Guiding Principles
1. Books directly to the blind person.
2. No copyright infringement.
3. Free to download books / audio content.
4. Synergy with the ecosystem and drawing on mutually beneficial
components.
5. All those who can benefit from the project will benefit. At
the moment, we envisage the following beneficiaries directly:
- Blind Children
- Children in semi urban and rural schools who drop out for want
of recreational activities.
- Older people who lose sight as they age.
- Children of Indian origin who are not familiar with the script
of an Indian language but would like to know about the literature
of that language.
- People in semi urban / rural areas who are print disabled (not
educated enough).
- Girl children(and older women) who are not enrolled in schools. Their access to knowledge should not be cut off.
Content Creation
For content creation, we will depend on the following sources:
1. Blind institutions who may want to share their audio books
with others.
2. Individual Volunteers who will record at home and share files.
3. Organisations and Educational Institutions that will take up
recording as a group volunteering activity - through the Read
Fest event.
4. Commercial audio book producers - we will talk to them about
letting us use their rejected files or obsolete files.
5. Tie ups with authors to let us use vanilla recordings for free
and sell the production quality content for a royalty.
Content Consolidation
All content will be accessible from a single location. The database
is searchable by key words. That way, the user will be able to
see what is available. For all paid content, the user can decide
whether they would like to buy, but at least the search result
should produce information that such content exists. I have written
about it here:
http://eshabraille.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/the-google-of-audio-books-is-here/
Distribution
-
Making the content accessible and available to the blind /
print disabled.
We will use the following distribution mechanisms(in that order
of preference)
1. Internet - Free downloads. No signup required. This will help
even those with minimal internet skills to use the site.
2. Mobile Phones - Tie ups with mobile phone service providers
to allow users to download this content on their mobile phones
and to store it on their local media if required.
3. In the unlikely event that a beneficiary cannot reach us through
the internet and mobile phone, we will provide the content on
digital media and physically ship it.
4. For some blind schools and village schools, we will also distribute
mp3 players with inbuilt speakers so that the stories can be told
to the entire class.
- Ensuring continued distribution and access.
The CLABIL project is an ongoing initiative. As our beneficiaries
grow, we will have to ensure that there is enough content to keep
their attention and interest. As we try and reach more and more
locations, we will have to add subjects, languages and formats (poems,
stories, riddles etc.)
Constant communication is another key requirement.
