Pratham Books (www.prathambooks.org) is a not-for-profit children's book publisher that was set up in 2004 to publish good quality, affordable books in many Indian languages. Our mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and we have spread the joy of reading to millions of children in India. As a publisher serving every child in India, Pratham Books has always pushed the boundaries when it comes to exploring innovative ways in which to create access to joyful stories and have been fortunate in finding partners to collaborate with who share this vision.

In 2015, Pratham Books' increased its footprint by going digital. As an industry leader, we were one of the first publishers in the country to open license our content. All this content is now available on StoryWeaver, which is a digital platform that hosts stories in languages from India and beyond, so that every child can have an endless stream of stories in her mother tongue to read and enjoy. The stories can be read, translated, versioned or downloaded for free. All stories on the platform are openly licensed.

We are looking for a Content Manager for the StoryWeaver team.

 

Illustration by Mohith Mohan from Building a Building, written by Kavitha Punniyamurthi, published by Pratham Books

We are looking for a dynamic individual for the position of Content Manager - StoryWeaver. A self-motivated individual with experience and skills in curating content from multiple sources, forging strategic partnerships and anchoring the process of migrating content to the platform. The person will lead a team and be responsible for timely execution to expand the content available on the platform to serve the needs of children globally. The role will report to the Director - StoryWeaver and will work closely with different internal and external stakeholders. This is a full time position based out of Bengaluru.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the strategic planning, development, and management of content on StoryWeaver

• Curation of Content

  • Continual development of new, innovative ideas to curate the content on the platform 

  • Curate content based on requirements of organisations and partners so as to ensure users access quality content

• Licensing and Sourcing Content

  • Create partnership opportunities with other publishers to open license their content on the platform

  • Work closely with the content team for sourcing children's storybooks under open licences from across the globe

  • Create, implement and showcase the best practices around open licensing of content through easily replicable frameworks

• Orienting to Curriculum 

  • Liaison with educational and governmental partners and teachers on curating content based on curriculum and structured frameworks. 

  • Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders and subject matter experts to create and source curriculum based content. 

• Hygiene and Maintenance

  • Liaison with collaborators and  internal and external stakeholder to ensure that high quality standards are met for crowd-sourced content - including review processes and red flagging of inappropriate content

  • Work closely with operations and studio teams to ensure processes and work-flows are created and well implemented

  • Work closely with the editorial, research and marketing teams on promotions and campaigns and to deliver the project goals

• Other Tasks 

  • To take on other tasks or responsibilities, as required for the project  

  • Archiving and documentation 

Required Skills

1. Post graduate in Literature / Education / Journalism with 6-8 years of experience in related fields. Experience with digital platforms is favourable

2. Experience in curriculum development or classroom experience

3. The candidate must have hands-on experience in review, proofreading and production related processes.

4. Exceptional communication skills     

5. Highly organized and detail oriented

6. A proven track record to manage, lead and deliver large-scale operations

7. Proven ability to build consensus and work effectively within a cross-departmental team         

Nice to have but not mandatory

1. Experience working with non-profits     

2. 1-2 years working in a partner-facing role     

3. Indic language and digital publishing experience

Location: 

This is a full-time position in our Bangalore office.

Compensation:

Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience

Write to us:

Email your resume with ‘Content Manager - StoryWeaver’ in the subject line to [email protected]

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Today is World Storytelling Day, which means it is time for our annual storytelling contest: Retell, Remix, Rejoice - this time, with a twist! This year’s edition of Retell, Remix, Rejoice will focus on translating some wonderful storybooks on StoryWeaver, and adding to the pool of multilingual children’s literature.

Translate storybooks and share the joy of reading in 10 languages

At StoryWeaver, we believe that every child deserves joyful storybooks in her own language. In order to work towards this, Retell, Remix, Rejoice 2020 will nurture the translator community, to find and encourage translation talent in 10 languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Hindi, Gondi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Vietnamese.

If you are fluent in one or more of these languages, just fill in the participation form (link below), and we shall assign you a storybook. All you have to do is translate the book into the shortlisted language and submit it!

This year’s prize

The winner(s) will have a one-on-one mentoring and feedback session with an editorial expert. The winner(s) will also receive a print copy of the translated book (only for participants based in India), and the winning translation will be published and highlighted as a Recommended title on StoryWeaver.

How to enter

Enter the Retell, Remix, Rejoice 2020 contest here: https://bit.ly/RRR_Contest

Guidelines for submission

1. The contest will run from March 20, 2020 to May 20, 2020

2. All translations submitted must be your own work.

3. Translations must be in Bahasa Indonesia, Hindi, Gondi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, or Vietnamese.

4. Participants must be over the age of 18 to participate.

5. By submitting your work to Retell, Remix and Rejoice 2020, you are agreeing to a CC-BY 4.0 license being applied to it. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. To know more about CC-BY 4.0, click here.

6. Terms and conditions apply. All final decisions rest with Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver. For more read here.  

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On World Book Day, we are excited to launch Classics on StoryWeaver, a collection of beautifully re-illustrated storybooks for children to read and enjoy!

What are classics? 

A. Montgomery Johnston in his article ‘The Classics of Children's Literature’ describes classics as those books that have a high literary quality, great child appeal and have themes that are of universal interest. Most classics have stood the test of time and have therefore been read by several generations. 

Donna Norton in her book ‘Through the Eyes of a Child’, talks about the importance and the need of exposing children to good children's literature. She says it nurtures growth and development of personality and social skills, helps develop emotional intelligence, provides an opportunity to learn about various cultures and transmits important literature and themes from one generation to the next. In his 1970 Nobel Lecture in Literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that literature can convey the life experience of one whole nation to another and thus becomes the living memory of the nation. 

Classics on StoryWeaver

Keeping all this in mind, we at StoryWeaver were looking for ways to bring some of these classics back to children who have perhaps not been introduced to them. Since all of the content on StoryWeaver is under the open Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, we looked for classics that were either out of copyright or in this open space. 

We were thrilled to find Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/), which was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. This is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks, which are digitized and diligently proofread by thousands of volunteers for enjoyment and education.  

While the stories on the Project Gutenberg platform were incredible, most of them had very few and very dated illustrations. Since StoryWeaver mostly hosts picture books for children, we decided to re-illustrate a few of these beautiful classics so that a new and younger generation would be able to read and enjoy them. 

We are also re-illustrating some children’s classics from the giants of Indian literature like Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand and Sukumar Ray and publishing them in their original language. But more about that later! 

Today, on World Book Day, we are proud to launch our Classics on StoryWeaver series with the following titles The Man in the Moon, Pussy Cat Mew, How the Whale Got his Throat, and The Rooster that Crowed Too Soon, beautifully illustrated by Sahil Shaikh, a Communication Design student from the DJ Academy of Design. 

An illustration from the storybook The Man in the Moon, written by L Frank Baum and illustrated by Sahil Shaikh

An illustration from the storybook How the Whale got his throat, written by Rudyard Kipling and illustrated by Sahil Shaikh

Do read the books on StoryWeaver and let us know what you think!  We hope you love these books as much as we do. 

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