OLPC tech guru on ‘$100 laptop’ as p-book replacement with high-res screen

Comments:

• gecko says:

  April 30, 2007 at 4:51 pm

  now instead of 1 laptop per child, it has become 1 laptop per 1.75 child. i simply don’t get the idea of providing laptops to children of the third world when they still lack the basic needs – medicine, food, lodging… the money would be better used for something else, anyway, what use is a computer without internet? who is going to pay for their internet access?
• Garson O'Toole says:

  April 30, 2007 at 11:42 pm

  A posting on the ZDNet “Education IT” blog by Marc Wagner is also emphasizing the value of the OLPC for electronically distributing educational e-books. In fact, Wagner thinks that the entire OLPC project goal would be worth the expense if the computers are used as e-book readers and children are given access to large e-book libraries. Here is an excerpt of his blog posting:
  

  What is intriguing is reports I have read that suggest that these laptops will be preloaded with large volumes of textbooks and literature. (See Should Education IT care about OLPC?) This is a great way to provide each school child in the third world with something of far greater value than a lame computer — a virtual library in a format far more suitable for harsh environments than ink printed on paper. I applaud this part of the project. As long as these devices are robust enough to survive the harsh environments they are to be found in, if they are used for nothing other than ebook readers, they will have been worth the expense.

  Wagner also is concerned about the possibility of censorship. A topic David Rothman also commented on recently. Here is an excerpt:
  

  The downside? These reading materials will be approved by the third-world government who’s footing the bill. Whether this is good or bad depends a great deal upon how forthright that government is with its citizens, and how trustful its citizens are of their government.
• Bill Janssen says:

  May 1, 2007 at 12:13 pm

  Isn’t there an opportunity here for someone who wants to create
  a nationwide tax-dollar-supported digital library system? Seems like it
  might make sense to start a non-profit dedicated to adapting
  the OLPC technology for free e-book readers for the nation’s
  public library system. Partner with the OLPC and LOC and wireless
  hotspot providers to provide access to content from the local
  public libraries via the mesh network. The library would run what the
  One Laptop folks call the “school server”; the patrons would use
  stripped down versions of the laptop (maybe not so stripped; the
  keyboard would still be useful for note-taking).
• Bill Janssen says:

  May 1, 2007 at 1:01 pm

  reports I have read that suggest that these laptops will be preloaded with large volumes of textbooks and literature.

  Mr. Wagner apparently hasn’t been reading carefully. There’s next to no storage on these machines. What the project is planning to do is establish a server in each community that has a disk, and contains the large volumes of materials. The laptops will access the material over the network.
• David Rothman says:

  May 1, 2007 at 5:07 pm

  Bill: Yep. I like your idea. E-books have been a support nightmare because of all the different formats, in addition to the usual hardware challenges. You’re talking about standardization in effect. That’s ok as long as different vendors can participate.

  Mix the software and related hardware standards with a comprehensive solution and tax money (perhaps a mix of local, state nd federal), and voila, you’ve got a variant of TeleRead.

  I’m using the word “comprehensive” with some major caveats, by the way. I don’t want any national digital library system to control all of publishing; no Big Bro, please. I’m sure you’d agree.

  But most books are not controversial, and within certain categories, such as textbooks, there could be a wide choice. Furthermore, with standards around, the consumer machines and the infrastructure associated with the system could work with all kinds of books.

  As for a cause dear to you—e-books accessible on the Web rather than on users’ local drives—I continue to worry about the downside. For example, do we want Big Bro to yank away books already on the server?

  But for people who want this as an option in the interest of simplicity and variety, I think it would be fine. What’s more, the ubiquity of the system would actually make this approach more practical than otherwise.

  Thanks. Further details welcome!

  David
• Garson O'Toole says:

  May 1, 2007 at 5:43 pm

  Below is an excerpt from a recent interview with Nicholas Negroponte that mentions e-books on the OLPC and is dated May 2007 (bold added for emphasis):

  CPU: What kind of software will come preloaded on the OLPC laptop?
  NN: It is a general purpose laptop, and thus will have tons of software, much of which we cannot predict or imagine. It will come preloaded with some things [any or all of which can be deleted], which will be different in each country and determined with them. But, in general, we tilt the initial software load to constructionist software—note the work of Alan Kay and Seymour Papert. For example, we have a full Squeak environment in the current test machines. We will have Logo in many flavors. It will come with 100 books, pieces of music, cartoons, etc., as well as reference material in local languages.

  The excerpt leaves the impression that some e-books will be pre-loaded on the OLPC. Yet, the memory of each OLPC is limited and so access to a really big library of e-books requires something like a local server, a non-local server, or a distributed storage system using other OLPCs.
• Suggested Reading | Chris Webb: Publishing, Media, and Technology says:

  May 1, 2007 at 8:38 pm

  [...] OLPC tech guru on ‘$100 laptop’ as p-book replacement with high-res screen (tags: ebooks olpc) [...]
• Bill Janssen says:

  May 2, 2007 at 2:40 pm

  As for a cause dear to you—e-books accessible on the Web rather than on users’ local drives—I continue to worry about the downside. For example, do we want Big Bro to yank away books already on the server?

  There’s an initiative called LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) which seems relevant. If your community library served the copies, so that there would be thousands of copies of each document, it might be hard to remove them all from every server.

  Note the current antics going on on DIGG…
• Bill Janssen says:

  May 2, 2007 at 10:59 pm

  There’s next to no storage on these machines.

  Actually, they’ve recently increased the storage on the machine from 500 MB to 1 GB (which must accommodate the system software as well as data like books). I believe it has 256 MB of RAM. You could probably get a lot of books in, say, Plucker or some other compressed format, in that amount of space.
• David Rothman says:

  May 3, 2007 at 2:04 am

  Bill: Many thanks for mentioning LOCKSS. Looks very interesting. The prob is that at first glance–am I missing something–I don’t see participation by large book publishers. I’m not sure how fond they’d be of letting local libraries keep copies.

  Simply put, while LOKSS is a dandy system for consenting journal publishers, it has its limits.

  So the big prob remains. Consumers will have to trust large central sources rather than being able to download and have permanent access to copies of a wide variety of content.

  Hey, keep plugging away with your thoughts on possible solutions. I do see merit in books-living-on-the-Net as an option. What’s more, in the case of truly networked books of the variety that the good folks at Sophie envision, there won’t be any other choice.

  Thanks,
  David