Italy-based digital books distributor and publishing facilitator StreetLib has partnered with India’s Storyweaver to deliver 5,000 free multilingual stories to the world’s children, as part of its commitment to UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages.
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[Press Release] UNESCO’s Year of Indigenous Languages sees StreetLib and StoryWeaver providing access to over 5000 multilingual stories.
Loreto, Italy 10 April 2019.
StreetLib CEO Giacomo D’Angelo said:
“2019 is the UNESCO Year of Indigenous Languages, and we’re delighted to support this cause by leveraging our unrivalled global digital books distribution network to distribute the wonderful stories from StoryWeaver.
All the stories are available under open license and the platform also provides easy-to-use tools to create, adapt, and translate new stories for children, all for free. This is something we’ve long admired and we are happy to be able to collaborate with them and offer their content on our platform.”
Suzanne Singh, Chairperson at Pratham Books, said:
“Pratham Books created its digital platform, StoryWeaver to provide open and free access to books so that children have enough books in their own languages to learn and practice reading. We are delighted that Streetlib is migrating 5000 books from Storyweaver to their digital library. Collaborations like these will lead to the creation of a global network of local language libraries for educators and children everywhere”.
Pratham Books (www.prathambooks.org) is a not-for-profit children’s book publisher founded in 2004 with the mission to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’. Its key objective is to publish good quality, affordable storybooks in multiple languages to support reading acquisition among children. StoryWeaver (www.storyweaver.org.in) is an open source, digital platform of multilingual children’s stories from Pratham Books. On StoryWeaver users can read, create, translate, download and share over 12500 stories for free in 153 languages! By creating a collaborative framework where the creators and consumers of children’s content could interact with one another, StoryWeaver attempted to address the scarcity of books for children in their mother languages. The titles on the platform are a mix of fiction and nonfiction,and cover a diverse variety of themes including maths, science, environment, humor and history among others.
Initially the StoryWeaver titles will be available to download for free from the StreetLib Store, an ebook store available anywhere in the world where there is an internet connection. Once the StoryWeaver catalogue is fully ingested, StreetLib plans to explore with its hundreds of global retail, subscription and library partners how it might make this content available for free on their platforms.
Giacomo D’Angelo added:
“This content will be especially valuable to schools and libraries in the emerging markets, where finding affordable and suitable digital content in local languages is a challenge.
We are already talking to libraries, education authorities and individual schools around the world and we invite any and all interested parties to contact us to explore ways of bringing them the StoryWeaver catalogue and our wider catalogue of over a quarter million titles.”
Here is just a peek at some of the languages StoryWeaver offers content in, and that will be available for free download anywhere in the world via StreetLib.
Languages from India
Assamese, Bengali, Bengali-Kora, Bengali-Santali, Bhoti, Bundelkhandi, English, English-Bengali, English-Hindi, English-Marathi, English-Tamil, English-Urdu, Gondi, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Kora (Bengali Script), Korku, Marathi, Marwari, Odia, Pawari, Punjabi, Santali (Bengali Script), Surjapuri, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu.
Languages from Africa
Acholi, Afrikaans, Chinyanja, Chitonga, Dagaare, Dagbani, Dhopadhola, Ewe, Fante, Hausa, Hebrew, Igbo, IsiXhosa, isiZulu, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kiswahili, Kumam, Luganda, Lugbarati, Lumasaaba, Lusoga, Maa, Olukhayo, Runyankore, Sepedi, Sesotho, Sisali, Yoruba
Languages from Europe
Macedonian, Serbian (Cyrillic Script), Serbian (Latin Script)
Languages from Asia
Bahasa Indonesia, Bangla (Bangladesh), Basa Jawa, Farsi, Filipino, Khmer, Lao, Pashto, Vietnamese
About StoryWeaver
StoryWeaver (www.storyweaver.org.in) is an open source, digital platform of multilingual children’s stories from Pratham Books. On StoryWeaver users can read, create, translate, download and share stories for free! By creating a collaborative framework where the creators and consumers of children’s content could interact with one another, StoryWeaver attempted to address the scarcity of books for children. StoryWeaver was launched in 2015 with 800 stories in 24 languages. Today, the platform offers over 12,500+ stories in 153 languages.
About Pratham Books
Pratham Books (www.prathambooks.org) is a not-for-profit children’s book publisher founded in 2004 with the mission to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’. Its key objective is to publish good quality, affordable storybooks in multiple languages to support reading acquisition among children. Since inception, Pratham Books has published over 3,000 books in 21 Indian languages.
Contact us at contact@storyweaver.org.in
About StreetLib
StreetLib (www.streetlib.com) is a publishing facilitator and a global gateway to the $143 billion international book market, 70% of which is happening outside the USA, for publishers big and small. Whether you are an independent author or a multinational publisher, StreetLib offers unrivalled global reach through our worldwide network of retail, digital library and subscription service outlets. StreetLib distributes ebooks, comics, magazines, print-on-demand paperbacks. Audiobooks and other print soon. StreetLib standard model is no up-front fees and it takes just a 10% commission per sale made.
Contact us at info@streetlib.com
See the original press release here.
