E34 Brad Turner talks Bookshare.org

Gaining access to reading material is about more than having good books to enjoy, which is of course a worthy end in itself. It’s even about more than having access to material that can advance your education and training. Being able to read a book at the same time as your sighted colleagues are talking about it around the water cooler facilitates full inclusion.

Many of us can still remember that due to resource and technological limitations, it could often take many months for a best seller to be made accessible. Now, there are many accessible ways for us to read a book, often in a timely manner, and one of those is Bookshare, which is specifically for print disabled people.

More than 425,000 people in 70 countries have access to Bookshare’s collection of 546,950 titles. More than 820 U.S. and international publishers contribute to its social mission by donating their digital files, making it possible for Bookshare to serve users around the world and ensurin [...]