by David Risher

Hello from Ayenyah, Ghana! Today Worldreader took a huge step forward, setting in motion the first true field-test of e-readers in the developing world. It was remarkable in almost too many ways to write, from the 22-hours it took us to get from Barcelona to Accra, Ghana, to the asking permission of the village Chief to work with the local school (and presenting the Witch Doctor with a ceremonial bottle of Schnapps), to the torrential rains that started at 5pm and ended promptly 120 minutes later, to the incredible generosity of the people we’ve met.

So what did we learn? As background: we spent the day with 20 students from age six to twenty-six, teaching them about e-readers and then letting them loose on a bunch of pre-loaded Kindles. In a way, we simply wanted to see how these children were going to react to this very new technology. We came away more convinced than ever that e-readers will change the face of reading in the developing world.

Some of the reasons are exactly what we expected: asking people here to imagine holding 1500 books in the hands makes them grin— it’s so far beyond what they or frankly anybody is used to. Simply having access to this material is really quite a profound change for many of these children. The content they liked ranged from Magic Tree House books to (not surprisingly) some custom content we created on Ghanaian football… like anyone, they wanted to read what they enjoyed.

The Kindle’s built-in dictionary was a big hit, and the text-to-speech functionality was very, very popular. But in a way, the more interesting conclusions we have about the technology itself (which of course will improve quickly and on many dimensions) was that part of its appeal is that it’s simply different from a book. These children have seen books lying around forever, though mostly the books have been inadequate for their needs or in poor shape. But e-readers— perhaps because they feel a bit like cell phones, which everyone in the developing world understands— somehow ignite a new level of interest in kids here. Of course, new technology always has an appeal (as long as it works well), so we’re seeing some of that. But we think there’s something a bit more profound going on… that there’s the possibility that at least for people in these communities, reading certain kinds of material, e-readers might awaken a new interest in reading.

As you look at these, know these these kids are every bit as clever, curious, and enthusiastic as any you’ve ever met. What they haven’t had is access to the range of ideas that e-readers can help bring. We hope we can help.

by Zev Lowe

Over the last two days, the Worldreader team has gathered in an empty classroom at ESADE Business School to prepare our e-readers for classroom trials in Ghana. In less than a week, we will begin working with the teachers and students of the OrphanAid District School in Ayenyah. David, Colin and Mike are leaving for Accra this Friday, March 12. They will have 18 Kindles in tow, thanks to the kind folks at Amazon.

But it wouldn’t do to just show up with brand-new e-readers fresh out of the box. We had to register them and load them up with some starter content. In our earlier classroom trials in Barcelona, the students in David Pover’s 12th grade classroom read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which was a free book. But our Ghana trials will involve younger children, with about a 4th grade English language reading level. Our search for free and/or open-source age-appropriate content didn’t yield much. While our long-term is to encourage the use of local content, in the interest of getting on the ground as soon as possible we paid for content off Amazon’s Kindle store.

We decided that we would start with four books and a magazine. As soon as we get to Ghana, we will confer with the teacher and modify our selection of content as necessary, but it seemed important to show up with something so we could demonstrate the potential of the e-reader to contain a veritable library in one slim package. Also, Ghana doesn’t yet have wireless Kindle coverage, so we thought it best to download some content while we can do it conveniently.

We underestimated the complexity of the Kindle ecosystem. In pricing their e-books, Amazon has had to balance publisher demands to control rights to their books on a market-to-market basis, the cost of wireless delivery worldwide, and the need to keep things relatively simple for the average customer. The result? Customers can register an unlimited number of Kindles to one account, but each time you purchase a book license, it is usually valid for only 6 devices.

It was great that we could register all 18 Kindles to one account, and we were prepared to buy 3 copies of each book. But we encountered some problems along the way. The system kept track of how many downloads we made of a single book (good), but didn’t make it easy to buy more than one copy of a book (bad for us), and occasionally seemed to get a little jumbled about whether we’d downloaded 5 or 6 books, particularly if we did some wirelessly and others over the internet (confused yet?).

Furthermore, the market-by-market pricing posed an interesting question: Should we use a U.S. or Spanish credit card? If we used a U.S. credit card, then the books would be cheaper. But because we are physically in Spain, we would have to pay when wirelessly downloading content. Of course we could just use a Spanish credit card, but then we’d have less content to choose from — for example, we found out that Curious George Plants A Tree wouldn’t be available to us then.

	U.S. credit card	Spanish credit card
Content availability	Extensive	Limited
Book price	Cheaper	More expensive
Surcharge per wireless download (outside U.S.)	$1.99	Free (included)

Based on the various obstacles and minor setbacks we ran into while setting up all 18 Kindles, we’ve drawn up best practices that will scale for future, larger trials. The real learning will come in Ghana, but we’re amazed at how much we’ve learned before even leaving home.

The Kindle is making inroads among college students in the United States. It’ll be great to see how kids in Ghana will react to having the device in their classrooms. What will they think about the books we’ve chosen? Will they use them more in class or for leisure reading? How will their teachers react? We look forward to learning and adapting, and keeping all of you posted.