Everyone reads at Bookshare.org!

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When Kim Brown found that her young son needed special education instruction at school, she took the skills she learned in the software industry and began researching technology tools for the classroom. Brown even adapted business software such as PowerPoint to help her son visualize and absorb written language. In her quest for assistive technology that could help young students read, Brown discovered Bookshare.org, the largest online digital library of accessible books in the United States. The Bookshare.org library offers more than 36,000 books, magazines, and newspapers in digital files that can be converted to assistive technologies such as large print, Braille, synthesized speech, CD, DVD, and MP3 digital audio.

Brown became so adept at researching and evaluating accessible educational tools that she was hired by the Portola Valley School District as an assistive technology specialist. She now helps teachers and students in the district's special education classes download electronic books to their school laptops and introduced software that reads the books aloud in a human voice. In addition to books that the school has downloaded from Bookshare.org, Brown has scanned another 18,000 pages of literature and textbooks and developed an assistive technology lab class to teach students how to use the tools.

According to Nina Clinton, who teaches special education at the district's Corte Madera School, combining onscreen digital texts with an audio program provides a multi-modal approach that permits students to see the words as they listen along. Brown says the combination of viewing and listening to digital texts has allowed the school's special education students--including her son--to read textbooks at their own grade level. She says that other qualified students with learning disabilities are using Bookshare.org to read high-level fiction and additional assigned reading.

"Talk about a self-esteem builder," says Brown. "The students know why they are in these classes, but they don't want to be looked at as the lower ones on the totem pole. They told us that they want the same books as their peers."

Bookshare.org was launched in 2002 by Benetech, a Palo Alto, California-based nonprofit technology organization. Benetech developed a technical conversion process that transforms scanned book files into the worldwide DAISY/NISO digital talking book standard and the digital Braille (BRF) format. The DAISY/NISO standard allows the distribution of digital books with indexing and bookmarking features that lets readers navigate quickly from one part of a book to another.

Bookshare.org now supports more than 18,000 user accounts that serve readers who have a print disability, teachers, and organizations that access Bookshare.org's digital texts. The Bookshare.org collection is selected by members and volunteers who submit books they have scanned. Teachers can download desired books, request that new educational content be added to the library, and encourage students to register for individual Bookshare.org memberships. A special provision in U.S. copyright law gives qualified nonprofit organizations, such as Benetech, the ability to distribute copyrighted materials in a specialized format for use by people with print disabilities without requiring permission.

Bookshare.org member, Monica Willyard, says the service allowed her to read an accessible copy of The Odyssey that her sighted daughter's English teacher had assigned. "Bookshare helps us too by making it possible to discuss these books as a family," writes Willyard. "My heartfelt thanks goes out to whoever scanned The Odyssey. You've made my job as a mom so much easier."

Bookshare.org memberships are free for qualified U.S. students. Other readers subscribe to the Bookshare.org library for a $25 sign-up fee plus $50 annually for an unlimited number of books. Bookshare.org provides members with free, PC-based DAISY book reader software that reads books aloud on a personal computer. Bookshare.org's texts in the DAISY format can also be read in a standard web browser allowing users to browse web pages with their screen reader, screen magnifier, dyslexia reading software and/or Braille display.

Among the Bookshare.org titles are bestselling popular books including the current New York Times bestseller list and the Harry Potter series. Over 150 newspapers and magazines are also available daily through Bookshare.org in partnership with the National Federation of the Blind through its NFB-NEWSLINE [R] service. To comply with copyright law and agreements with publishers and authors, Bookshare.org members must provide proof of a print disability, such as blindness, low vision, a reading disability, or a mobility impairment that makes it difficult or impossible to read standard print.

In October of 2007, the U.S. Department of Education awarded Benetech a $32 million five-year contract to dramatically expand the Bookshare.org collection and provide U.S. students of any age who have a print disability free access to the service. Teachers of students with disabilities and educational agency staff members can download books for students without charge. Both members and nonmembers can search the catalogue of immediately available titles on Bookshare.org.

Bookshare.org member, Josh Bowers, a 21-year-old student who is blind and who studies psychology at the Harrisburg Area Community College, says his biggest challenge is getting access to textbooks. "Hopefully some day, when a book is a published, they will send an alternative copy and donate it to Bookshare, or when we buy it, the publisher will donate it to us," says Bowers. "How else will we get equal access to all the books?"

The U.S. Department of Education funding will allow the Bookshare.org for Education project to add more than 100,000 educational books to its collection in the next five years and deliver millions of books for free to students who have print disabilities. Bookshare.org is currently adding 150 to 200 new books each week to its online library. It has permission to distribute about 3,000 copyrighted titles to people with print disabilities worldwide and offers texts in both English and Spanish. Bookshare.org is expanding its partnerships with publishers and has established agreements with technology book publisher O'Reilly Media and other leading publishers.

Bookshare.org accepts books provided by publishers in RTF, XML or the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) format and converts them into DAISY digital talking book and digital Braille formats. Bookshare.org released a free beta version of its NIMAS Validator software that locates errors in digital books produced under the NIMAS Standard. Bookshare.org's NIMAS Validator helps replace the laborious process of human validation by automatically checking key formatting criteria in NIMAS files such as the correct sequence of page numbers and missing images. The NIMAS format is especially important to students with disabilities since recent changes to federal law made NIMAS the standard accessible format for all K-12 textbooks.

ANN HARRISON IS THE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR FOR BENETECH THAT OPERATES THE BOOKSHARE.ORG SERVICE. SHE CAN BE REACHED AT [e-mail].