Great news about Bookshare.orgOh! This is so exciting!! This is the best news I have heard lately. *G* I told you guys you were doing an awesome job!! Maithe ----- Original Message ----- From: Lisa Friendly To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ; bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2007 10:21 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Great news about Bookshare.org Forwarded from Jim Fruchterman: I'm happy to share incredible news, which will transform Bookshare.org. On Friday, the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. federal Department of Education made a major five-year award of $32 million to Bookshare.org. This funding is to fully support all schools and students with qualifying print disabilities in the United States, K-12 and post-secondary, with access to the entire Bookshare.org collection of accessible electronic books and to software for reading those books. As of October 1, 2007, we will cease charging these schools and students anything to join Bookshare.org as members. In this initial news flash, I can't begin to share with you all of our plans for Bookshare.org now with this funding. But, we are planning on adding more than 100,000 new educational books and materials to our existing collection of over 34,000 titles. We are going to reach out to every student, every family with a disabled student, and every school in the U.S. to offer them the chance to join the Bookshare.org community and transform the practice of making books accessible. We are going to coordinate with schools and publishers to deliver the best quality content possible and lower their costs in meeting our shared obligations to serve every student with a disability in the nation. We expect to provide millions of books to students through this new program over the next five years, at a tenth or less of the historical cost of providing these services. And, we expect our improvements to serve all of these students will make Bookshare.org better for all of our Bookshare.org users. Bookshare.org's track record of being highly responsive to our members will be enhanced with significant funding to implement major improvements to our content and services. Our volunteer community is an essential part of what made this grant possible, and you are a crucial part to making this a success in the future. Your commitment to our shared vision of better access to information is core to where we are heading. We want to make equal access to educational materials for disabled students a reality! Jim Jim Fruchterman President and CEO Benetech