Publisher offers online creative tool to writers, kids

In keeping with its motto of seeing "a book in every child's hand", Bengaluru based publisher Pratham Books has created a unique online platform and resource database consisting of 800 stories in 18 languages. While most of these stories have already been published by the non-profit, some have been written specially for the initiative.
The organization's books and other resources have always been open source (under a Creative Commons licence, which gives people the right to share, use and build upon creative content).But it had been toying with the idea of digitizing all its published content,stories, books and artwork so that more people would be able to access it as per their convenience, said Suzanne Singh, chairperson, Pratham Books. Soon they were mulling the possibility of building an online platform that would not only let educators, librarians, teachers, parents, writers, illustrators and students download and print Pratham Books' titles anytime they wanted, but also give them a certain creative freedom over them.
The children's publisher wanted to create a platform that would enable users to play around with the resources to create new content, translate titles into languages that are not offered by the publisher or use the artwork database to create new stories. The website, storyweaver.org.in, which took almost a year to be perfected, was launched on September 8, International Literacy Day .
"The stories can be read, downloaded, translated or printed by anyone for free. We have also built a publishing tool where users can create new Indic language stories from an image bank of 2,000 openly licensed images. By providing publishing tools along with openly licensed content, we will be able to catalyze the creation of more Indic language content," said Singh. All content on the platform is Unicode (font) compliant, which makes it easy for users to print the books.
Pratham Books is among the first publishers in the world to not only digitize content but also offer creative possibilities within it. The American Library Association, headquartered in Chicago, is waiting to see how the initiative pans out, sources in the organization revealed.
TIMES VIEW
Pratham Books' novel initiative is a promising beginning to what should serve as an example for others. That it has digitized its content and made it accessible to all is noteworthy but what's more laudable is giving the user creative liberty.Technology is the greatest leveller and the publisher has done well by tapping into it. The open-source initiative can be of great help to teachers and children in rural areas, who are often deprived of resources, boosting literacy levels in the process. The easy access may also push urban kids to read, a habit being slowly forgotten.