Making free children’s books with Book Dash

Book Dash is an award-winning publisher of children’s books. Everything Book Dash publishes is free to read, and anyone can reuse its books and illustrations. Since 2014, the organisation has distributed nearly two million free books to children.

Book Dash began as an Electric Book Works experiment. We believed that professional writers, illustrators and designers would donate a day to making children’s books together as a gift to the world. The model was wildly successful. Today, Book Dash is an independent non-profit organisation known around the world.

In 2016, acclaimed literacy organisation Worldreader asked EBW to turn a range of Book Dash books into reusable HTML and ebooks that could be read on any device. Our workflow and technology had to be rock solid and future-proof. Building on our Electric Book workflow, we designed an open system for storing and publishing the HTML and ebooks on GitHub.

You can read those online editions here, and download the epub editions from GitHub.

These ebook editions have gone on to be viewed many thousands of times on Worldreader’s platforms.