My Visit to Bookshare

I was very excited when I read the description of this site--"Bookshare.org gives print disabled people in the United States legal access to over 33,000 books and 150 periodicals that are converted to Braille, large print or text to audio files" (www.Bookshare.org). It can help individuals who are blind, those with severe vision problems, and those whose mobility is limited and are unable to turn the pages of a book. It also has over 1,000 books in Spanish. I immediately thought that this would be a great way to get free resources for my library to serve my students with disabilities.

I was right to some extent. Bookshare.org allows anyone to freely download "public domain books" (books that are out of copyright) in various formats. Many classic works of literature are available here, and you can also download software that will read books aloud to you. I browsed several pages on the site and was able to listen to a demo of a passage from Little Lord Fauntleroy. I must say that the quality could be improved. Some of it was a little hard to understand as it was being read.

However, if one wants to get copyrighted material from this site, one has to register with Bookshare and pay for a subscription. I was disappointed to find that schools had to pay what I consider to be hefty subscription costs ($75 per new student and $50 renewal every year after). I know that I will not be able to afford this type of fee, so I will only use the public domain books on this site. I have bookmarked it and will pass this information on to all teachers, especially the ones in the special education department of my school.

Just out of curiousity, I tried to scan this website with WebXact, but could not. It seems that the site blocks that from happening because I got this message, "This link is a server redirect." Hmm. . .