Growing up polyglot

Fort Myers entrepreneur Serdar Acar has been selling books and online materials through his company, Dino Lingo, to help parents teach foreign languages to their children.

Now he's launching a vast online library of children's books called Dino Books that subscribers can listen to and read in 21 languages. “We started writing and illustrating almost two years ago and a year ago we started putting the website together,” says Acar. “We spent a fortune on this.”

Dino Books contains more than 6,000 children's books, including nursery rhymes and short stories from all over the world. By June, Acar says he expects to have books in 30 languages on the site.

Readers can select different languages of the same book to listen to and read translations in their native tongue on the same page. “If you want to read the book in French you can also read it in any language,” says Acar, a native of Turkey.

Individual subscribers pay $99.95 a year, but Acar says his main audience will be schools and libraries. Pricing for these institutions will vary by size, number of patrons and population of the area.

Users can preview the first few pages of any book at no cost at dinolingo.com/books. When they get to the fourth page, the program will ask them to subscribe.