Book Dash Logo

About Book Dash

Address
Woodstock, Cape Town
Company size
1-15 employees

Summary

About us Book Dash believes that "every child should own a hundred books by the age of five". To help make this happen, Book Dash gathers top creative professionals to volunteer their time creating children's books that anyone can freely translate, print and distribute in print or digitally.

Children globally need better access to more books, but traditional publishing models weren't designed to create beautiful, cost-effective books for all. Book Dash creates, translates and distributes high-quality, African picturebooks to children and families who need them most, in South Africa and around the world.

We work with leading non-profits, literacy-promotion organisations, free-reading platforms and community-minded businesses to put books into the hands of children.

Team & Working environment Book Dash is a high-impact, lean team that punches about our weight and leverage partnerships to reach out vision. We're a full-time team of three and we lead and execute on projects together, in consultation with experts and then make those happen. As a result, there is a lot of agency, and plenty of responsibility to make things happen in a supportive, learning-driven environment... all for a great cause!

We currently work in a hybrid way, coming into the office a few days a week, and having the option to work remotely on the other days while touching base with each other regularly.

Book Dash's vision is that "Every child should own a hundred books by the age of five"

Perks at Book Dash

Good impact work
Hybrid office and remote working
Casual dress code
Flexible leave policy
Small, supportive team

Tech Stack

utilities

Google Analytics
Google Analytics

business tool

Google Apps
Google Apps
Trello
Trello
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams

dev ops

Git
Git
Android Studio
Android Studio

application and data

Java
Java
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Lambda
Amazon Lambda
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services

Office Photos

Book Dash is a South African social impact publisher of free books for very young children. Our vision is that “Every child should own a hundred books by the age of five”, before they enter school!
Our mission is to gather professionals who volunteer to create new, African storybooks that anyone can freely translate and distribute. We employ our unique, 12-hour book-making methodology to create beautiful new books in just one day!
All Book Dash books are published online, free for anyone to read and re-use! We license everything under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license meaning our books travel the world freely!

We have key content partners who use and re-share the books on their platforms, helping us reach millions of families with the books. We also partner with local organisations like DGMT, FundZa and Moya Messenger to reduce barriers to digital content, and zero-rate our website.
We also work with donors and partners to print and distribute hundreds of thousands of physical copies of the books to young children to own, in all 11 official South African languages. To date, we've distributed almost two million physical copies of our books. We use tools like Trello for project management, Sage for accounting and tracking the number of books in the world, and Dropbox content management.
Getting books into young children's hands and homes is proven to be a low-cost, high-impact way to address the global literacy crisis. Book Dash's model and license dramatically reduce the costs of creation and distribution of print and digital books for young children.
We work with hundreds of partners locally and internationally to increase access to great books for all. We measure and track that data, in order to tell story around our impact, an leverage more funding. We use Google Analytics an Google data studio to do this.