40% of the world lacks access to education in their own language. The paucity of mother tongue reading material is linked to children’s inability to read at grade level. To accelerate progress towards SDG4: Education For All, children need books in languages they understand. The StoryWeaver platform addresses this book gap by pioneering a new model for the creation of and distribution of books.
StoryWeaver acts as a shared space for publishers, creators, translators, educators, governments, technologists to create book security. At its core, it is a repository of high-quality, openly licensed multilingual storybooks from global publishers, including Pratham Books. Each book is available in multiple formats and can be read online, offline, downloaded, printed, repurposed. Initiatives include audio-visual books for early readers; books in formats like PDFs, ePUBS (the latter allows for versioning into accessible formats like Braille). StoryWeaver also acts as a hub from which other platforms like Google Read Along pull content. Translation & versioning tools help customize books for localized needs. It is Unicode-compliant, enabling the addition of complex scripts. For every original book on the platform, 12 derivative versions are created, unlocking exponential growth. Since its launch in 2015, StoryWeaver has grown to a readership of 57 million with users from 150 countries.
In the last 3 years, StoryWeaver’s repository grew by 260% to 34,000 books and its language footprint grew by 150% to 296 languages. StoryWeaver's architecture is built for scale - its code is open-sourced to encourage replicability. Room to Read customized this to launch https://literacycloud.org, taking books to millions of children. We created a local language gateway for Darakht-e Danesh Library, Afghanistan in Farsi and Pashto: https://ddl.storyweaver.org.in. The response to the pandemic was swift, with the creation of a Learn at Home programme and boosting of multilingual resources. In 2020, StoryWeaver was recognised as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance. The goal for the next 3 years is to grow to 50,000 books in 350 languages, with a readership of 100 MN.
Create a free account on www.storyweaver.org.in to access openly licensed multilingual storybooks, educator resources, the Offline Library, tools to translate & create books. If you represent an organisation that promotes children’s literacy and would like to partner with us or discuss how we can customise the StoryWeaver platform as per your needs, write to us at contact@storyweaver.org.in.
