Bookbox, a project that plans to use Creative Commons-licensed works to build multimedia children’s storybooks in many global languages, won the Stanford Social Entrepreneur’s Challenge Award on Tuesday. The Social E-Challenge is a competition that judges ideas and business plans for social ventures initiated by Stanford students. Bookbox plans to initially focus its activities in India, and with Creative Commons in South Africa, building culturally-relevant children’s stories for local audiences on both the television and the Internet.

The Bookbox player allows stories to be played in a variety of different languages, with same language subtitling to teach literacy and language learning skills. Bookbox will use Creative Commons licenses to distribute their books on the Internet and DVD, and pay local authors for the rights to broadcast the multimedia books on national television.

The Bookbox team is comprised of a small group of Stanford students, alumni and fellows from the Reuters Digital Vision Foundation. The 7-member team represents the countries of India, Pakistan, Malaysia, South Africa, Brazil, and the U.S., and have drawn from ther experience of being expatriates in a country dominated by English language media by developing this low cost player to deliver reading and language learning practice to diverse language groups.

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