“This will be a lovely gift this Christmas after a year that’s been especially isolating for many of our service users.” In a prepared statement, Nila James, the organization’s fundraising director, is quoted, saying, “This is a very exciting opportunity to bring new audiobook titles to our members, who all have a dissability that makes reading print difficult.

Reaching its ultimate goal will be helped by its “champion” supporters, who will match each pound sterling donated up to £4,500 (US$6,078), making early donations especially valuable. At this writing, the Calibre Audio Library effort has listed a £9,000 target (US$12,027) and has raised £2,320 of that (US$3,100).

The name Calibre has given its own participation in this vast charity drive is “For the Love of Books,” and it’s hoping to attract donations, its media messaging says, to that program among the hundreds of other programs now running at Big Give. This would mean the addition of one adult and one children’s audiobook on each day of the holiday season advent calendar. In participating with the Big Give, Calibre joins 763 sister charities in a week-long fundraising bid to generate £12,000 (US$16,034) with which it will buy 48 new audiobook titles for is membership. Big Give functions as a kind of crowdfunding platform for holiday charitable giving campaigns. Today (December 2), Calibre’s offices in Buckinghamshire’s Aston Clinton have announced that the organization is working in association with the Big Give Christmas Challenge program through December 8. The charity counts among its publisher-partners Faber & Faber, HarperCollins, Naxos Audiobooks, Pan Macmillan, Penguin Random House UK, Ulverscroft, and WF Howes. Each book, the charity reports, costs £250 (US$334) to produce. In 2019, the program says, it provided more than 460,000 audiobooks to a membership of more than 14,000 users in the UK and international markets.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | First £4,500 in Donations Will Be Matched Able to lend audio content to countries ratifying the World Intellectual Property Organization‘s (WIPO) Marrakesh Treaty- the development of which Publishing Perspectives readers have followed for years-the United Kingdom’s Calibre Audio Library is an accessibility charity that provides audio content to users with who are visually impaired and print-disabled.

Calibre audiobooks