We expect to
provide millions of books to students through this new program over the next five years, at a tenth or less of the historical cost of providing these services.
And, we expect our improvements to serve all of these students will make Bookshare.org better for all of our Bookshare.org users.
Bookshare.org's track record of being highly responsive to our members will be enhanced with significant funding to implement major improvements to our content and services.
Our volunteer community is an essential part of what made this grant possible, and you are a crucial part to making this a success in the future. Your commitment to our shared vision of better access to information is core to where we are heading.
We want to make equal access to educational materials for disabled students a reality!
Jim
Jim Fruchterman
President and CEO
that is really awesome! It has made my day for sure.... i'll putit everywhere iknow: E-mail, facebok, and such.
I heard this message also but how do you get the student designation? I am in college and even use a school .edu email but had to pay when i renewed. Any hints?
I'd email bookshare's support email address (I think it's support@bookshare.org though I could be wrong.)
so, do you have to pay for it, and can high school students get it, and how do you go about it?
In the order of your questions: no, yes, and the following is something I got from an email on the subject:
. **Be sure to use the code OSEP when you
>sign up, to indicate that this is a free membership for a student, funded by a grant from OSEP, part of the Department of Education.**
What are the restrictions for downloading books if any? I mean, do they limit the amount of books you can download?
To an extent. They limit it to 100 a month, though if you find you've hit that threshhold you can email them and ask to be allowed more. (That's my understanding at least.)
I'd rather just sign up and pay the full price. I mean, once you're not a student in college anymore, your membership would expire, wouldn't it?
yeah but you could still take advantage of it while it's free, like come on lol.
Hey, where did you find out about this article or is there any website that you can post here about this topic?
Thanks
Hi all.
This is really good news. I am an existing bookshare fan who downloads books. This is cool because I was telling certain people about bookshare and they seemed interested. So that is really cool. I'll tell them about it. Thanks for posting this.
Macy
This was a news release that I saw several places. the news release was also on the bookshare website itself, probably still is someplace.
that's great but non of you guys has said what the web site isis.
The website is:
bookshare.org
Sounds cool! I thought they charged you. Lol! I was afraid to sign up.
They do if you aren't a student. but it truly is a wonderful huge collection of books. And more get added every day. (I know, I'm a vollunteer though I am a lot less active of one than some.)