TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Cellphones: Illiteracy-reducers, too—not just poverty-enders?

By David Rothman

Cellphones, already used by some for enjoying e-books, will grow more and more useful for reading as displays improve—with, for example, rollout or pop-out capabilities for E Ink screens. This could be where the real e-book market will be eventually, or at least an important part of it. Check out David Ajao’s post that we published from Africa, on mobile phones as a book-spreader.

And so I’m reading with interest a long New York Times Magazine piece on cellphone use in developing countries. Costs can be as little as $20 or $25, with the hope of prices dropping to $5 a phone someday. Remember when cellphones cost hundreds or thousands? The title of Sara Corbett’s article is “Can Cellphones Help End Global Poverty?” We follow around a U.K. man with the intriguing name of Jan Chipchase (his real one?), who works for Nokia as a human behavior researcher. Perhaps I need to catch up with Chipchase and see if he can’t start asking e-book-related questions as this Johnny Appleseed of a cell evangelist wanders around the Third World. Actually he’s better than an evangelist, in that he’s studying what the market is likely to adopt on its own, as opposed to doing a hardsell.

A panacea not, but a little hope just the same

No, cellphones and OLPC-style computers won’t magically end illiteracy by themselves—we’ll still need teachers and librarians. But the technology will provide a handy platform for books and other printed items and increase the breadth and power of words.

Reducing illiteracy isn’t such a bad way to help reduce poverty as well. From better health information to agricultural news and tips, the written word can make a difference—oral culture can go only so far.

Greater use of the written word can even foster more stable societies, if government news and laws are presented in a way more thoughtful than TV and radio can provide. Stability, in turn, just like greater literacy, leads in the long run to greater prosperity.

Mobile phone stats from the Times: “To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries.”

An idea: I see from the Times that Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Prize winner who founded the Grameen Bank to encourage micro lending, also has also started Grameen Phone, Ltd. Might he perhaps be the one to encourage cellphones to grow inexpensive e-book reading capabilities—and also work toward content for the phones.

Also in the Times: At a certain age, simplicity sells in high-tech gadgets. Applicable to e-books? Of course. Yet another argument for standards, so that grandpa can just look at an .epub logo and confidently buy the latest John Grisham without being captive customer of Amazon? See E-books as the new ‘large print’: An eye doctor speaks out, as well as librarian Isabelle Fetherston’s earlier essay.