More on the XO

In response to a friend, I wrote: The XO wouldn't be my preferred way to donate to improve education (that would be FAVL). There is a high risk that an enormous amount of energy has been put into this effort, and then large sums of public money spent, and that three years from now there will be dusty warehouses full of these machines sitting around. Ask yourself: would it be better to buy one laptop or 10 Leapfrogs.... The concept of the whole project is: if we do it big enough it will change the world. But like many "big ideas" conceived in university settings, it is vulnerable to the critique that, "big ideas don't succeed in the large because they were never tested in the small".

Future technology for libraries

Take Amazon's Kindle reader, or the XO (One laptop per child), and add the International Children's Digital Library and you would have a very low variable cost library for children. But the fixed cost is enormous... At $400 per electronic reader (maybe $200 if you got a bulk discount) and 20 readers per library, the "book collection" would have a fixed cost of $8000-$4000... this is well more than our present cost for providing traditional paper books. The electronics have the disadvantage of requiring electricity to recharge, personnel to manage, internet connections to download more books (the nearest connection for most FAVL libraries is several hours and $20 roundtrip away). The readers also may be tempting to thieves. So far we have found that children's books are pretty immune to theft. But someday the cost will be low enough, and the collections big enough, that electronic readers will be the books of village libraries in rural Africa.

Addition to post: My colleague at SCU Center for Science Technology and Society visited Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive for a demo of XO.... it looks amazing but my early position still stands!

A library friend has opened a library in Jordan Nu, Ghana

Marilyn Deer writes...
Jordan Nu is about a three hour tro-tro ride from Accra.... The commissioning ceremony was wonderful with all of the community in attendance. The entire primary and junior secondary marched in singing at the tops of their lungs accompanied by drumming. The paramount chief of the region was in attendance as well as library board executives and district assembly executives. I gave a speech, calmly, thinking not too many would understand my English, but then was told by many of the community over several days that they heard my message repeatedly and translated by the secretary of the community. Had I known that the media vehicle was in fact recording I might have been speechless. The community insisted on naming the library after me, I tried to convince them to call it the Jordan Nu library or community library but they felt the sponsor's name would benefit them later and they wanted to honor my commitment to them....what an honor! The first day the library was open there was no room to walk because the floor was lined solid with children reading. Now that made the whole four years of work worth every minute of effort! Of course, now the work and commitment really begins and we hope for a sustaining asset. Jordan Nu is paying the two librarian's salaries as well as the building maintenance and they formed the library committee independent of me. I have committed to supplying books until they can carry that responsibility alone. I am so thrilled to have been a part of this project. I don't know when I'll return, soon I hope. I'd like to be a fly on the wall to see how thing progress in the next few months. I am collecting books appropriate for them and believe that "if you collect them, a donor shipper will come." One of the library board execs was very impressed that the books I had stocked the library with were almost entirely written by African for Africans and I tried to use the national publishers. He said they are quite weary of well-meaning donors sending inappropriate literature which is not useful or meaningful to them.

National Endowment for the Arts report "To Read or Not To Read"

The report describes a decline in reading by Americans...

All of the data suggest how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals— whatever their social circumstances. Regular reading not only boosts the likelihood of an individual’s academic and economic success—facts that are not especially surprising—but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing, that readers attend more concerts and theater than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational level. se cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact—books change lives for the better.

Amazingly there is no mention of libraries, except to mention they will not be mentioned...

Also absent is a discussion of U.S. public libraries and their part in promoting reading of all kinds. A lack of reliable national data on library circulation rates for reading materials—as separate from CDs and videotapes, for example—has informed this decision.