Show 30 -- Bookshare

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Beth Case: Hello, and welcome to Disability 411 - the podcast for disability professionals. I'm your host, Beth Case. Today we're going to be talking to Susie McKinnon and Janice Carter about the Bookshare program.

But before we get to that, I do want to let you know that I met with Rachel Simon again, as promised, and asked her some of the questions that you all sent in. Thank you all that participated in that. And so that you're not all sitting on pins and needles, the winner of the signed autographed copy of Rachel Simon's book, "Riding the Bus With My Sister," goes to Rebecca in San Antonio. Congratulations, Rebecca! So I will be getting that book out to you right away.

I went ahead and had Rachel sign a couple more copies of her book that I will be giving away in some future contests and drawings, so you still have a chance to get one. And if you don't get an autographed copy, I still urge you to go and buy her book, because it really is amazing. Again, it's called "Riding the Bus With My Sister," by Rachel Simon.

Well, no announcements again this week. Don't forget that you all can send me your announcements to have me read on the air. If you have an event or something coming up that you would like to have mentioned on the show, just send me the information, I'll be glad to mention it for you.

So, on to our interview with Susie and Janice!

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Beth: Today we have with us Susie McKinnon and Janice Carter from Benetech, and I'm just thrilled that we're getting this interview. I'll just start out with having them tell you a little bit about who they are and what they do. So Susie and Janice, take it away.

Janice Carter: Beth, thank you very much for inviting us. I'm Janice Carter, Director of Literacy Programs here at Benetech; we're in Palo Alto, California. Benetech is a non-profit/social enterprise where we use technology to serve marginalized communities. Susie?

Susie McKinnon: And my name is Susie McKinnon. I work specifically with bookshare.org; I do marketing and outreach and specifically work with schools, institutions, and government-related institutions.

Beth: Well, I did want to talk to you all today specifically about the Bookshare program. So can you give our audience, who maybe haven't heard about it, just a little overview about what Bookshare is?

Janice: Sure, this is Janice, I'll go first. The Bookshare launched in February of 2002, as a result of our founder Jim Fruchterman's work with Arkenstone and reading machines for the blind. He took advantage of a copyright amendment in 1996. The Chafee Amendment said that you could distribute accessible copyrighted materials to people who qualify with a print disability. So Bookshare was born as a result of that. And now we have almost 30,000 books, four and a half years later, and we have over 150 newspapers that we provide every day to folks in the United States who qualify.

Beth: Well, that's quite a lot of books and newspapers. So what format are they available in?

Susie: So bookshare.org online book files come in two different formats. One is called DAISY, which stands for Digital Audio Information System. There's actually different versions of DAISY, and we have the text-based version of DAISY. The other file format that we have is BRF, which is Braille Refreshable Format, which can be used with refreshable Braille devices.

Beth: And so what kind of equipment do you need in order to listen to or read a book in DAISY?

Janice: We have a great partnership with a lot of the vendors, but with HumanWare, they provide a complimentary copy of Victor Reader Soft. When you become a member of Bookshare you get this software application that you download; it's a DAISY reader and it gives you a text-to-speech rendering of the book, and you can also see the print if you have low vision or you have a learning disability like dyslexia and you need to see the print as well.

Other vendors like Kurzweil, Freedom Scientific, GH, I could go on and on, we have a list of vendors at our website. We're vendor-neutral, and any company who provide software or hardware, like Book Port from APH, or Book Courier from Springer Design, any organization who provide devices or software applications for folks to access text, we work with them.

Susie: And so we're very happy to say that we're very flexible, and that our book files will work with most of the software or devices that are available.

Janice: Oh, and that's another... so screen readers like Jaws and Window-Eyes, for folks who... Bookshare is e-text, so our members have a computer and they have internet connectivity. That's one of the qualifiers for folks to become members of Bookshare.

Beth: And that leads me into my next question. What does it take to become a member of Bookshare?

Janice: Susie?

Susie: OK. So we serve the print-disabled community only. To become a member, basically there is kind of a two-step process as far as registration goes. If someone is over 18, they can simply go online and register online, there's a simple form they need to fill out and agree to our terms.

