The New Bookshare has Launched!

Over the weekend just ended we successfully launched the completely rebuilt Bookshare website. The original Bookshare website and service was created over seven years ago, and has served us well. But, our new Bookshare for Education project with its likely prospect of increasing our student users one hundredfold meant we needed a rebuild. I'm also excited about our new logo!

The new features built in are too many for me to list in a short blog post, but our team has prepared a brief on the new Accessibility and Ease of Use features. Big news includes:

• Many new accessibility features
• Brand new talking software from HumanWare and Don Johnston
• High quality text-to-speech
• Extensive features for schools to manage student memberships, including an easy way for a school to recommend a student gets their own personal membership (their own unlimited use library card)
• Expanded and enhanced volunteer functions to make adding new books easier
• Replacing our proprietary compression software with password-protected standard zip compression

I'm very proud of our team in their ability to conceive of and execute on this project. It's been an all-Benetech effort to make this possible. The new website makes it possible for us to pick up the pace of innovation even more, because it will be much easier to add enhancements to this new modern design.

The goal of the new Bookshare is make it easier to deliver on our mission objectives. I expect that the new Bookshare will be used in most schools in the U.S. in the next few years. We're dedicated to making sure that lack of access to books is no longer a barrier to success for print-disabled students!