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Bringing Millions of Books to Billions of People: Making the Book Truly Accessible

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Literacy and access to knowledge underpins just about every social good, from education, to economic development, to health, to women’s empowerment, democracy and respect for human rights. To bring the power of books to everybody on this planet, we must make books truly accessible. Third, the print book is not universally accessible.

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A Call for Millions: Ending the Global Book Famine for the Blind

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

There’s a global book famine afflicting people with disabilities. I have good news: For $5 million a year, we can build a global library that provides tens of millions of people around the world who are blind, low vision, or dyslexic free access to books that will work for them. This one does. We have the technology.

Global 109
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Fair Use Victory Advances a Future of Accessibility for All

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

HathiTrust, a unanimous three-judge panel concluded that digitizing books in order to enhance research and provide access to individuals with print disabilities is lawful on the grounds of fair use —that is, a limitation and exception to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work ( Section 107 of the U.S.

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Robin Seaman, Agent of Inclusion

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The nonprofit Benetech team built the revolutionary Bookshare library for this community, all online, and based on the powerfully flexible ebook. We named this library Bookshare because it was created with an army of crowdsourcing volunteers, many of them blind people themselves, who scan the books using optical character recognition.

eBook 100
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Advancing Reading Equality with Bookshare’s Exponential Growth

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

I’m thrilled to share with you some of the recent amazing impact of Bookshare , a Benetech Global Literacy initiative and the largest accessible online library of copyrighted content for people with print disabilities. These milestones represent a giant leap forward in the number of students and individuals we serve.

Literacy 129
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Nonprofit Advocacy Can Be a Force Multiplier for Social Change

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

You see, several months later, the federal Department of Education challenged us to compete against a well-respected national nonprofit 60 times our size in a bid to provide accessible educational materials for US students who are blind, dyslexic, or otherwise print disabled. million contract to do just that. Fast-forward six years.

Advocacy 176
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The Case for Copyright Exceptions and Fair Use

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The tools we develop for that purpose span a range of fields—from human rights , to global literacy , to the environment —but no matter what area we work in, we depend on an IP system that’s friendly to technological advances and to positive social impact. copyright law. In the U.S.,

Copyright 196