TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Karina Descartin’ Category

By David Rothman

Years ago I called for an Electronic Peace Corps (hello, Presidential candidates?), and high on my list were medical apps. Imagine how I felt to read the following item on an OLPC list a few minutes ago from Ed Montgomery:

“For those with questions about the need for this project, (especially critics, naysayers, etc.), I’d like to offer this link to a fantastic, 34 minute video by Dr. Larry Brilliant, who describes the elimination of smallpox (includes photo of the last known case, a small girl in India). Note, during his presentation, (Day 6, I believe), he mentions that because ‘there is no Internet, no computers,’ they had to print 2 million copies of a photograph, in order to search for cases.”

Yes, the OLPC machine can take photos and, obviously, distribute them. While I still see a need for an Electronic Peace Corps, working closely with NGOs such as the Geek Corps, I do know of one way in which OLPC beats the EPC by a mile. And that’s the idea of people in developing countries helping themselves—by coming up with their own solutions to local health problems and other challenges and spreading the word around.

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By Karina Descartin

Moderator’s note: Please welcome Dr. Karina Descartin as the newest contributor to the TeleBlog—see her bio at the end of this post. Check out her own blog, The story of healing. - DR

I’ve been reading e-books for years, almost as soon as PDAs came out, even if I haven’t always been wild about them.

No, I didn’t need the biggest, sharpest screen, just the right information in my textbooks when I was a medical student in the Philippines. I felt secure. In my pocket I could carry hundreds of thousands of words of medical advice—well beyond what I could hold in my head—and maybe use this wisdom someday to save a life.

E still key

Today e-books remain very much a part of my life as I prepare for my U.S. Medical Licensing Examination, needed to practice here in the United States. When I travel, I can’t tote a portable library of paper books. So instead I carry a MacBook, which contains seven medical review books, among others, and can play video lectures, too. My first-generation iPod Nano stores audio (MP3) lectures.

What’s more, e-books are part of my husband’s life, too—he’s a Web designer for the Wowio e-book service.

Beyond just exploring

No, I’m not the ultimate fan, just an explorer, but I’m excited by the possibilities of e-books as a way to squeeze more out of education budgets in developing countries while increasing the number of enthusiastic readers.

In fact, maybe reading TeleRead has already made me more than just an explorer. Today e-books are not a necessary evil for me; rather, just a necessity.

More on my reading material and hardware

Just what was I reading in my PDA days in the late 1990s and early 2000s? Well, I carried around two volumes of Harrison’s Principles of Medicine and two volumes of Schwartz’ Textbook of Surgery—plus a whole gamut of other books, which I read through the magic of the iSilo reader.

Back then, I was using the Compaq Ipaq 3760. Sweet! But eventually, we had to part ways; the Compaq was so thick, it kept ripping the seams off the pocket of my smocks, and the battery life was pathetic, an hour to an hour and a half at the most. But it served a purpose during that time, with 64Mb of RAM, a Flash memory slot, and the ability to work with a Targus Portable Keyboard. I’m nostalgic about the keyboard and the student days, but not the iPaq’s specs.

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