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OLPC America could be catnip for U.S. schools—and e-book publishers, too
January 14, 2008 | 10:49 am
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By David Rothman
American schoolchildren from low-income families will soon be able to learn on the same kind of spiffy green laptop that students in Peru, Nigeria and other countries will be getting—thanks to a new organization called OLPC America. Some enticing e-book possibilities could arise from this U.S. version of One Laptop Per Child.
The school district in Birmingham, Alabama, already plans to buy 15,000 laptops, and some lucky U.S. students already have XOs via Give One Get One, but the new group, focused on action at the state level, could broaden the action across the country. I just hope that better-off students can benefit, too. Let’s not ghettoize the OLPC program in the States. It should be for all kids, with rich and poor children having a chance to learn from each other via the superb communication capabilities of the XO. A common approach would also be better for the development of curricula.
But that’s not all. Over the weekend, the TeleBlog carried a 5,500-word writeup on the XO-1 machine developed by the parent group, One Laptop per Child, and there’s a reason for the excitement—the actual gizmo is better for reading e-books than the expensive laptops owned by students from well-off families. It isn’t just the incredible screen, but also the fact that the XO can be folded into a tablet for more comfortable reading, just like a Tablet PC.
The existing e-book software? Could be better. But there’s already a good substitute for techies, and in the TeleBlog post, I suggest that libraries and others could work with programmers to come up with programs to make the machine iPod-simple, just like the Kindle.
Looking beyond the Kindle—and considering the copyright angle
Meanwhile I’d recommend that U.S. publishers take a good look at the XO and consider the possibilities. At less than $200, with prices expected to drop dramatically, it undercuts the current Kindle, and the talk is that similar machines will actually end up going for just $75. That’s less than the price of many a large reference book. Should this happen, it almost would be fiscally irresponsible for schools and libraries not to embrace e-books fully.
One big challenge, beyond preparation for teachers and librarians, will be to reconcile the machine’s philosophy with U.S. copyright law. When you download an e-book PDF with the current XO software, you get a prompt asking if you want to share the book with a group friends. Not exactly the dream scenario for typical publishers.
Wikis as razor blades
Furthermore, like me, OLPC is hardly gung ho on DRM. And yet I’m keen on the old-fashioned idea of publishers and writers—I’m one myself, remember—getting paid. In my XO review, you’ll find suggestions for new business models that could be used with the XO. One approach might be the use of book publishers to create and develop wikis related to books, an approach that already seems of some interest to Wiley. The actual e-book could be the razor; a wiki, the blades. I give more details in the write-up.
Separately, I’m also wondering about the use of social DRM—that is, embedding users’ names in files, so the books are less likely to be pirated. No, like the wikis, this isn’t a cure-all. But it’s one solution. I’d welcome people’s ideas on others.
If publishers act smartly, they could both serve the society in general and turn a profit off books delivered via the XO and similar machines to a screen-oriented generation. It will be interesting to see if the big houses can look beyond the Kindle, the most fashionable gadget of the moment, to consider the potential of OLPC-style machines.
A few more details about OLPC America: The group will be based in Washington, D.C., and a director and board are said to be already in place. U.S. students from low-income families are to start receiving laptops this year.
“To have the United Sates be the only country that’s not in the OLPC agenda would be kind of ridiculous,” OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said as reported in PC World. “We are doing something patriotic, if you will, after all we are and there are poor children in America.”
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Comments:
David, I’m pleased to see how excited you are about OLPC except when it comes to making it the standard for ebooks. There we part ways. The one thing I want from my ebook reader is for it to not be another computer. I want it to emulate, as closely as it can, the experience I get when I read a printed book.
This may well be a generational thing or perhaps one’s experience reading print books before ebooks came into being or perhaps even how early one got into the habit of reading books and newspapers and magazines on a computer-like device. I am old (or at least feel that way), being a baby boomer and I absolutely hate reading a newspaper or a magazine online. I subscribe to about 20 monthly magazines and I buy 4 to 10 hardcover books a month, as well as — since I received my first ebook reader for Christmas — 6 ebooks between Christmas and now, and I have downloaded several free ebooks. But I cannot read them on either my desktop or my laptop. Doing so makes me think I’m at work, and reading is a pleasure activity that I associate with my own time, not my client’s time.
My gripe with the OLPC device is not the software but the hardware. Because it is a computer, it’s not for me for pleasure reading. Similarly, I wouldn’t buy a Kindle because that is just a computer waiting to happen. Although far from perfect, the Sony Reader is more for me because it is more like a book. And that’s what I want — a book, even though it is an ebook.
Richard: I love e-books either way–whether on a dedicated machine or something multipurpose. Hey, it’s a individual thing. Enjoy your Reader! I was going to sell mine but am itching to try out the planned upgrade for the 505. Thanks. David
David, it is obvious from your posts that you love books. I just fear that the push everyone seems to be making as regards ebook reading devices is to enhance each product with computer-like features. The people who rave in praise about the Kindle never discuss the reading experience. Instead they discuss the wireless connection and other computer features.
When asked about what they would like to see by way of improvement, many ebook posters give answers thgat largely tend toward the computing experience. Even your own posts here tend to promote and complain about the computer-like/type capabilities, although you also do discuss the reading experience.
My question thus becomes this: If you are so happy reading on the OLPC device, how does that experience differ from reading on a tablet PC, a cell phone, a standard laptop, or any of the other portable devices available, assuming all were running the same reading software?
