Bookshare, the greater library in internet for people with visual disability

The virtual bookshop North American Bookshare, created in 2002 for the company without spirit of profit Benetech to facilitate the reading of books and press to the persons blind and with disabilities that they can not access to these publications in standard format, is experiencing an important international expansion, and has incorporated texts in Castilian, as the television channel briefs CBS News.

This service already counts on 6.000 subscribers that through the web page Bookshare.org, 31.100 books and 150 newspapers in formats can unload audio,o archives compatible with readers of computer screen, or that afterwards will be able to print in Braille.

The cost of the service is from 25 dollars of inscription and 50 annual dollars, which allows a catalog to access of 30.000 titles as well as to|in the daily press. The law of author's copyright North American allows to the persons with disability to access to contents that they could not use in its original format, and through a system of digital identification, Bookshare guarantees that only users with disability access their materials.

Benetech is funded with donations and counts on the support of technological firms like Microsoft or Google. Thousands of volunteers are of scanning the texts that their offers in charge. Likewise, the publishing companies facilitate him copies in digital format of their publications in the moment of i their launch in the market.

Jim Fruchterman, set up Benetech in order to put the technology in the service of the social causes, and the company also counts on projects for the literacy, the promotion of the human rights and the elimination of antipersons mines.

Fruchterman has received recently the prize "MacArthur genius", who rewards employers with an important social task, and works actively as the next generation of companies managers of the technological sector to develop the social consciousness.

Source: NotiBlog