Celebrating International Friendship Day – Friends Who Are Helping Us Bridge Geographic Boundaries

August 2 is International Friendship Day. We have been around for about 5 years, but on our journey we have made numerous friends who have helped and supported us along the way. This post is about some of our friends who are helping us cross geographical boundaries and make our books available to kids across the world.

Connexions – We have been working with the Connexions Project , at Rice University in Houston, to build a platform that allows people to reuse, remix and translate our content into multiple languages both Indian and otherwise. While we have made great progress on the basics, we still have work to do in building the ability to deal with multiple Indian languages, the ability to control font sizes and pagination.

Literacy Bridge (Talking Audio Books)

We have been working with the non-profit Literacy Bridge in Seattle on a project called the Talking Audio Book. We have been working with them to provide openly licensed content for this device and help them plan and organize a pilot program in India.
International Children’s Digital Book Library

The International Children’s Digital Book Library is a wonderful project that is “… making the best in children’s literature available online free of charge and pursues its vision by building a digital library of outstanding children’s books from around the world…” We will gradually be making our content available in their library and in multiple languages.

Bill and Microsoft

We had an interesting research proposal from Microsoft’s India Research Center – they had devised a low cost method, centering around the use of optical media such as DVDs and CDs, to distribute reading material to read and listen to. We are in the process of conducting a
pilot with them and are looking forward to the results of this project!