 | |
| Founded | 2014 |
|---|---|
| Country of origin | South Africa |
| Fiction genres | Picture book |
| Official website | bookdash |
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]
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]
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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