Had an opportunity to catch up with David Risher, founder and head of Worldreader, the group that is transforming literacy around the world by sending Kindles loaded with books to the remotest reaches of the planet. He sounds like he is having a blast. And who wouldn’t be, when the CEO of a little internet start­up called Amazon just donated a half a million dollars to the cause?

Risher, no stranger to mighty enterprises given his background at Microsoft and, um, the aforementioned Amazon itself, has presided over one of the truly great stories of the e­-book revolution. And he believes that things are just getting started.

We talked about the days when an e-­ink Kindle cost almost $400. Blows my mind to think that I bought two at that price. But with the decline in price for e­readers of all kinds, and especially for e­-ink models of all shapes and sizes, Risher sees the equation shifting dramatically in the Worldreader budget from hardware expense to content expense.

I asked about how Worldreader manages content across its growing installed base of Kindles. He told me that Worldreader worked with Amazon on the development of its new Kindle content management system, Whispercast. Just like so many librarians in the early days–­­Kathy Parker in IL comes to mind–­­David painted a picture of spreadsheets and Kindle nicknames and copies of books shared among Kindles. Oh my! Whispercast is a great step forward for the Kindle as an enterprise device, even if the enterprise is a single elementary school.

I encourage you to learn more about Worldreader at its website. David and Zev and Colin truly are changing the world with the program. I daresay that the distribution of these Kindles to those who need them will have a stronger long term impact on the way America is perceived in distant corners of the earth than will the strategy of military intervention we have relied on for so long.