Hachette Book Group Partners with Bookshare

Bookshare looks for publishers to partner with us to make books more available to people with disabilities. It's very exciting that we can announce that one of the largest book groups in the United States has just made the commitment: Hachette Book Group Partners with Bookshare To Make Thousands of Books Available to People with Print Disabilities.

Hachette Book Group publishes under quite a number of famous imprints, such as Little Brown and Company and Grand Central. According to the company, they had a record 107 books on the New York Times bestseller list in 2008, with 35 of them ranked #1. By gaining access to these books directly from Hachette, we don't have to go through our typical time-consuming process of chopping, scanning and proofreading the books. They will be sending the books to us in high quality XML formats that we can turn into DAISY and Braille digital files. We're really excited about the social responsibility that Hachette has demonstrated through making this commitment!

Part of our commitment to Hachette is to ensure that people with print disabilities get the Hachette books they need through Bookshare. The Bookshare infrastructure is set up to make it easy to provide these specialized accessible formats. We're looking forward to making other, similar partnerships with publishers to address the needs of people who simply can't use the traditional print book.