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

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Today, we are poised at a moment in time where we can transcend the limitations of past book technologies and bring the power of books to all humans. However, as a technology, printed books come with serious challenges for some communities (like blind people) that technology can unlock. Love of the print book. We can do better!

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Are You Passionate about Technology and Social Good? Benetech Needs You!

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Guest post by Betsy Beaumon, President, Benetech We are seeking visionary leaders to join Benetech in applying technology to advance the rights of disadvantaged people around the world. We are Silicon Valley’s deliberately nonprofit software company. You’ve come to the right place: Benetech.

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Receiving the 2013 Migel Medal

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

This is the field where I found my life’s calling, applying technology to meet critical needs of society, where the market is likely to fail. I remember the day I told my wife, Virginia, that I’d do this “nonprofit thing” for just one year and then go back to regular for-profit high tech companies. That was over 24 years ago!

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Increasing Accessible Publishing Globally

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The world has finally moved beyond just electronically creating books that are then distributed as ordinary print books to actually delivering digital ebooks. In technical terms, this means that the next version of the DAISY format, version 4, will be the same as EPUB3, the main format used by commercial publishers of ebooks.

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Commercial Availability: The Poison Pill for Marrakesh Treaty Implementation

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

That’s the lobbying position of some companies in the intellectual property field when implementing the new Marrakesh Copyright Treaty. Libraries for people who are blind or dyslexic are the primary source of accessible books in audio, large print or braille. That would pretty much defeat the purpose of having a library.

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Tribute to My Mentor

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

When I explained that our board just didn’t see manufacturing reading machines for the blind making financial sense for a for-profit company, Gerry said “How about you set up a deliberately nonprofit tech company?” What if we could scan once, proofread the resulting scan, and share that ebook with tens of thousands of eager readers?

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Benetech’s Framework for Developing New Social Enterprises

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

In my contribution to Ron’s book, I discuss the framework that guides us at Benetech, the technology nonprofit I lead. When I first started pursuing the idea of using technology to solve challenging social problems, it was a pretty radical idea. copyright law. Our lower cost model allowed us to invert the power structure.

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