#1: The Amazon Kindle
While growing numbers of people in the development sector get increasingly excited at the potential of tablet computing for health, agriculture, education and other development activities, it’s the Amazon Kindle that’s been exciting me recently. The irony is, without really trying, Amazon have built something which more closely resembles an appropriate technology than other organisations who have specifically gone out to try and build one.
So, what makes the Kindle so special?
It’s light, relatively rugged, and mobile- Ten days reading time on one charge
- One month ‘standby’ time between charges
- Solar panel cover option removes the need for mains charging
- Built-in dictionary and thesaurus
- Display can be read in bright sunlight
- Internal storage for up to 200 books
- No need for the Internet once books are loaded
- Text-to-speech for illiterate/semi-literate users
- Costs continue to come down
- Remote delivery of books and materials (local wi-fi permitting)
Of course, I’m not the first person to notice this. A year or two ago the highlight of an ICT4D conference I attended was a short video showing children in West Africa using Amazon Kindles. I’ll never forget how they interacted with the devices, and what having access to one meant to them and their hopes of an education. Not many technologies give us these little glimpses of magic.
Imagine, all the books a child would ever need to see them through their basic education, all packed into a ~$100 device.
The people behind that video were from Worldreader.org, an organisation whose mission is to “make digital books available to all in the developing world, enabling millions of people to improve their lives”.
We often say in mobiles-for-development that today most people in the developing world will make their first phone call on a mobile, and have their first experience of the Internet on one, too. Perhaps children, in the not-too-distant future, will have their first experience of reading on an e-reader?
Good to hear, as the IDS Knowledge Services has also been thinking along the same lines too.
Having developed an API (http://api.ids.ac.uk) to our datasets (which include tens of thousands of thematically organised resources, primarily academic research, on development issues that are freely available online), we are now looking at ways of packaging “resource guides” on topical, relevant development themes for viewing on Kindles and other handheld devices.
Simon Colmer
Information Projects Officer
Institute of Development Studies
@simon_ids
@Simon – Thanks for that! Sounds very interesting. Looking forward to seeing the resources when they come out.
Re: “Remote delivery of books and materials (***local wi-fi permitting***)”
It even goes beyond local wifi. Amazon’s partnership with telecoms world-wide means that students in at least a few developing countries (notably Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, and India) can access content without wifi (assuming they have 3G versions). Let’s hope the coverage map continues to expand. Here’s Amazon’s most recent map:
http://client0.cellmaps.com/tabs.html#cellmaps_intl_tab
@Eric – Great point, Eric. I was assuming the cheaper “wi-fi only” version in my post but forgot the 3G option. It certainly makes an even more interesting proposition.
Ken,
Agree the kindle is amazing engineering. I think you could also just say the ereaders in general will be great for development. The kobo readers is equally well designed and robust in my opinion.
My only knock on the kindle its a bit more proprietary and can’t how into a backend that’s not amazon. It does support mobi files so maybe that will be the chosen platform for education.
End of the day I think we will see a supervision cheap $20-30 ereader hopefully with the ability to plug into an open backend for disseminating information.
Thanks for the post!
Matt
@Matt – Thanks for that, Matt. Totally agree that other e-readers likely fall into the same category (it’s just that I own a Kindle so was speaking from experience – I’d love to get a Kobo and any others out there to play with). A $20-$30 open hardware/software e-reader with similar specs would be really interesting. Here’s hoping we see one in the not-too-distant future. We already have the $35 Aakash tablet from India, after all.
Kiwanja, I have a kindle and I am loving it. But I am not sure how appropriate it is for kids in developing countries. My perplexities have to do with the price and versatility of the machine. Kindles are still very expensive (80$) for what they deliver. As far as e-readers kindles are great, but they don’t do anything else and the price barrier is such than only with a huge donor intervention it would be impossible to distribute them in large enough numbers. Surfing the web, social networking and emailing are painful experiences on a kindle. So basically what you get is a 1400-books library (I think that’s the estimated storage space on the device): probably more than you would need in a lifetime. What is missing though is the ability to access the Internet, find the information you need in any specific moment, interact with other people, receive and send information. In one word, as a development tool the kindle seems to belong to a different era, when books were the only source of knowledge and learning was a rigidly defined process. Nowadays you can learn more in 1 hour in an internet cafè than in weeks in school. My worry is that a device like the kindle would increase the knowledge gap instead of helping to reduce it.
@Roberto – Thanks for your thoughts. I agree and disagree. I’m not sure if $80 is really that expensive given the typical expensive equipment development projects try to spread around the world. Assuming the books can be loaded at low cost this is probably cheaper overall than physical books over the course of a student’s lifetime. Versatility-wise, the Kindle is great because it just focusses on doing one thing, and one thing well. I think the tendency in development to think that convergence and multi-access devices are best isn’t always the right one. The Kindle sucks at web stuff because it’s not designed to do that. If it were to focus more on being a communications device then it would end up with a high resolutions (less power-efficient) screen, would then not have the long battery life it does now, would probably end up being more complex to use, would have use/cost/data access implications, and so on. I think it’s a reasonable compromise to focus on just being an e-reader and let phones, laptops and tablets battle it out for everything else.
@kiwanja: don’t take me wrong, the kindle is a great device, I agree 100% wih you. My concern is that in the developing contexts where I have worked, children use 1-2 books over the course of their studies. Providing them with a kindle would not make much of a difference. Good teachers receiving a decent salary seems to be a much more effective and sustainable “technology”.
@Roberto – Thanks for commenting. I’d have to agree that no technology can or should replace the teacher, but in the absence of enough of those, and an absence of physical books (for a variety of reasons) the Kindle may be a solution. Do children only use two books because that’s all they need, or because that’s all they can get hold of? I’d imagine the learning experience being considerably richer if they had access to more books, and books for pleasure (rather than just traditional education).