The second part of that is providing a proof of their print disability. We do have a partnership with the NLS, the National Library Service, so if somebody is a member to the NLS, they can fill out an online form, submit that, and the NLS will verify their disability for them, with us. A second way of doing that is we have a form that they can simply have filled out and signed by somebody who can certify their disability.

Janice: And then the last piece is you need to pay a fee. There are really three pieces. The member agreement that basically says you understand that you're receiving copyrighted materials and you will not make copies and distribute it. Two, Susie explained the proof of print disability, which is a part of our digital rights management. And then the third is that a fee is paid by either the member, if it's an individual, which for the first year is $75, there's a $25 fee that we need to cover our administration costs, and then $50 a year to be a member of Bookshare, to access the entire repository, so all the books, all the newspapers.

Beth: Can you elaborate on the newspapers?

Janice: I'd be delighted. It is one of our incredibly great partnerships. We started working with the National Federation of the Blind, almost three years ago, and they launched the Newsline service, NFB did, almost ten years ago, whereby they receive a digital feed from newspapers in states where they have funding. So there are organizations in certain states that will pay for the newspapers to deliver their content on a daily basis to NFB, and prior to Bookshare, the only way that was accessed was via the telephone. NFB members could ring up Newsline at NFB and listen to the newspapers.

Now, in addition to that great service, if folks are members of Bookshare, and you're in a funded state, which are, I believe, 41 states now, you can download, for example, The New York Times. If you're a member of Bookshare and you're in a funded state, you can log on in the morning to Bookshare, get the New York Times, Washington Post, download it onto either your computer or your Book Port or your Book Courier or your BrailleNote, get on the bus or get on the subway and go to work or go to school.

There are great partnerships, and this is one of them, where two organizations got together and the service that's provided is extra for members and for NFB members as well.

And just some trivia, some people always like to know metrics, we just sent our newsletter out, we send a quarterly newsletter to about 7,000 folks who've signed up to receive things. The top downloads for the newspapers were #1, The New York Times; #2, The Wall Street Journal; #3, The Washington Post; #4, USA Today; and a tie for #5, The San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Times were tied for fifth. So our folks who are members really like to know, what are the top ten downloads, what are the lists of popular items?

Anyway, thanks for asking about the newspapers. It's a great addition to the Bookshare collection.

Susie: Absolutely.

Beth: I'm just surprised that they're available so quickly. So are you provided the newspapers already in the digital format, or how do you get them turned around so quickly?

Janice: The digital formats are sent into NFB Newsline in Baltimore, and that night they provide it in the text-to-speech audio format from a phone standpoint, and we get the digital feeds sent by Newsline in Baltimore to us at night, and it comes into our system. It's technology serving humanity.

Beth: So that's great that you get that directly digital, and then that saves a lot of time and work. What about the books, though? How do you get those into digital format?

Susie: That's an excellent question. We like to call ourselves an online digital book-sharing community. We have hundreds of volunteers that will submit their scanned-in books to us. So these folks range from anybody, it could just be an individual that needs a book in an accessible format, to a teacher or a rehab counselor, somebody that's serving somebody with a print disability.

And one way of talking about how this is such a great community is, recently we had a really good story about a young man who was working on a project within his high school through Eagle Scouts in Virginia. He is a member of Bookshare, and he decided to get his own volunteers to help scan in several books so then they can share them with Bookshare. I think he sent us about 25, probably of his favorite books, that we didn't already have in our collection. And so it took him, this was quite a project for him, it took him several hours to do this. And because of his efforts, we now have all his favorite book collection on our repository that he can share with everybody across the country.

Janice: And we have awesome volunteers. We have, at any point, over 200 active volunteers. We have an active volunteer list, but in addition to the volunteers, we have grants from folks who, for instance, we have received a grant in the past where they underwrote 1,000 books in Spanish to be processed and placed in the Bookshare repository. And they also underwrote a Spanish version of Bookshare. So if any of your listeners are Spanish-speaking or want to see what we have, they can go to Bookshare.org, choose "Spanish," and see what's available in that language.

We also have, for instance, the New York Times bestsellers. We had an anonymous donor who wanted to allow us to buy the books clean; we get them from Amazon and they're chopped, they're processed so that they're really clean scans, they're done in-house. And it's sort of a gift that we're giving back to the volunteers, that someone else is purchasing these books and providing them.

