From the San Jose Mercury News:

Benetech, a technology non-profit based in Palo Alto, announced this week that it has received a $32 million federal grant to expand Bookshare.org, a website that provides scanned books and periodicals to people who are blind or dyslexic.

The grant will allow it to open up its collection of more than 34,000 volumes free of charge to all blind or dyslexic students from kindergarten through graduate school.

“We believe this project could potentially benefit thousands of students . . . by exposing them to an Internet library with a multitude of books, magazines and newspapers in accessible formats,” Patty Guard, acting director of the Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs, wrote in an e-mail Thursday.The 5-year-old Bookshare already has 6,000 to 7,000 users, but that should increase to about 100,000 as a result of the grant, said Bookshare CEO Jim Fruchterman, who last year won a MacArthur Fellowship for his work.

He describes the site, which he thought of after watching his son download music from Napster, as “Amazon.com meets Napster meets Talking Books for the Blind - but legal.”

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 7:43 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, blindness/visual impairments, dyslexia, philanthropy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post