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Pratham Books was set up as a not-for-profit children’s book publisher in 2004 with the mission to see ‘a book in every child's hand’. The key objective was to publish good quality, affordable story books in multiple Indian languages to support reading acquisition among children.
About 50% of children in India are not reading at grade appropriate levels. Among the many factors that contribute to this is the lack of quality reading material in mother tongue languages. In India, there are critical supply side shortages for supplementary reading resources for children. It is sad that in a country with 22 official languages and several hundred mother-tongues, books are printed primarily in English and Hindi, driven by market economics. Pratham Books created an alternate model to address these inequities to provide quality storybooks for children in multiple languages that are engaging and joyful and encourage a child to learn and practice reading.
In the last decade, Pratham Books has published over 450 original titles in 21 Indian languages, which total up to about 3000 books. The books cover a range of genres including early readers, fiction, non-fiction, and storybooks on science, history, mathematics and nature. They have had the distinction of working with many of the country's renowned authors and illustrators and their books have won several awards as well.
StoryWeaver is an initiative from Pratham Books. It helps further the endeavor to find newer ways to ensure that every child is able to discover the joy of reading. Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver is an online platform that connects readers, authors, illustrators, and translators to create free stories for children around the world. Through StoryWeaver’s open source technology, openly licensed stories can be translated, remixed, or newly authored to expand the diversity of storybooks available to children, especially in native languages. In last two and half years, Storyweaver has expanded to offer 8000+ books in over 113 languages. Teachers, literacy organizations, and parents can easily find resources that fit their students’ reading ability as well as their language preferences. All of StoryWeaver’s content is free to access and can be easily downloaded, accessed on multiple devices, or printed.
In next few years, Pratham Books aims to increase the number of quality stories available through StoryWeaver and expand distribution and access to the platform, aiming for more than 500,000 active users and 20,000 titles.
Source: Read more about StoryWeaver here and here.