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Distributing the Ability to Solve: The StoryWeaver Story

Sitting on a rickety wooden bench, young Tushar anxiously tapped his foot. His eyes followed the teacher, who was reading aloud Kali Wants to Dance, written by Aparna Karthikeyan and Illustrated by Somesh Kumar, a story about a man who broke gender stereotypes to become an expert Bharatnatyam dancer. His classmates fidgeted impatiently but he was transfixed. As the teacher gathered her books and prepared to exit the classroom, he walked up to the teacher and whispered in her ear,, “I want to open a beauty parlour when I grow up!”

This is a true story from the village of Dharashiv, Maharashtra, where children were given access to our picture books. At Pratham Books StoryWeaver, we believe books can be powerful agents of change that can help shape children’s perspective of the world. Yet, globally, the book-to-child ratio is 1:300 , and 6 out of 10 children can’t read at their grade level. This reading

deficit results from there not being enough affordable books, in not enough languages, and poor accessibility to reading resources.

Pratham Books started with an audacious mission to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’. Over 20 years we have shipped millions of storybooks across the country – a  massive effort from a book distribution perspective. But, we wondered: How could we reach India’s 240M children in their mother tongue?

What do we do differently to get closer to our goal, without having to increase resources or distribution manifold?

In 2007, a young copyright lawyer suggested a way out of this quandary – open licensing our content and allowing anyone, anywhere to be the creator, reader, or distributor of stories. I’d love to tell you we immediately saw the multiplier effect openness could trigger and got on board. But, our first reaction was unease. As publishers, what would happen to our brand, our creators’ rights, and how would we enforce ethical attribution at scale?

Embracing openness took time. It demanded a mindset shift – to go from a distributor of stories to enabling everyone to be a story weaver. 

Slowly, however, we realised it was the only way to make sure stories create the sea change they have the potential to. We just had to find a way to bring together all the small ripples. 

This led us down an untrodden path – designing an open publishing Societal Platform. StoryWeaver started out in 2015 with 800 stories in 24 languages and, as of 2025, hosts 66,000 stories in 370+ global languages that have been read over 200 million times. All stories are freely available in multiple formats and can be read online and offline, remixed to create new stories, and translated into almost any language. It has become the world’s largest open platform for children’s storybooks, making it a hub from which multiple platforms such as Google’s Read Along, Let’s Read Asia, Global Digital Library, among others pull content to create their own ripples of change. This is our story of exponential – a small change of openness creating more and rapid change. 

Although a domino effect is visible today, back then, we began StoryWeaver as all journeys of change begin – with questions. Many questions.

Openness at scale

In 2009, we had started experimenting with open licences on Scribd with the story Chuskit Goes to School! written by Sujatha Padmanabhan and illustrated by Madhuvanti Anantharajan. Three years later, we revisited Scribd to find that the story had garnered a stunning Indian-language readership and had even been translated to French, Spanish and Sanskrit! This early experiment showed us that perhaps herein lay an idea to solve large problems at scale with limited resources. What we needed now was more books and many more storyweavers. 

Pratham Books had already built trust with a community of creators – authors, illustrators and translators of children’s literature. We first started with this community, urging them to open-license some of their stories on Pratham Books as a ‘gift’ so that we could offer the joy of reading to every child. Luckily, a lot of creators agreed enthusiastically. Still, as creators who had developed beloved original characters and stories for children, they were naturally concerned about how quality control of derivative works and translations would happen when their work was made open to remix, translate, and repurpose.

However, if we were to disrupt the traditional publishing model that kept books exclusive and expensive, we needed a big, vibrant community. In 2011, we organised a conference ‘Sabha’ to pitch the power of open licensing to content creators. Our young copyright lawyer talked about its potential to create impact at scale and discussed our plans for fair attribution. From lengthy reviews by multiple editors to letting anyone adapt stories at will, this was a new way of doing things for creators and our team. So, we designed best practices guidelines for attribution on our platform so that every creator would be acknowledged. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything works smoothly. Till date, we receive complaints from authors about their books being printed and sold on Amazon and other websites without due credit. 

The issues around attribution keep cropping up or bothering creators, but we also witnessed a fundamental shift (in ourselves and our community) – of thinking beyond attribution to enabling contribution. Today, we can see the multiplier effect that openness has triggered in just a few years and the power of collaborative effort in real-time. When we started in 2015, we had 24 languages, and in 10 years, we’ve added 370+ languages, out of which 65% are indigenous (we added 74 indigenous languages just in 2019)! We know this exponential change is possible because of our collective investment in the idea of openness and a community that was invested in our mission to put a storybook in every child’s hand.

Keeping users at the centre, with technology 

StoryWeaver has been designed for scale from the outset. Every decision went through the litmus test of “Will this work at scale” and sometimes we have to make difficult short-term journeys in favour of long-term scale. One such decision was to be Unicode compliant. When we started, migrating 800 books across 18 Indic languages and hundreds of proprietary fonts was an uphill task. But today, hosting 375+ languages has been possible because Unicode allows us to add complex script languages such as Khmer and tribal languages such as Chakma. 

Through the years, we’ve built pathways to understand our users to help us tailor our platform towards a more efficient experience for our audience. For instance, our mobile translation tool was developed after one of our long-term translation partners mentioned that she preferred translating in transit, on her way to work. We developed the offline translation feature to be able to support a translation sprint for 350+ stories in indigenous languages at Uganda Christian University, where the Internet connection is patchy at best. With Room to Read, we created and deployed a white label version of StoryWeaver, taking storybooks to the millions of children they serve worldwide.

