[Textbook-l] Pratham Books; Open Access/Wiki Children's Books

[Gautam John]

Hello List,

I got here via Erik at the WM Foundation.

I'm working with Pratham Books [1] and we're a non-profit children's
book publishing house that seeks to put a book in every child's hand.
To further this goal, we are in the process of developing a reading
portal for India, on the lines of the water portal [2] that we hope
will ultimately be the de facto repository of information related to
children's books in India.

An integral part of this portal is a wiki-like platform where we hope
to upload all of our books, close to 1000 of them, and allow them to
be translated and edited and downloaded in high and lo res PDF's by
users. The goal of this project is to untie distribution of the books
from the physical medium to further our mission, as mentioned
previously.

However, given that it's children's books, maintaining and preserving
the layout of the books, the pictures with respect to the text, is
crucially important. We also contemplate uploading blank templates, of
only the layout and pictures, for people to use to write their own
stories.

A few areas we're looking for assistance are:

User Interface

Given the nature of the content we're seeking to create and enable use
and re-use of , the ease of use and the intuitiveness of the UI will
be crucial in building support from a user base.

Platform Design

Ideally, we'd like the platform to conform to the same standards that
the project does of being open, free and modifiable. However, the
deeper technical issues are, at this point, a little beyond our scope
of abilities.

Community Building

In particular, building an active and engaged community around the
idea and the content will define whether this platform works. Also,
issues and processes for moderation and administration from within the
community.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you.

Best,

[1] http://prathambooks.org/

[2] http://www.arghyam.org/


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