We are delighted to mark the milestone of delivering our 10,000th children e-book. We are glad that we can deliver a new reading experience to thousands of children and parents. This is an encouraging proof of the value of Sharing-Books.com and it energizes us in continuing the development of our next set of features.

I must admit that I missed the milestone. I stayed up till 2:30am watching the book counter go up as the other side of the world was waking up. I had hoped to capture a screen shot of the site at 10,000 books. Unfortunately, I fell asleep at 9,992... and woke up to see the counter at 10,095! I will make sure I do not miss 100,000 books downloaded.

Our team is very thankful for all the authors who believe in Sharing-Books.com and who keep adding their works to our library. We are glad that together we can deliver children literature free to children around the world. We thank our visitors for their interest and we encourage all to keep referring Sharing-Books.com to their family and friends.

Pierre Lapointe
Co-Founder

Labels: milestones, news

Sharing Books has reached another fantastic milestone! Our book creators have now published their 200th book on our site! This is a fantastic place to find ourselves, it was less then a year ago when we opened up the Sharing Books website to the public. To have published 200 new children's books in that time is phenomenal, and we would like to thank all of the authors and illustrators who have chosen to publish their work with us. Here's to 200 books in under a year! It is fitting that our 200th book published is Where There Is A Will by Larry Low, who was one of the first book creators to start publishing with Sharing Books.

Labels: milestones, news

So right as the final sprint for the Simone Wood Award, 2009 was underway a series of major failures occurred with our server. We are still trying to piece together what happened, and we will try to keep you informed. It involves multiple systems having multiple problems, and is proving a Gordian knot to untangle. So much like Alexander the great we took a knife to the knot, and the site is back to accepting books for publication.

We know that some people have not had their books properly upload over the last few days, so we are asking that they re-upload their books. We are going to give a grace window for the affected users over the weekend, allowing them to upload during this week until Friday, and accept them into the contest.

Further details on how this is going to affect the contest will be posted by Wednesday. We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing.

Labels: awards, contest, news, Simone Wood, site outages

We are happy to report that a pile of our books are now available for the visually impaired on BookShare.org as of today. The following works are available:

A World Too Much With Us - Larry Low
Can't Complain - Larry Low
Chelsea's Chariot - Carol Mayer
Crossing Rubicon - Larry Low
Grandmother Goodness - Larry Low
Mrs. Whip - Larry Low
North to LA - Larry Low
Philmore, Xebob and the Impossibility Theory - Lucas Spata
Saying No to Video - Larry Low
Small Paul - Larry Low
Songs Said to Have Been Sung by Sam - Larry Low
Sunka and the Great Camel Race - Larry Low
The Case of the Macabre Maccaw - Larry Low

Labels: Bookshare.org, content, news

Another site update on Sharing Books has gone out, and some users may have had a minor interruption of service around 9:30am PST. This update brings the following things to the Sharing Books website:

• Cleaner, quicker, and in theory more accurate search using quick search and advanced searching features on the site.
• Some improvements to some backend processes.
• For our Volunteer Librarians your navigation should now cease it's magical disappearing act.
• New and improved buttons for us administrators of the site to download your book and text versions of your book without having to download from the frontend of the site or the DB directly!

Labels: new features, news, site outages, site upgrades

Some of you may have noticed a brief interruption of the site this morning. This interruption was intentional this time! I am happy to report the following new additions and changes to the Sharing Books site:

1. The site now has the ability to list ISBN numbers on books. Over the next 48 hours expect to see ISBNs appearing on your book details pages. This is a manual process, so it will take some time to get all the books with ISBNs. Also note it can take up to 14 days for us to process a new book and get an ISBN for it, so if you have just uploaded work please be patient.
2. The 'Published Books' page on user profiles has been cleaned up, and should now give a better idea of the status of your book ( Approved, waiting approval, etc ).
3. The downloaded books count had a bug that was causing it to return false information on books that have been updated or changed. The bug caused the download count to only show the downloads for the most recent version of the book. We have corrected this, and the download count on the book details page now shows the full download history of a book, including all revisions. Anyone with a book that they have updated or made changes on should now see a download count number that is higher. In some cases significantly higher.
4. There have been a few minor adjustments to some back-end reporting tools for us site administrators, letting us do things like add ISBNs and resend Terms of Contribution emails on books which seem to be pending acceptance of the ToC. This should help streamline publishing, and ease the lag time on books with multiple creators involved.

