As a follow up to our chat a few weeks back, Worldreader CEO David Risher was kind enough to answer a few more questions for me. First, I wondered how the money from the Bezos grant would be used?
Our goal this year is to move from 10,000 kids with access to e-readers to over 50,000. Jeff’s grant is a big part of that– it helps us get more books from publishers, train teachers and students, ship the e-readers– we’re even using it to help develop a solar case that kids can use to keep their e-readers charged.
As I mentioned in Part 1 of the interview, Worldreader played a role in the development of Whispercast, the enterprise content management tool Amazon now offers to customers deploying content across a large collection of Kindles, like a school or corporation. I think it is neat to hear about the “solar case” they are now developing to improve the utility of the devices in the bush. As Worldreader tackles the issues of deploying Kindles to remote areas, this role as an innovator in the design and functionality of the platform is welcomed, and is already producing outcomes that affect the educational use of these devices in positive ways.
Next, I asked David whether, with so many kids in the US who can’t read, if he envisions a time when the US will be part of Worldreader’s world?
Someday, but honestly it’s not a focus in the near term. The reason is that in the US we have plenty of ways to get books– on-line retailers, lots of libraries, and so forth. Plus to a large extent the revolution here is in more expensive tablets– we’ve got books (and easy access to electricity!), so as a consequence technology in education is happening at a different level.
Our are of biggest impact is where there are very few books (in Sub Saharan Africa, half the classrooms basically have no books at all) and not much physical (road) infrastructure– that’s where we can make the biggest difference.
Finally, I asked David how geopolitics fit into his thinking about where WR goes and what it’s impact may be?
You know, we’re pretty open minded about where we go, so long as it’s an area where there’s a broad recognition that education and literacy matter. If you look at the books we’ve got in our program, they run the gamut from national-curriculum textbooks to international storybooks to atlases to health information. Repressive governments don’t want that sort of material in folks’ hands, but thankfully, the number of those governments is going down every day. (Though we do try to avoid geographies with high corruption indices, as measured by Transparency International.)
Really, wherever cell phone coverage is extensive (and in much of Africa it’s at about 80% penetration), we’re happy to come.
Again, I am astounded by the growth and effectiveness of the work that David and his team have achieved with Worldreader. Although it may be many years before the effects of the program become evident, providing direct access to text has driven Western culture since the time of Gutenberg. That Worldreader will have a liberating effect on those young readers it reaches seems indisputable. That the world of Worldreader is growing is an indisputably positive development.