Our friend Gautam John of Indian children’s book publisher Pratham Books emailed us this morning to tell us that Pratham is a finalist for a Google Impact Award. What’s even more exciting is what Gautam’s team wants to do with the award. I’ll let him explain:

Page 15 (from Too Many Bananas)
Pratham Books / CC BY-NC-SA

Pratham Books will use this award to amplify its existing work by creating an open-source platform that will encourage the creation of new stories, remixing of our openly licensed content and translation of all these stories in local languages. Every creation, new or remixed, will be shared, resulting in a large repository of stories available in various digital formats for free use. All content will be released under Creative Commons licenses.

Pratham Books has been a front-runner in adopting a Creative Commons licensing framework and in the last 5 years we have released over 400 stories and hundreds of illustrations under a CC BY or CC BY-SA license.

Pratham Books now hopes to build a collaborative platform which will scale our existing production of 1600 books across 12 languages to 20,000 books across 25 languages over 3 years! Millions of children across the globe will benefit from this platform.

We’ve been fans of Pratham Books’ work for a long time. The company was featured in The Power of Open as a great example of how open licensing can play a crucial role in a sustainable business model. Last year, Gautam wrote a guest blog for CC about how sharing books under CC has led to the community creating numerous translations, audiobooks, DAISY and braille versions, and even smartphone apps, resulting in far greater reach than the company could have achieved without open licensing.

We’re excited to see Pratham Books undertaking this project. Vote for Pratham!