You meet the most wonderful people when you provide a service focused on children.  I just finished a conversation with Sylvia McGrath who is building a second career serving children and adults facing chronic illnesses.  With business associate, Belinda Witzenhausen, Sylvia has created a series of web sites and resources to make a difference word by word.  We agreed to cooperate to serve our mutual audiences.

After a successful career in business, Sylvia reoriented her life to serve children with books and tools to help those with severe health challenges.  Sylvia publishes a monthly newsletter for children with special needs, chronic illnesses and learning challenges.  The newsletter includes practical information as well as book reviews, games and craft projects.  Sylvia will feature some of the books from our library.  Sylvia is also an author completing her first children book that we hope to see on Sharing-Books in the near future.

For those of you with special needs children, we invite you to discover these free resources created thanks to Sylvia's dedication:
Professor Owl's Publication Centre
A Treasure Chest of Resources
Professor Owl's Book Corner

Our Charity partners, Room to Read, who have played a very productive role to develop and equip libraries in developing nations, and who have helped thousands of girls go to school, have released a ten year review and updated vision in a very interesting document: Envisioning Our Future: A Road Map for Learning.

As usual with Room to Read documents, their review is well researched and their plans are inspiring. 
Enjoy the read!

As we are often asked for business details, our team has assembled a Sharing-Books Quick Fact Sheet (as of January 2010).

• Conceived in February 2007 - founded in October 2007 - website Sharing-Books.com launched in September 2008
• Built in Joomla open source platform
• website without flash - designed for low bandwidth regions of the world
• Shared Books Ltd (owner of Sharing-Books.com) is a privately held Canadian company, incorporated in British Columbia with a number of individual and corporate shareholders
• Became promotional partner of Room to Read at start-up
• Revenue sharing 1/3, 1/3, 1/3.  Sharing Books is a for profit social enterprise that shares its revenue equally between the book creators, Room to Read, and operating the company
• Published 250 books in its first year, one of the largest publisher of new children's books in Canada and the world
• Sharing-Books.com is used in libraries and schools around the world from California to Ukraine to Australia
• 25,000 e-books downloaded reaching an estimated 125,000 readers
• Held three book creators contests in 2009
• A current project includes transforming our e-books into video-books for distribution on content selling sites.
• Publishing partner of Bookshare.org, the world largest online library for the visually challenged
• Sharing-Books acquires classic children books that are over 100 years old, scans them and republishes them as e-books
• E-books save trees - not printing 250 books saves one paper tree.
• Sharing-Books is an active participant in the annual E-Book Week (March)
• Sharing-Books has been recommended by a number of parenting and technology sites and blogs
• Sharing-Books operates a virtual office with participants from several cities in British Columbia and Alberta.
• Sharing-Books creators come from North America, Europe, India, Asia and Australia.
• We use a unique licensing agreement that lets the creators retain the copyrights to their work.  The license grant Sharing-Books the rights to further develop the intellectual property of the books.
• Sharing-Books has a speed publishing process that can approve and publish a book in 48 hours.
• Sharing-Books' content is vetted by a team of volunteer librarians.
• The publishing process enables book creators to update their books with new versions.
• The PDF version of the books is available to anyone for free, and the video versions of the books will be sold for a micro-payment.

I was delighted to discover the Canadian poet Shane Koyczan at the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Featuring him was a bold and brilliant decision.

First as a Canadian, I loved what he had to say about our country. And as a participant in a project like Sharing-Books that supports literacy and new authors, I feel really inspired that maybe we will help a new author find his voice, or that through one of our e-books a child will discover that poetry is a calling worth following.

Maybe one day, they too will recite their poem in front of over two billion TV viewers.

Labels: Poetry, Shane Koyczan, writing

Our friends at Room to Read have posted their latest update. Take a few minutes to see how our friends at Room to Read have accomplished much despite a difficult economic environment.