By Jennifer Baljko

Author Keith Thomson fell into writing novels in a roundabout way.

Before he penned his bestselling thrillers Once a Spy and Twice A Spy, Keith was a semi-pro baseball player in France, an editorial cartoonist for Newsday, a filmmaker who won the Laura Napor Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and a screenwriter. He also frequently contributes to the The Huffington Post, reporting on intelligence and things like bomb-sniffing mice.

 

The Writing Life

What tipped the scales in favor of books? A contentious scriptwriting meeting with a big Hollywood movie studio and a passing comment from his agent.

“After the meeting, my agent and I were walking to our cars. He said if I wanted the story to be the way I wanted it to be I should write a novel,” said Keith. “I was 29 or 30 years old at the time. The idea of writing a novel had never occurred to me. When I got back to the hotel, I signed up for a fiction writing course.”

Pirates of Pensacola, the book Keith has donated to Worldreader, came out of that initial effort. The tale about a landlubbing accountant meeting his estranged pirate father was inspired by his own childhood fantasies, Keith told us. When he was eight years old and living in a small coastal town in Connecticut, he would stare out at the ocean and pretend the semi-infamous 19th Century pirate William Thompson, who Keith imagined as distant relative with a similar but slightly different last name, would show up on the shore and invite him on swash-buckling adventures.

The Power of Reading

These made-up exploits stemmed from a natural inclination towards escapist tendencies and were fueled by the books he read as a kid, Keith noted. In particular, grabbing The Mammoth Book series of true adventures off the town library’s shelves gave him a total rush.

“There wasn’t one book that made me fall in love with reading. It was these cinder-block sized books about true stories,” he said. “They were pure, unadulterated, extra octane tales of people going on live adventures.”

When children have access to these kinds of stories, their creativity gets stirred up and their worldview shifts. Ensuring that kids have access to books and reading was what struck Keith about Worldreader.

“When I heard about what Worldreader was doing, that appealed to me on a gut level,” he said. “[Former U.S. President] John Adams said ‘You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.’ And, that’s true. I always felt that’s what a good book did—it takes you anywhere you want to go.”

That’s something Worldreader can get behind, too. Thanks for the chat, Keith!

For more information about how Worldreader is bringing books to all in the developing world using e-readers, visit us at Worldreader.org.

 

 

by David Risher

Worldreader is working so every child in the developing world can have any book he or she wants, using e-readers. When you step way back, you realize that there are at least three groups you need to get on-board to make that dream happen: e-reader manufacturers, book publishers, and kids.

Today’s hero is the Penguin Young Readers Group, who has just agreed to donate the use of a number of their books to Worldreader. There’s only one word to describe this: awesome. One of the world’s largest English-language publishers, Penguin (and their many imprints, including Grosset and Dunlap) is home to many of the world’s best-known children’s authors… I don’t even want to start naming them, because the list is nearly endless, but have a look here for a sample. We’re starting with books from the “Who Is / Who Was” series, including “Who Was King Tut” and “Who is Barak Obama,” which we know will be a big hit with our students in Kenya. (Must…. not… make… birth… certificate…. joke.)  Penguin joins Random House (who happens to be the world’s largest trade publisher) and some 15  African publishers, all of whom are supporting Worldreader in our mission.

And we’re just getting started.  Soon we hope to share news of some of the world’s biggest authors who are joining the movement. E-books represent an incredible opportunity to let children in the poorest countries get access to the world’s best literature, and we’re incredibly grateful to all those who are helping make that happen. So: let’s say a a huge thank-you to Penguin Young Readers Group and to all who are bringing books to all.

For a list of all the books currently available for free to Worldreader students, click here.

By Susan Moody

Since Worldreader launched the iRead pilot in November, we’re seeing astonishing improvements in primary students’ reading comprehension– their sub-scores improved an average of 13% in just 6 months!

This week the primary students at Adeiso, Ghana wrote poems and rhymes which show how having e-readers and, importantly, reading a lot (they are spending up to 50% more of their time reading) is changing the way they express themselves.  A special thanks to Writers Project Ghana– they asked the students to test their writing skills after a reading workshop.  Here are a few of them for you to enjoy.

By Susan Moody

Today I spent some time reviewing our blog posts over the past year and reflecting on what I’ve experienced with Worldreader.  Now, I am going to make a prediction:  E-readers will change the way the developing world reads.   Most predictions take a lot of nerve and guts, but this really isn’t the case here.  It’s just hard to deny when you see what’s happening.

Exactly a year ago, Mike Sundermeyer blogged about his trip to Ghana where he pioneered one of Worldreader’s first meeting with local publishers.  According to Mike, it would be a “fantastic first milestone in getting great local content”.  Fast forward a year later and we have partnerships with over 10 publishers in Sub-Saharan Africa and they are uniformly thinking about their global digitization strategy.  We have helped them to digitize 116 African titles, like local favorite Ananse and the Pot of Wisdom, and have many, many more in the pipeline.

The launch of the iRead pilot in Ghana was exhilarating, and we blogged about how we were giving students raw power by giving them e-readers.  Of course, we wondered exactly how much students and teachers were going to read and were promptly blown away as they began downloaded not hundreds, but thousands of books.  Soon we noticed trends– like students were downloading books directly related to what they wanted to be when they grow up.  An example of this was Abigail Amoh Paintstil, a student at Kade SHS who told us she wanted to be a journalist; we noticed she was downloading The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.   Then, if we weren’t inspired before, we saw the effect of all this reading (students are spending 50% more of their time reading than before) on testing (primary students’ reading comprehension sub-scores improved an average of 13%) in just six months! And this could be just the tip of the iceberg.

And the beauty of it is this: what we saw in Ghana isn’t an anomaly.  Just last month, we launched in Kenya together with The Kilgoris Project and today we received an e-mail from them.  Here’s a tiny glimpse from Caren into all the amazing things occuring there:  “What’s happened at Ntimigom with just three weeks of Kindle usage? Kids are lining up to read at recess.  Instead of playing football, they read in the shade of the trees by the office.  Parents are embracing them too- many primary parents have come to school to get their own Kindle lesson.”

So, the cycle is like this: Students who before have had little or no access to books get e-readers and begin reading more than ever before.  Teachers love them too, as do parents—it’s a welcome addition into the community.  At the same time, publishers join the wave and begin digitizing thousands of African titles—it’s apparent that a vibrant publishing sector will be key to developing a robust culture of literacy. The price of e-reader technology will continue to decrease, making it a feasible option for the developing world. (For our Spanish- speaking followers, please see Worldreader in La Vanguardia last Sunday on this exact topic.)   And students begin to read a lot better (just see the video below if you don’t believe me!) So I welcome your comments: do you think e-reader technology could be a game-changer for reading in the developing world?