Comments on: The $100 laptop: NestlÃ©’s baby formula redux? Bad news for local culture, not just education, unless OLPC shows proper sensitivity?

By: Joscha

Joscha — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 18:56:22 +0000

Perhaps eBooks will not be about publishers, but about authors. After all, what do we have publishers for?
In the past, publishing houses have served an important task (and will continue to do so for the traditional pBook-chain): They brought authors, production, quality control, printers, distributors and advertisers together.

For digital content, these tasks can often be done (albeit in a much different way) through online-platforms, and everybody could go and create one at relatively little cost. Is this going to globalize eBook-production? – Of course! And is this going to kill a lot of publishers? – You bet!

Nonetheless, the whole thing is pretty much inevitable. And it is not going to kill literature and writing, instead, we are even going to see entirely new formats and genres.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 16:10:03 +0000

Agree with your excellent points on the need for digitization, Joscha. Heck, I’ve been pushing the concept of well-stocked national digital libraries since the early ’90s. My concern is that there be the proper balance between the global and the local; we need both! Ideally OLPC-related activities will nurture local publishers, etc., not supersede them. I remain a supporter of the project but want to make sure it goes in the right direction, rather than top-down. Thanks. David

By: Joscha

Joscha — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:55:03 +0000

The criticism of the OLPC typically revolves around: books are much cheaper and not as overly fancy, and a school-lab with a couple of outdated 486s would do the same tricks as the OLPC at a fraction of the cost.

This neglects some extremely important points:

1. There is a wealth of free digital text-books out there, and with the OLPC, this is going to multiply. In many countries, distributing cheap and up-to-date textbooks is a major issue, and the OLPC will help.

2. The OLPC does not only allow the consumption of knowledge, but active participation and creation. Without access to computers, you remain below the tabletop of technology, collecting its scraps. Bringing children on-line allows the most gifted individuals among them to participate in our world-wide community of geeks, and this may create a cultural and technological leap in the local environments.

3. School labs with just a few PCs are just not doing the trick. Even here in Germany, they are usually under the supervision of teachers of the pre-Internet generations. Just as geeks here, those in the developing countries will have to empowered to learn and create on their own. Besides, continued software development, writing and so on cannot happen on machines that are to be used in class, by dozens of people subsequently, or by several at a time.

I suspect that critics and OLPC enthusiast are reflecting their own disagreement about the role of personal computing in today’s society. Personally, I think that it cannot be overemphasized. Without computers, there is no access to world-wide knowledge, no cheap world-wide communication and no adequate participation in contemporary art, economy and culture.