E as a bridge: How e-libraries and the right e-book devices could bring nations, socioeconomic classes and generations closer together

Here are my remarks prepared for The World in Your Library conference, held today as part of the LACUNY Institute Series in New York. – David Rothman, TeleRead moderator.

I know. The gizmo I’m holding up is made of plastic rather than the familiar cardboard, paper and glue of a “real” book. And it weighs three pounds.

These days, however, I am spending at least as much time reading off my One Laptop Per Child XO-1 machine as off conventional books.

But let’s look beyond my experiences and think globally in more than one sense of the word. How will the XO-1 fit in with the open source concept—the idea that software can actually be given away and modified? Later this afternoon I’ll demonstrate FBeader, the open source program that for me is a vast improvement over the reader that the XO comes with. Via the Web, you can see tips galore on using FBReader yourself.

What’s also ahead in this talk

• I’ll also tell how open source, e-books and related technology might contribute to the success of the Bologna Accord—a way to make academic standards more comparable in Europe, and perhaps elsewhere, including, maybe, developing countries. Interest in the Accord is a major reason for this conference. But you can’t raise standards without making the best use of your limited resources, one reason why the economies of open source could be so significant if the Bologna concepts take off globally.
• Finally I’ll mention the role that the TeleRead idea could play in all of this and more. For those who don’t know, TeleRead is the name of a plan for well-stocked national digital library systems in the United States and elsewhere. I proposed it in the early 90s—the possibility of not only getting huge digital libraries online but also integrating them closely with local schools and libraries and promoting the use of appropriate hardware. I’ll tell how TeleRead could live up to the title of this talk and bring nations, socioeconomic classes and generations closer together.

Why e-books

Let me emphasize that I’m not an academic, teacher, librarian, programmer or OLPC staffer—just a writer who has been in love with the tech since the 1980s but who has tried to recognize its limitations.

For me, it’s the words that count more than the package, and with a memory card I’ve bought, my XO-1 can hold well over 10,000 books—in fact, probably all the text in Project Gutenberg if I use the right formats and compression software.

Now imagine if I were a student in a place without well-stocked physical libraries. I could share my favorite public domain books with classmates, or at least pass on the appropriate Web links so they could download the books themselves. I could also exchange comments on the books with others.

With the XO I can write, e-mail, browse the Web, even use the machine for making videos or sound recordings or uploads to the Web, although for now I’ve stuck mainly to the text-related uses of the XO. The children won’t. Significantly, one of the main goals of One Laptop Per Child is to encourage young students to create their own content rather than, say, passively watch television. A related idea is to help them learn and develop their mental powers through play, one of the concepts of the teaching philosophy known as constructivism’

Really worthy of 60 Minutes—and a computer for all?

So is the XO-1 all it’s cracked up to be? Does it fully live up to the ballyhoo on 60 Minutes, which you can watch via a link I’ll provide from OLPC News? Can it on its own close the Digital Divide in the United States and elsewhere? Will  the XO-1 by itself turn around the lives of children in remote regions or Peru or Nigeria? Or can the XO and variants single-handedly improve the lives of children in the States and maybe even the elderly as well?

The answer is an emphatic no—not by themselves. You see the computers themselves are just a start and actually a bit of a distraction from some other issues.

First off, the XO, brilliantly designed though it may be, isn’t for everyone.

Here. Let me open up the tablet. Notice? it’s a laptop now, rather than a tablet, but the keys are child-size. I myself prefer an auxiliary keyboard, along with a mouse, too, since the touchpad won’t work when the XO-1 is in the tablet mode.

I’d hate to see the whole planet forced to use one kind of computer, and I’m delighted that the XO-1 has encouraged the creation of rival machines. One gizmo alone can’t do it.

Second, and far more importantly, hardware alone isn’t the answer, even if some children may take to programming naturally. But that’s not the same as a teacher or librarian explaining Dickens or a local novelist or the history or Peru or Nigeria or wherever the children are using the XO. At this point in the OLPC project, far more attention has been paid to the hardware than the ways in which it will be used. I hope that changes. It isn’t enough just to rely on studentsfollowing their curiosities; how can they be curious about what that which they don’t know? The value of librarians and teachers, as facilitators, is obvious.

The benefits of of open source

But how does open source enter the picture? Here are the benefits to rich and poor countries alike—whether or not they are Bologna participants, although it’s easy to see how cheaper knowledge will make it easier to raise standards everywhere:

1. Open source can reduce software costs in countries that have enough difficulty coming up with XOs for just a fraction of their schoolchildren.

2. Students themselves can play with the software and blur the difference between users and programs. Some may become exactly that. And remember, what one programmer develops can be freely used elsewhere.

3. Open source not only is a program-multiplier, so to speak, but also a knowledge-multiplier. It allows the creation of wikis, those Web pages, like Wikipedia’s, that can have thousands of contributors. Often, not always, the crowd is smarter than any one contributor would be. Not that I see wikis as a panacea. Like classrooms, they work out best with supervision—in the form of knowledgeable and alert editors.

4. Via open source, librarians, academics  and others can work with programmers to create tools with knowledge rather than profits in mind. A wonderful example of this is the Zotero personal card catalog, which actually is much more than that. In the future you’ll even be able to use it as a platform for professional collaborations—effortlessly sharing your work with thousands of other people. If you’re reading this on the Web, click on the image to see a demonstration of the program.

Open source, of course, also has been catnip for people creating blogware—they’re free to pick up each other’s best ideas.