Labels: features, news

The Simone Wood Award, 2009

Sharing Books is pleased to announce the Simone Wood Award for Children’s Literature. Simone Wood was an avid supporter of dance and her family have launched this award on Simone’s birthday to honour her life-long passion that she gave to successive generations.

The Simone Wood Award is available to any book creators who publish their work through Sharing Books. Eligible works must be focused on dance, dance themes, and/or the history and development of dance. Any of the children's books published on Sharing Books from April 3rd 2009 to May 31st 2009, with dance as their primary focus, will be automatically entered in the contest for the Simone Wood Award for Children’s Literature. This is a juried award, and a jury of content reviewers will determine whether the works submitted fall within the content guidelines.

The award will be given to the three most downloaded books on the Sharing Books site during the month of June, 2009 as follows:
• First Place award of $300 Canadian to the most downloaded book in June
• Second Place award of $200 Canadian to the second most downloaded book in June
• Third Place award of $100 Canadian to the third most downloaded book in June

Awards will be divided equally between the author and illustrator of illustrated works, or in granted in whole to the author in non-illustrated works.

Simone Wood Award, 2009 Eligibility Guidelines

1) The work must have a 'dance' focus. The work must contain content focused on dance, dance movements, dance culture, cultural dances, or dance history that forms the core or pivotal point of the work. There is no restriction on the type of dance, or the nature or approach to dance that is taken in the work.

Examples of eligible works would be:
• A story about a child going to their first ballet class.
• A mythological story about dance gods or goddesses.
• A story about a teacher running a dance pageant at her school.
• A picture book that shows a performance in visual and poetic form.

2) The work must be geared towards children.

3) Works must be submitted to Sharing Books between April 3rd 2009 and May 31st 2009. Works that are submitted, but not published and awaiting approval to go on the site by May 31st 2009 will still be eligible to enter the contest for the Simone Wood Award for Children’s Literature, 2009.

4) All submitted works will be chosen for eligibility by a team of jurors.

5) Winners are chosen based on the downloads of the books from 12:00am June 1st, 2009 to 11:59pm June 30th, 2009 PST.

Labels: awards, contest, news

Some of you may have noticed a brief interruption of your Sharing Books experience this morning. We have pushed out some minor cosmetic changes, and most importantly we have launched our Partner Stores affiliate program. These are businesses and affiliates who have agreed to share a portion of the purchases that come from the Sharing Books website with our company. This money, like all our revenue sources, will be divided amongst our creators ( 1/3 ), Room to Read ( 1/3 ), and operations of the website ( 1/3 ).

If you have a moment take a look at our current affiliates.

Labels: features, news

I woke up today to find an email sitting in my inbox from Mark Gladding letting us know that there were some posts up on eBooks Just Published about Sharing Books. I am always excited to see anything that mentions our company, particularly when I'm not mentioning it.

eBooks Just Published is a real find, they trawl the internet to bring people ebooks that are new, fresh, and DRM-free. And they do it every day. For any of our authors, take note, this is exactly the type of site you want to discover your work. We already have one book from our roster, recently published Scatsby the Bear, show up on their site. I'm hoping down the road we see more of our authors showing up on eBooks Just Published, since it is definitely a place to spread the word about your work.

While poking around on the site I found an interesting article on eBook readers for children. There are some interesting points here, mainly revolving around what the reader needs to look and be in order to work for children. While I completely agree, the device describe in the post would be an absolutely fantastic computing device, not just an ebook reader for kids, I do think that there are current devices that can bridge that product gap.

I think that the real targets for children's ebooks is not some down the road technology, but rather the tools that exist today. Things like the Leapster, the iPod Touch, the Nintendo DS, the Playstation Portable ( PSP ). These are all existing products with high market penetration, and they all support some form of ebook reading. The iPods and Nintendo DS are particularly attractive, since they support DRM free file formats such as PDF. Kids are already using these devices for all sorts of things, from browsing the internet to reading to playing games. All that needs to happen is one decent bit of software marketed towards children, and the nut is cracked.

Some may argue that the Nintendo DS is too small for children to enjoy the books, or to use before a certain age. I do tend to agree on an aesthetic stance, the DS has a small screen and small controls. That being said, I've seen 4 year old children pick up a DS and start playing a game. I see no reasonable barrier to usage that can not be solved with proper interface design. Same goes for an iPod or PSP.