Distributing the ability to solve

In our earlier avatar, we created the story – from its format to language – and distributed it too. Our understanding, knowledge and bandwidth were the limits to scale. What has made StoryWeaver limitless is enabling many solvers. Now, communities can decide what they want to read, in their language, and innovate to ensure all children can access books. 

In 2017, Pratham Books released Angry Akku on StoryWeaver in 7 languages. Badan Bahasa (the language wing of the Ministry of Education of Indonesia) translated the book into Bahasa Indonesia and shipped it to island communities. WorldReader used the book to teach children about emotions, and a publisher in Nepal translated and distributed the book in Nepali. After an Urdu translation workshop with the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), teachers encouraged children to record the book as a podcast. Aripana Foundation organised an interactive online reading session for the book in Maithili. Vinayak Varma’s Angry Akku has found a home and resonance across the globe and is now available in 60 languages, including Farsi, Korku, IsiXhosa, and Marwari, and has been read 93,000 times online on StoryWeaver alone! It is a testament to the power of an enabling co-creation environment – if it exists, many innovators will come forward to create solutions that work just right for the communities they serve. 

We have seen Storyweaver being used in remote villages in Oaxaca, Mexico, for a step-by-step literacy programme in their endangered language of Triqui by a community of linguists and teachers. We have seen Sciences Po Aix students conducting a translation sprint to create a digital library in Senegal. A man in a village in Birbhum has been translating stories in the dying language of Kora on the platform, so that the children in the village might speak it even when their parents no longer do. We have realised that when we distribute the power to solve, we end up with something much bigger than our own imagination. You don’t need to topple all the dominoes of change, just the first. Many others will come and bring the other dominoes of change. 

A surprisingly big change agent for us has been the sarkaar (government) actors. When they become part of the transformation, scale is inevitable. For example, we carved out a programme strategy that linked high-quality storybooks to language learning outcomes, which led several state education departments in India to adopt and print StoryWeaver’s Foundational Literacy Programme. Now, 6 million storybooks from this programme have reached 50,000 schools and millions of children in India in print and digital formats.

Driving inclusion with stories

“When we were kids, there was no poetry or stories in Gondi. Now, when we get married and have kids, we will be able to gift our children Gondi books.” Suresh told us. He was a participant in a translation workshop for creating books in the indigenous language of Gondi, spoken by 2 million people in North India, which before then did not have a single published storybook. 

It is estimated that 40% of the world’s population does not have access to an education in a language they speak or understand. Within India alone, linguists found 780 living languages and estimated that 400 of them are at risk of dying.  We want children to engage with stories close to their cultures and stories that speak of people different from them because we believe stories are mirrors to our world and windows to another. 

To improve accessibility for indigenous languages to StoryWeaver, we began a strategic intervention called ‘Freedom to Read’ to increase our community partnerships and footprint in indigenous languages. In 3 years, we created access to stories in nearly double the number of languages we had in 2017. For inclusion, we wanted to represent all 22 official Indian languages. Every addition taught us something new. For instance, members of the Chakma community in the North East of India, wrote and illustrated a book – 𑄞𑄪𑄘𑄬 𑄇𑄪𑄉𑄪𑄢𑄴 𑄓𑄧𑄢𑄚𑄴 𑄇𑄨𑄖𑄳𑄠𑄠𑄴𑅃 (Did You Know that Ghosts are Scared of Dogs?) on StoryWeaver, which is now the first-ever story in the Chakma language to be available online. This meant we had to work very closely with the team developing the Unicode script for the language. We collaborated with the Asia Foundation whose volunteers translated books in Nepali, and with an enthusiastic teacher in Maharashtra who translated stories into Pawari. Eventually, these digital language communities grew strong enough for us to print books in these ‘new’ languages for the first time and have them reach readers at the last mile with remote libraries.
This, for me, is the real shift we’ve been able to create.

It doesn’t matter if we are able to preserve one out of 6,300 marginalised languages in the world. What does matter is that we enabled a child who only understands that one language to have a book to read. 

Moreover, we’d never imagined the platform could or would be used for literacy, or with children with social and emotional issues or disabilities. We never thought it would help create the first book in a decade, in Chocholteco, an indigenous language in Mexico, or be the first book a twelve-year-old girl read in her mother tongue in Gondi. Closer home, organisations such as Azad India Foundation use our stories to revive and strengthen the availability of Surjapuri texts for children in Bihar, and Suchana carries Santhali and Kora storybooks in print and digital from our platform in their mobile library across Birbhum, Bengal. What communities have done with our platform goes beyond what we could have imagined. 

What’s next?

In the course of our journey, our biggest lesson has been that there is nothing as transformative as collaborative action. As change leaders, to truly build societal solutions for systemic problems, we need to learn how to be open, collaborate and co-create as much as we can!

Economist William Easterly argues that development is about creating problem-solving systems, and not just individual solutions or interventions for specific problems. By becoming a platform that nurtures, captures, and amplifies micro-innovations from disparate communities of practice, StoryWeaver, then, can be reimagined as a problem-solving system that mobilises a global community to collaborate, share knowledge, and work towards ensuring every child has access to and experiences the joy and pride of reading stories in their mother tongue.

In 2021, we found out about Shambhavi Patil, a grade 1 student in Maharashtra who suffered from paediatric diabetes, which made her unenthusiastic and uninvolved in school. She finally found joy and interest through the stories we shared as part of Goshticha Shaniwar, or Saturday of Stories programme and parents reported how she loved the stories and the accompanying activities, and began to ask for help with learning new words and showing interest in the classroom.

Storybooks can bring joy, courage, and vibrancy in a child’s life, and we intend to reach every child with that power. And if, through our efforts, storybooks can reach the Shambhavis of the world, no matter what language they speak, it would have been a journey worth undertaking. 

Come join us, and be part of a movement to get the children of the world reading!