At the same time, I would argue against open source displacing everything commercial. The two build on each other. Commercial developers make their share of breakthroughs, and if the work is any good, open source people may well come along to imitate functions. Also bear in mind that many open source people are hackers who program for each other rather than the public at large. I’d love to see academic institutions and others fund open source in a truly massive way, with the understanding that interfaces will be simpler.

I myself use a mix of open source and software from the usual corporate suspects. I’m writing this blog post not just directly in WordPress, an open source program but also in a wonderful little Microsoft program called Windows Live Writer, which lets me create and edit posts offline—much faster than I could do otherwise.

I know Open Office works with an add-on called Sun Weblog Publisher, apparently also commercial software, and I look forward to trying that as well.

TeleRead

So what role might a TeleRead approach play in dissemination of knowledge? The TeleRead idea—first published in Computerworld in 1992 and later as the last chapter in an MIT Press/ASIS information science collection called Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier and elsewhere, including the Washington Post and U.S. News & World Reprot—has evolved over the years. But three basic components remain:

1. Well-stocked national digital library systems, with many librarians in many cities participating, as opposed to just a tops-down approach. I say systems plural, because TeleRead could happen in many countries besides the U.S.

2. Careful integration of TeleRead into local school and libraries and other institutions at all levels. Teachers should know know to use text and multimedia from TeleRead to reinforce lessons.

3. Promotion of appropriate, book-friendly computers. Here in the states, one model could be to use the library and school market to justify production of extra low-cost computers to lend out to students, at least if they needed this. Schools are already giving away laptop or helping students buy them, in effort to save books.

Imagine if variants of the XO existed not just for children but also for adults. And what if those digital libraries catered not just to the young but also the old and encouraged them to mentor each other. An eighteen-year-old might teach an old codger computer the mysteries of blogware, while he in turn helped helped the teenager with English or history—including some eras he might have lived through.

Suppose, moreover, that library users of all ages could use digital libraries to learn job-related skills? I’m thinking of the insurance clerks from India who work for an insurance company in the midwest and must compete for Java guides at the local library. What if the very best guides—along with helpful wikis—were free online? And suppose TeleRead funded open source software development along with digitization of public domain works? The same concept would work across national boundaries in not all but many cases, with appropriate translation resources. Is there really a Peruvian algebra or Nigerian laws of physics? And if a Chinese researcher born to a rice farmer is the first with an all-purpose cure for all kinds of cancer, in defiance of medical wisdom, will it be any less efficacious just because it came from there rather than here? Simply put, national digital libraries and other services on the Net can help us transcend differences of geography, economic status and age. Would commercial solutions—so often requiring affluence to enjoy—be eough by themselves?

The unlibraries: Google and Microsoft

Yes, there is a difference between library and commercial approaches, and in other ways, too. Google and Microsoft are happy to come in and digitize library collections, but gotcha exist. Other companies may not be able to index the material for use on the Web. In fact, as you can see from the accompanying image, Microsoft even wants to have its corporate watermark on every page—notice the blow-up of the watermark at the bottom of the title page of Old People and the Things That Pass. Google, too, is watermark crazed. No, I don’t hate Microsoft and Google, in the latter of which I even have a small investment for retirement purposes. But isn’t it possible we need other business models to play a more prominent role? And mightn’t there even be contracting opportunities for both, just so they didn’t restrict use of the material created?

*     *     *

As I’m winding down this presentation, the radio is abuzz with reports of financial disasters in the states and elsewhere, and many in the academic world might trace the problems to the government’s eagerness to de-regulate and not get involved. A comparison here? Should our schools and libraries be as haphazard as our financial system?

I don’t want Washington to regulate our local libraries or our reading habits, and in fact, I favor a strong private sector in the book world as a check on Washington’s power. But isn’t there also a place, in the United States and elsewhere, for national digital libraries that could compensate publishers and writers fairly based on the number of accesses or other criteria?  Or pay Microsoft or Google for services?

At the basic level, at least, you don’t even have to be a progressive to like the basic TeleRead concept. None other than the late William F. Buckley Jr., my political opposite in many ways, wrote: “Andrew Carnegie, if he were alive, would probably buy TeleRead from Mr. Rothman for $1, develop the whole idea at his own expense, and then make a gift of it to the American people.” Yes, Bill Gates visited the TeleRead site some years ago and knows about the idea. I doubt he’d make me an offer, however—at least those are my impressions so far, based on Microsoft’s current focus on proprietary e-book standards rather than the .epub format on which major publishers have agreed through a group called the International Digital Publishing Forum. But one never knows, and besides these days, Warren Buffett is richer. That said, neither Buffett nor Gates could pay all the costs of a full-scale TeleRead—running into the tens of billions, but just a speck of the costs of Iraq and certainly longer lasting in its benefits. Expensive? Yes. But not in the grand scheme of things. Remember, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product is about $13.5 trillion dollars.

In a recent TeleRead item, to which I’ll link, I briefly mentioned ways in which the U.S. might get on with an actual TeleRead to counter, for example, the bad news conveyed in reports from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’d love to see some discussion and action in the States, especially in a campaign year, but if other countries beat us to a full-fledged TeleRead-style approach, which China seems to be working toward, through a efforts in the areas of e-book technology and digital libraries, I’ll understand. Thank you, and I hope you can come to the XO demo later this afternoon and have fun watching FBReader in action.

Note: For time purposes, I expect to abridge parts of this when delivering the presentation. – D.R.