And then last, and really important, some of the publishers are joining in providing digital feeds of the books that they produce. So we have one publisher, O'Reilly, Tim O'Reilly is the gentleman who runs O'Reilly Media. We have about 800 books about software production and code, where Tim and his organization sends us a digital feed as they produce books. So it's beautiful texts, there aren't any errors, it's easy to navigate. And we have another publisher who produces novels, and we are in the process of receiving close to 1200 books from them and that's the beginning of being able to go to some other publishers and say can you work with us as well? We are very protective of their copyright and only serve those folks who deserve access to these alternative formats. So, very exciting here right now.

Beth: You know, you all have really come a along way in what 4, four and one half years?

Susie: Sure have.

Beth: And I have a secret to divulge. You are probably now aware but back in about, it was probably about 2003 I was a volunteer for Bookshare.

Susie: Thank you.

Beth: And I only did a few books but I remember going to the website and there was a wish list. These are the books that we would like to have, and you just signed up and I said I will do this book and then I went to the library and I sat there with my flatbed scanner and scanned in these novels page by page.

Susie: You know how laborious it is. [laughter]

Beth: [laughter] But that's why I only did a few books. Bur things have changed a lot since then.

Janice: Thank you for doing that.

Susie: Thank you.

Beth: Now I have to come back right?

Janice: One of the, in the Bookshare, in the heart of our mission and goal is, you have a reader. You have a student. You have a teacher. You have a parent and in order to provide a book to someone so that they can access it and read it, hours and hours are spent in what you did for Bookshare with several of the books that you submitted. When it is in our repository and the copyright information is there, it saves the redundance. It provides a timesaver for folks. To check at Bookshare, if we have it then you don't have to do that.

That's has been one of our great arguments with the publishers is that this is going to happen one way or the other. Legally these folks are allowed to do this. So if you can provide us clean copies, you would really be providing an additional service to this community. So if any of your listeners out there have books they would like to share with us it's www.bookshare.org under volunteering it will explain how you can submit books. We would appreciate your donations.

Beth: And you know the story that you told about the young man who got his group together to scan books. That's such a great idea. I mean what a great philanthropic activity for a group because you could have one person who is doing the scanning and one person who proofs. You can have a whole bunch of people working on a set of book and it would be fun doing it as a group.

Susie: This young man organized folks at both at his community library as well as at the lab at his high school so he was very organized about it. I think they had a lot of fun as well, so.

Janice: Yep.

Beth: So Susie you said that you worked with schools and with groups. Can you elaborate on that?

Susie: Absolutely. So we have several schools throughout the country that we are currently working with. We have a couple of different programs for them to choose from depending on how they want to serve their students and basically we have one account called institutional access and another one called sponsored subscriptions. Both of these are a little different depending on how the teachers and staff want to serve their kids and manage the book files for them. So if the school is interested in setting up an account where they are going to be the ones or their staff members will be the ones that will be finding the book files, downloading the book files for them and providing those to the kids then they would want to set up an institutional book package with us.

Basically this is a year subscription where they choose a certain number of books for the year to serve their students with and I'll caveat that with we actually have a special running right now for back to school so if any folks are listening and you are an educator, you can contact us, again it's bookshare.org or you can reach us at groupaccounts@bookshare.org.

The other account that we have available is sponsored subscriptions. This allows a student to have a little bit more flexibility on their own to access our website on their own. It gives them unlimited access to any of the books available on our repository so this will give the student their very own login information and so wherever they have internet access at home, at library or school, they can on the fly log in, do searches for books and download on their own. And I think that covers the two accounts.

I also wanted to let you know that we have many different options available depending on how schools or districts want to set up services for their kids. So we manage schools anywhere from very small private schools to very larger size districts and territories. So we are very flexible and we work with schools and institutions to help them manage the best way and save time and efforts on both sides.

Beth: So you have textbooks available then as well?

Janice: Well we have some textbooks right now but that is going to be changing over the next year or two. There is something else happening for those of your listeners who are in the K through 12 space. They are very much familiar with regulations on the Department of Ed that this December 2006 it is called NIMAS. The National Instructional Materials Accessibilities Standard. This is an XML standard basically that describes how a digital book needs to be tagged for navigation. What that says is that as of this December as state agencies and local education agencies order books from publishers for the following school year for their K through 12 core curriculum, those books must be provided to the NIMAC repository that's the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Center or Access Center which is housed at APH, Printing House for the Blind.

