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Q: What if my university doesn’t allow students to download files onto local computers?
A: This isn’t a problem at all. All of your Bookstream eBooks are located on a secure server cloud and no download ever takes place to your hard drives. Students “stream” the book through a web browser.
Q: How much bandwidth does Bookstream require?
A: Not much. Opening and browsing books doesn’t require any more than general web browsing. When streaming text-to-speech, Bookstream only draws and average of 20 kilobytes per second. This is a fraction of what other streaming sites require to stream music or video.
Q: How will our IT staff support it?
A: Bookstream is entirely wed-delivered. There’s nothing to download, and nothing to install. It doesn’t require IT staff support.
Q: What’s the difference between Bookshare and Bookstream?
A: Simply put, Bookshare is a source for accessible books. They have almost 100,000 eBooks in DAISY format, but membership is limited to students who are copyright exempt under the Chafee Amendment (only a small percentage of the special education population qualify).
Bookstream helps you manage and deliver your accessible books through the cloud. You upload your eTextbooks, worksheets, quizzes, and even Bookshare books to the cloud and share them with students. Bookstream “streams” the books through the Internet.
Q: How much effort does it take to get up and running?
A: We designed Bookstream so it can be implemented in just 30 minutes. Just upload your eBooks, add students and share your eBooks with them. It’s that easy.
Q: What happens with hyperlinks in a book?
A: If there are hyperlinks within a book that link to other parts of the book (like a glossary or index) or even an entirely different webpage, clicking the link will take you to that location.
Q: Can I add notes and links to a book I upload to Bookstream?
A: Yes. The person who uploads a book (it’s “owner”) can write a "note" in the book. Within that note, the owner can add hyperlinks to other websites.
Q: What about protecting copyright?
A: Bookstream can help you be “audit safe” when managing copyrighted materials. Books are not downloaded, so you don’t have to worry about copyrighted material being circulated around your district. You can manage books by only sharing materials with the students who have the rights to use them. You can change who has access to which books at any time.
Q: Can I upload ePub books that I purchase from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or iBooks?
A: The short answer is no – each of those formats only work on their own devices or their own apps. While ePub is the de facto standard digital book format, there is a small war being fought between the large eBook reader companies (if you’re interested in that thumb war, read Gizmodo’s article “How You’re Gonna Get Screwed by Ebook Formats”). Each wants to dominate the market and lock you in to using their device (not the others). So if you buy a copy of The Book Thief from Amazon, you’re stuck using it in the Kindle (or Kindle app) forever. If your next device is a Nook, you’re going to have to re-buy your book. If you need to use assistive technology with your book, you better hope that your eBook device or app can accommodate your specific access need. We take a different approach with Bookstream. We accept any DRM-free ePub books and you can read your books on any device with a full web-browser. Five years from now when you have the best new devices of all time that you paid a whopping $100 each for, you can still use your Bookstream library on them.
Q: Can I upload PDFs to Bookstream?
A: Bookstream does not allow PDFs to be uploaded for many reasons. Bookstream is fully web-based and helps you protect copyright because there is nothing to download. When you open a PDF in a web browser, you are actually not viewing it through your web-browser, you are looking at the PDF through a plugin. Plugins (like Adobe Acrobat) allow PDFs to be downloaded onto that computer which breaks the digital rights management of the file. Furthermore, PDFs do not display well on a small screen, many PDFs aren’t built with accessibility in mind, and many devices don’t support accessibility features like Voice Over with PDFs. Because of the wide accessibility of PDFs we can’t claim 508 compliance if we supported them. On the other hand, we can claim 508 compliance when using ePub. There are some PDF to EPUB converters like Calibre. However, because of the nature of the PDF format, results will vary widely depending on how the PDF was created. If you’re building an accessible library, lobby for DAISY or NIMAS or ePub formats. They are the most accessible and will work well on the widest variety of devices.
Q: Is there a fast way to add my student names to Bookstream?
A: Yep. There are two ways to add students to Bookstream. You can add one student at a time, but you can also import all of your names at once by importing a CSV file. You can read how in our “Implement-in-30” tutorial.
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