When I worked at the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, members of our group created a way to put thousands of books on a disk, and then set up a mobile printing press of sorts. The idea was that you could take your portable printer, laptop, and book binder anywhere in the world, and print books for kids, schools, or libraries that had a hard time finding books. I still have two books made from the first such printing press.
Well, now it looks like a former Amazon executive is taking it one step further. David Risher founded Worldreader, provides Kindles to students in parts of the world where it can be hard to get print books. From the article:
““There’s a huge difference between being able to read from a selection of the 10 books that you happen to have — or that somebody donated — versus being able to get your hands on a book that you are really interested in,” says Risher. “When you combine that with very very low distribution costs for additional books and falling technology prices, these are ingredients for doing something really special.”
“Risher says he thinks e-books will let the developing world skip the paper stage, in much the same way cell phones have helped countries skip the landline stage. E-readers, he says, are more akin to cellphones than laptops — and are well designed for the developing world because they don’t consume much power and they use the universal GSM network. “Computers play a great role, but e-readers really solve the reading problem much more direct and simple way,” says Risher.”
A great example of using technology to make the world a better place.
