Nonprofit Tries One-Kindle-Per-Child In Ghana

Nonprofit Tries One-Kindle-Per-Child In Ghana - Digits - WSJ:

In the developing world, where literacy remains a giant challenge, might digital books be able to leapfrog their print counterparts?

That’s what a non-profit called Worldreader is trying to figure out with a series of trials in Ghana that involve giving students Amazon.com Kindles to read in school and at home.

Worldreader was co-founded by David Risher, a 45-year-old former Amazon senior vice president who was responsible for growing the company’s operations beyond books. He left Amazon in 2002 before it created the Kindle, but was taken with the gadget’s ability to offer access to a huge assortment of books in parts of the world where getting a regular book into the hands of students can be a six-month challenge.

“There’s a huge difference between being able to read from a selection of the 10 books that you happen to have — or that somebody donated — versus being able to get your hands on a book that you are really interested in,” says Risher. “When you combine that with very very low distribution costs for additional books and falling technology prices, these are ingredients for doing something really special.”

Risher says he thinks e-books will let the developing world skip the paper stage, in much the same way cell phones have helped countries skip the landline stage ...