Beth: We love our acronyms.

Janice: Yes we do. This is an enormous step forward in that it is a baseline standard for the quality of the book. It has to be of quality for navigation. It's the beginning of as a publisher sends the hard bound books to a state because x amount have been ordered and purchased a digital copy will be sent to the repository and the state agencies, local education agencies will be allowed to access the repository for those students who require accessible text. This is a big, big step and so the Bookshare, Jim Fruchterman our CEO, myself sit on the NIMAS committee. We are on the NIMAC committee, folks from RFBND the publishing community, the state agencies have been meeting for the last three years, as far as how this will be brought to market.

It will evolve, it won't be a perfect 100% solution at the get go. But five years from now it should be much easier for teachers and parents to know that if their child needs accessible text for school they will have that in a format where they can go to the same page and chapter as a student with a hardbound textbook, so.

Susie: And they should get it in a timely manner.

Janice: That's correct.

Susie: That is the point of the whole thing.

Beth: That would be fantastic and certainly will help the K through 12 community, what about those of us who work in the colleges? Do you know of anything similar?

Janice: There are a group of folks led by Ron Stewart, it's through the head post secondary organization that have been, again we work with that committee also. There are folks from New York, California. There are members on the committee from really around the country, Indiana where the goal is to work with the publishing community also to follow in the footsteps of NIMAS, K through 12 is a very easy animal compared to the number of books that are required for post secondary. So there is an effort being made to arrive at a standard as publishers across K through 12 and post secondary are changing their production techniques, the output will also provide an accessible version that someone at the college level can order a digital copy of a book for a student in addition to a print copy for another student. So there is a lot of activity in the education space. The only one that has been mandated by the government is the k through 12. So there appears to be, since you are in the post secondary arena Beth, there appears to be a lot of activity as well.

Beth: Now I try to keep the show from being too biased but from a personal viewpoint I would like to know what is going on that might help our students as well. So how many schools do you work with?

Janice: We have had hundreds of organizations have been off and on with us but at any given point we have several hundred schools who are actively registering students, example, you probably know this from your job, sometimes you don't have students who require books. So the schools we have some who are regular they stay with us because they have a steady stream of folks who need access to our collection. We have hundreds of schools who are members of Bookshare.

It has been interesting to watch that at post secondary level, they tend to purchase the institutional package where their mission is not to provide full access to Bookshare to their students. Their mission is to find a book to get to a student because that student starts class next week.

Beth: Or last week.

Janice: Or last semester. Whereas with K through 12 we have a number of schools who are trying to promote reading in general so they will underwrite subscriptions for their students for full access to the repository.

Beth: Well I think your program is just, it's an amazing program and then to realize what a short time that you have been operating, it's just absolutely amazing To my listeners, if you haven't checked out Bookshare, you really need to go give their site a look. I will have all the links in our show notes which as usual can be found at disability411.jinkle.com. And, you know if you are looking for some volunteer activities, some way to give to the community, consider scanning some books for them. It actually is kind of fun. I enjoyed doing it.

Susie: Thank you.

Beth: You may see me back in your volunteer list soon.

Janice: It will be great.

Beth: Susie and Janice that you for talking with me today.

Janice: Thank you for inviting us.

Susie: Thank you for inviting us absolutely.

Beth:...and we will be right back.

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Beth: Well as promised I did go back to Bookshare and signed up again to be a volunteer. I will like to challenge you all to do the same. If you have a little extra time do go there and sign up. Tell them you heard about it on this podcast. I would like to see how many disability411 listeners are participating.

And that will wrap this up for this week Don't forget our website is disability411.jinkle.com where you can read the transcript of today's show, listen to all our past shows and read their transcripts and participate in our forums, join our Frappr map and all other kinds of other fun stuff. So until next week, this is Disability411. I have been your host Beth Case.

The Disability411 podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons attribution non commercial, non derivative license and is part of the jingle.com family. Music by the Brobdingnagian Bards is used with permission. Visit our Website at disability411.jinkle.com