I’m away for a while (still away!) but I quickly logged in talk about this inspiring dream that Pratham Books is dreaming up! It’s one lofty vision, and every single vote from you and me can make it possible.

 

A quick heads up on it, and then straight to the voting panel!


Pratham Books is a finalist in the Google Impact Challenge. They propose to build an open source platform for children’s books. In simple terms, it means that it will allow for people to (most importantly) translate the books, remix books, adapt it in different ways for different users (audio, apps, mobile, download and print), etc.  In a country like ours where just a fraction of our kids have access to good, fun, entertaining reading material, bringing resource heads (authors, translators, illustrators, editors, publishers, educationists) together on one platform is an ambitious, yet doable plan. And it seems like the most creative and satisfying way to take up the challenge of putting a book in every child’s hand in a language that she understands. The world over, collaboration is not just the new buzzword, but also the most keenly believed-in strategy to be followed for a lasting impact all around. And in India, it is especially the need of the hour.


Here’s how Pratham Books envisions it, and I quote (from blog post):

“Our project will build collaborative web platforms that solve the three major problems that affect children in India – a very low number of books available for them, a lack of linguistic diversity of books and a lack of access to funding for libraries and books so that children can experience the joy of reading.”

For those among us with a better feel for numbers, here’s a mind boggling statistic (from Pratham Books’ blog post):

In the last decade, Pratham Books has created 250 stories, and 1600 books — which have been read 50 million times. With this Award, in just 3 years’ time, they’ll be able to scale up to 20,000 books, across 25 languages and over 200 million book reads!

Here’s a link to a couple of more detailed posts on this:

Creating a climate of collaboration

Let a thousand tongues speak

And now, fellow snugglers, here’s what we need to do to make this a reality:

Let’s vote!

We have time only until Oct 30. Get going, now now now!