I honestly feel that technology devices are converging, that computing power has reached a point where it makes more sense to build devices that let you play games, surf the internet, read a PDF, listen to music, etc. Certainly there is a place for illustrated ebook readers as a specific market product, but when it comes down to it, if I am spending $300-500 on a device for my kids, I'll lean towards one that has functionality they can grow into and with, rather then a one-use product. Though I really do want a nice tablet computer, about A4 size.

Labels: discussion, e-books, media coverage, news, technology

Some of our users may have noticed two brief times where the site was down for maintenance today. Hopefully it did not freak anyone out too much! While the site was shut down for maintenance we did some upgrades to our database, our administrative back end, and added one new feature to the website.

On the book details page for each book you can now see how many times your book has been downloaded, giving you an idea of how popular your book is, and giving you some numbers and goals to shoot for! For those looking to get ahead of the pack in the current contests, you can poke about and get an idea of who is leading the pack. This number shows the total downloads over the lifetime of the book.

I'll gloss over the database stuff, since it is really just changes to let the download totals work on the site. The back end features let us track downloads over a period of time, so we can get an idea of book popularity over a given time frame, not just the lifetime of the book.

Labels: features, news, site upgrades

I attended the Vancouver Children Literature Roundtable annual Illustrator’s breakfast featuring Shaun Tan. I must say that I attend these events with a lot of humility being relatively new to the children literature world. The passion and enthusiasm of the attendees are inspiring. With his years of dedicated work Dr. Ron Jobe has facilitated a powerful legacy as evidenced by the attendance at the roundtable. We have to be thankful to leaders like him and his colleagues on the board of the roundtable.

However, I was surprised when less than ten people stood up, when authors and illustrators were asked to identify themselves. I don’t know if this low turn-out of book creators was due to competing events in Surrey and Granville Island or if some are too shy to identify themselves as book creators because they have not been published yet. In my opinion, book creators should not hesitate to identify themselves as such even if they are not published yet. Claiming the role goes a long way in assuming the responsibility of creating books. Being in the process of creating should define an author not what has been done in the past. Hopefully, the easy publishing offered by Sharing-Books.com site will help many more book creators identify themselves as such.

The event was also the occasion to introduce the six books shortlisted for the Children’s Literature Roundtables of Canada 2008 Information Book Award. This award honours books created with an educational purpose. This will be a difficult choice as all entries were of very high calibre in my opinion. These excellent books highlighted for me how children literature influences the values of the next generation. The topics chosen reflect the concerns of today’s adults and have the purpose of communicating these concerns to our children. I could not help but think of how many important topics remain unaddressed in children literature because of the constraint of paper publishing. There are many topics that may never be addressed unless you make publishing easy and do it in such a way that it can reach an audience spread over vast areas. Some audiences would never be big enough to aggregate locally in a “market” deserving a book, but once we use the web these audiences can be found and communicated to in an effective way.

The keynote speaker, illustrator Shaun Tan, gave a most interesting talk explaining his progress from early childhood drawings to the wonderful images he shared with the audience. I found his images and his talk absolutely fascinating. However, I am not sure I see his award winning books as children books. To me (and I am not an expert) they are more illustrated poetry where adults can spend hours exploring the rich details and symbolism of his images. I do not know if they would keep a child’s attention in the same way. Shaun himself admitted that he gets the most compliments about The Arrival from older immigrants who describe the book as depicting exactly what they felt when they arrived in their new country.

Perhaps such a high level of art intimidates new creators and prevents them from identifying themselves as authors or illustrators. We often hear comments like, “I am not good enough to be published” or “my book is not good enough to be published”. We address this with the “versioning” ability of our publishing engine. Start, publish your book. Share it with the world and connect with your audience. As feedback comes or as you feel inspired it is easy to update a book with new images or text on sharing-books.com. What is important is that you create and share your message.

Labels: event, news, vancouver

Welcome everyone to the Sharing Books company blog. It has taken us longer than we expected to get a blog up and running, what with the business of building the site and getting people involved. But here it is, ready for you and everyone else to read about the latest in news from Sharing Books.

We would love to see your comments on here, they are going to be moderated because this is a kid friendly site. If you don't see your comments showing up right away, please do not worry, we will be getting them up and in place as fast as we can. Do keep in mind the nature of our site and company, and try to moderate yourself and avoid those pesky words and terms that you would hate to hear coming from the mouths of babes.

Stay tuned for news as our company and site develops!

Labels: news, welcome