Worldreader is eight years old. A lot can happen in eight years: in 2010, the iPad had just come out, fewer than 35% of Americans owned smartphones, and the Mars Rover had not yet landed on the surface of our next-door neighbor. Today, tablets and mobile phones are everywhere, 77% of Americans own a smartphone … Continue Reading →

The Worldreader Library has reached a new milestone with 35,020 e-books in 43 languages for our readers in the global south. This milestone is rather different, representing a reduction in the size of our library by about 7000 titles. And we’re really excited about what this represents for our readers. We’ve always placed readers at … Continue Reading →

Reading to a child from the time that they are born can have the greatest impact on their life. As a digital reading organization, we’re always on a quest to discover smarter and higher-impact ways to get more people reading. Until recently, mobile phones really had no significant track record as reading tools for children … Continue Reading →

The Big Potential with Big Data Development practitioners and funders are increasingly interested in deriving insights from large data-sets (commonly termed “Big Data”). Every day, people around the globe who access Worldreader on their phones generate 1M rows of data. These data can help Worldreader improve our collections and create a better experience for our … Continue Reading →

When we look back at what titles our mobile readers were enjoying in 2017, we see that once again romance outpaced all other genres across our markets—just like it did in 2015 and 2016. But we’re also seeing something new.   These 5 books were among the top 30 titles read across all our geographies: … Continue Reading →

3rd grade student Lamees shares a phone with her friend Nour while trying out the Worldreader Kids app Walk into the right classroom at Um Huthaifa School and ask one of the 3rd graders to show you her “reading card” and she will invariably pull out a large piece of folded, colorful cardboard with lists … Continue Reading →

Anasoma Writing Contest winners with Chief Guest Lady Laimani Bidali Meet the Authors They are a teacher, a psychologist, an editor, a TV camera operator and a journalist, women and men of different ages who come from different parts of Kenya. Now they are all published authors, the majority of them for the first time. … Continue Reading →

A Literate Country That Isn’t Reading At Worldreader, we spend a lot of time puzzling over how to get more people reading. It might seem that by tackling illiteracy, we’re solving the problem, but that’s just the beginning. Mexico has a relatively high literacy rate of 94.4 percent. Yet, here’s the sobering news: most young … Continue Reading →

Three quarters of a billion people can’t read this sentence, and perhaps one billion more are being held back through lack of access to books and low levels of literacy. Today on International Literacy Day there is a lot to celebrate. But the reality is that these statistics have remained stubbornly stable over the past … Continue Reading →

Celebrating 200,000 Households Two years ago, we set out to try something unprecedented: using mobile phones to get entire communities to read with their kids. Along with our co-founder, Pearson (as part of Project Literacy), we set the ambitious goal of reaching 200,000 families in and around Delhi, India over the course of the pilot … Continue Reading →