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Book Dash
Social impact publisher From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Book Dash is a social impact publisher (SIP) which works with volunteer creatives to produce open access children's picture books.[1] Their aim is to create and publish high-quality picture books with storylines and illustrations that represent South African children's lived experiences, and make these open-access books available in vernacular languages, in print and on digital platforms.[2]
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Background
Book hunger is a pervasive problem worldwide.[3] In South Africa, a national reading survey indicated that 63% of South African households did not have any fiction or nonfiction books, and 65% of homes with children under 10 did not have any picture books.[4] In many schools, reading is seen as "oratorical" [5] and taught as an oral performance, with little emphasis on comprehending written text.[6][7] By Grade 4, according to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, four in five South African children cannot read for meaning in any language.[8]
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Organization
Book Dash is a non-profit organization, founded in 2014, that seeks to address the absence of picture books in homes.[9][10] They envision every child owning 100 books before age five.[10] Unlike the commercial publishing industry, where books take a long time to produce and are expensive, Book Dash uses volunteers to produce openly published books quickly.[11]
The book creation model that Book Dash follows has similarities to the Booksprints model, where a group of experts take a few days to design, edit and illustrate a book.[12] At each Book Dash event, ~10 children's books are created over a 12-hour period.[13] The storybooks are published under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing others to download, re-use and adapt these children's books and translate them.[11] The books are printed and given away for free.[14] In its first decade, Book Dash created more than 200 titles and gave away more than 4 million books.[15]
In 2024, Book Dash was recognized as "Platform of the Year" by Brittle Paper.[14] It was named a Library of Congress 2020 Best Practice Honoree[16] and has been shortlisted for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.[17]
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References
External links
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