If your real love is not the OLPC device itself but the software, then that experience should be promoted and other device vendors pushed to incorporate it as the software experience should be device independent.
Am I drifting? Ahhhhh, just call me an old crank, but I’m on the computer all day and the last thing I want to do is curl up with it for pleasure reading. Maybe i should forget ebooks and solely by the hallucinogen itself — the printed book.
Hey, Richard, what’s the TeleBlog community but a group of young and old cranks? I’m one. Pleased to have you among us. As long as the cranks are civil toward fellow cranks, which you are, and don’t turn into trolls, that’s fine by me.
Actually I share your concerns over focus on the reading experience vs. focus on the computing side. My dream world would be one of perfect e-book hardware and software. We still have a way to go. In the case of the XO, I’ve made clear my preference for simplified software. More time for books, please—less need for software struggles, Web searching, etc.! That’s part of the mission of the blog, which, by the way, is fun to write and moderate but also a major frustration since I’d rather spend more time with books and less with RSS feeds.
To address the question in regard to my own book-reading experience, I’ve enjoyed rereadings of New Grub Street and Candide on the XO, although right now I’m caught up in some paper books (I dislike buying DRMed e-books since I can’t own them for real). Thanks to FBReader’s ability to work with buttons on the XO, I can blow the type up when I’m in a section of a book with lots of dialogue or other short paragraphs, but can easily get a nice overview of long paragraphs and pages by way of smaller type when I want it. As for the general issue of more content for E, hey, I’m the guy who’s been pushing the idea of a comprehensive national digital library system—with, yes, end user devices considered—since early 1990s. It all ties together.
In a somewhat related vein, I’ve asked TeleBlog contributors for book reviews. See Paul Biba’s just-posted one. Care to join in? We’ve got our share of genuine booklovers, although of course their tastes vary widely—hence, the focus on the common topic of technology.
As for devices, my favorite varies by the occasion; in fact, there is none. With FBReader I can enjoy the same book on a linux PDA, my XO, a Windows PC, or(if I owned one) a Tablet PC. I used my Palm TX this morning during a wait in the doctor’s office to check up on some fiction I’ve been working on. And I often read off the TX at home. But it can’t handle .epub, which my Nokia 770 can through FBReader. Unfortunately the 770 isn’t as rugged as the TX. So I’m less eager to take it outside. Right now my favorite gizmo for home use is the XO, which, because I fear its being lost, stolen or broken, I don’t lug around. See my point? There is no favorite device right now, with or without FBReader in case. And I’m not insistent on FBReader, absolutely, since it won’t run on my Palm TX. There I use Palm Fiction Reader. I’d love to see FBReader for the Palm TX. But I’m not going to say, “That’s the only software to use,” especially since people’s needs and preferences vary. Like it or not, and I don’t, plenty of books are in PDF, which FBReader can’t handle. Same for DRMed books, although, as noted, I try to avoid them.
OK, a fellow crank I am, but hopefully one who appreciates the nuances, just as I suspect you do.
Thanks,
David
Addendum: I didn’t even get into the times when I’m in the mood for the Sony Reader (remember, I own one) or the Cybook Gen 3 (loaner)–I love its capability to bold all text. Can’t run FBReader, alas. I’d include the iLiad, too (it can run FBReader) but I need to return it in the next two weeks. The iLiad has the best page-changing control I’ve ever used.
David, I appreciate the offer to contribute a book review but I fear you and the rest of the community would be appalled at my attempt — it’s one reason why I don’t reviews on my own websites. Truth is I do read a lot. But during the daylight hours I read heavy-duty medical and educational tomes as part of my editing tasks for client publishers. During the night hours I tend to read a few pages of books like 1967 by Tom Segev (particularly well-written and analytical book), Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World by Miriam Bodian, and the Shield of Achilles by Philip Bobbitt before falling asleep. I don’t even know if these are books that are available in ebooks as I buy nearly all of my books in hardcover print editions. The ebooks that I read are the public domain, long out of print books that I have either wanted to read and never got to or that have caught my eye (e.g., Clarence Darrow’s book on crime).
Anyway, my point that I am skirting around making is that these days it takes me forever to get through a book and the books I tend to read are not those that the most readers would care for. More importantly, a good review requires analysis of the subject book including its place in either contemporary times or in its own time, not just a bold statement of like or dislike, and I simply am incapable of providing such analysis. My original writing reads as if I am a neanderthal thrust in today’s times and given a pen.
Should my writing improve, however, I will reconsider.
I’ll leave you with this: A book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in the history of the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is Judgment Days by Nick Kotz. This is a well-written dioscourse on how Martin Luther King, Jr. and LBJ together caused the passage of the Civil Rights Act, overcoming the opposition of the Republicans, particularly Sen. Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader. It also discusses how J. Edgar Hoover tried to derail the legislation by painting MLK as a leading communist sympathizer.
Two other books worth reading are Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 by Matthias Kuntzel, who argues that the present problem in the Middle East can be traced back to the late 1930s and the early 1940s and the joined forces of the Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis, and Summer for the Gods by Edward Larson, which is the true story of the Scopes trial in the 1920s and the clash of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan (and it is nothing like Inherit the Wind). Which leaves me with this book that is a must recommend: A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan by Michael Kazin, the story of the most popular orator in America in the late 1800s and of the man who was 4 times a presidential candidate and is best remembered for his Cross of Gold speech and his prosecution of Scopes.
Good night!