Storybooks Canada

Storybooks Canada is fundamentally an open source project, and all of our content is open licensed and free to reuse, adapt, and share in the spirit of the original African Storybook source stories. Everything can be downloaded and reused — audio, images, source text, pdfs (in a variety of formats) — even the source code of this website is freely available under a free license. Below you will find a comprehensive list of links to help make it easier to find, download, and repurpose this content.

If you're not sure how you can repurpose the material below, take a look at the Reuse section below for some inspiration. There are already many projects reusing this data — as intended!

Source text

The text of all of the stories is available in our GitHub repository. This repo combines translations from a number of sources in one location.

Translations into non-African languages have been sourced from the Global African Storybook Project, and you can find all of the raw text files of the translations in the main global-asp repository. There are also separate repositories for the original African language translations, new African language translations, alternate orthographies, translations into Indigenous Mexican languages, and so on.

Below is a list of these source repositories which may be useful if you intend to reuse this content:

• Global ASP - The main repository for non-African language translations
• ASP Source - Source text of all the original African language translations
• Global ASP New - New translations of stories into African languages
• Global ASP Alternates - Texts in alternative orthographies (for example, vowelled Arabic and Persian texts, Mandarin stories in Traditional Chinese characters, Cantonese stories in simplified characters, romanizations for various languages, etc.)
• Global ASP Mexico - An independent project to translate the stories into under-resourced Indigenous Mexican languages
• ASP Summaries - Short summaries of each of the African Storybook stories in different languages

Images

You can download all of the artwork on this site from our main image repository. The images are released under the same Creative Commons licenses as the original stories.

Many of the original images from the African Storybook have been colourized, de-colourized, or otherwise adapted for use in this project. All of this newly adapted artwork is available in the imagebank-new repository.

If you are looking for images, the Global African Storybook Project has built the ASP Imagebank Explorer which allows you to quickly and easily search for open licensed images using keywords in 20+ languages.

Audio

Apart from the complete language audio packages (see the Downloads section below), you can also browse the complete collection of audio files (both full stories and individual chapter sections) online in our audio repository.

Website code

This website is based on a purpose-built design framework for multilingual literacy sites called Nairobi CSS. If you would like to create your own version of this site with different languages, stories, or images, you can download the source code for Nairobi CSS from the Github repository and customize it to suit your needs.

If you would like to mirror this website (or any of the websites on the Global Storybooks Portal) on your own server, you can find the complete source code ready to use in the repos under our Github organization.

Downloads

All of the audio, images, PDFs on this website can be downloaded from our Downloads page. Most of these have been packaged together by language for convenience, so you can download all the PDFs or audio for a single language at a time, or all languages together.

Reuse

This site itself is a repurposing of the stories and images from the African Storybook via the Global African Storybook Project. Below are some more examples of creative reuse to inspire you:

• The Global ASP project has hundreds of translations in dozens of languages, with all of the stories available as interactive online slideshows.
• The ASP Imagebank Explorer is an early example of repurposing the African Storybook media for different uses. You can download the source code for the explorer app here.
• The Global ASP Audio Storybook Jukebox is a media player for multilingual storybooks that automatically reads a list of stories out loud. It is available in a variety of languages, and has features such as clicking on the story text to translate it. You can download the code in the Storybooks Jukebox repo and run it locally on your own machine.
• This project uses the source text of the stories as a corpus to create linguistic stoplists for under-resourced languages.
• Storybooks Canada Wordlists are a collection of automatically generated corpus-informed keyword lists for each story and language on the Storybooks Canada website. These were made possible by reusing the linguistic stoplists mentioned above, and have been designed to be printed and used at home or in the classroom as supplementary exercises after reading any of the stories on the site.
• Storybooks Canada Cloze Tests are a collection of automatically generated audio-enhanced cloze tests for each story and language on the Storybooks Canada website. You can generate your own cloze tests using the code in the Audio Cloze Tests repository.

Have you made an adaptation of the content on this site that you would like to share? Let us know and we'll add it here!