Check out the e-book area of Operation Outreach-USA, which includes books downloadable in Microsoft Reader format–as well as accompanying guides for parents and teachers. The organization is a partner of America’s Promise, Gen. Colin Powell’s group.
The Outreach program, which in a paper-book incarnation has been around for some years and reaches 3,000 schools, relies on car dealers and other sponsoring businesses and is intended to encourage both literacy and character development. The idea sounds intriguing even if Outreach is hardly a replacement for a well-stocked national digital library. One publisher, Storytellers, Inc., appears to dominate Outreach’s e-book area, and Microsoft is the format king here.
Overwhelmingly, the e-books seem to be about animals–for example, The Blue Kangaroo for pre-kindergarteners and The Pacing Mustang for middle schoolers.
I myself would welcome not just more books about people but also oodles of links to good public-domain texts from sources such as Project Gutenberg and the University of Virginia. They could be made part of the Outreach e-catalogue. As it happens, Storytellers has included a “retold” version of Beautiful Joe, a 19th-century classic that reportedly was the first book to sell more than a million copies in Canada.
In any event, the e-book area and rest of the site are colorful and professionally done and deserve a very close look if you’re a parent, teacher, school librarian or public-spirited business owner or manager. Those guides for teachers and parents–I like the idea, even if the public sections of the Outreach Web site don’t provide sufficient previews for surfers without passwords–could come in handy.
Still, I’d like to see a more ambitious effort that also included books without the guides; must everything be so neatly packaged? And why not guides to the free classics already on the Net? Methinks that the present limitations of Storytellers and Outreach should not be your school’s limitations. Simply put, you should not rely excessively on e-books from one publisher; bear in mind that public-domain children’s classics such as Alice in Wonderland are already in Microsoft’s Reader format via the UVA site and elsewhere.
If you can use e-book search engines and download free ASCII texts, which can be translated into Reader format via a Microsoft Word add-on, then so much the better. No illustrations? Perhaps that’s an opportunity for the children to receive assignments from art teachers, assuming any are still alive and walking the earth in this multimedia era where everything comes prefabricated.
Too, bear in mind that Outreach’s e-books don’t appear to be free, or if they are, the Web site fails to make this clear. The general Operation Outreach site says the price for participating in the program is “$250 for the average size class or about $5,000 per school and includes everything–all training, books and instructional materials.” Do remember the built-in limitations here if you want children to enjoy a wide range of e-books; pity the kids who can’t stand animal books, however popular they are.
A well-stocked national digital library remains the best way–not the only way–to deal with the proverbial “savage inequalities” of public and school libraries. Tax money could help. So could plain old philanthropy. I don’t blame Outreach for relying on local sponsors, I’d do the same and in fact applaud the participating business as indicated earlier; still, let’s not forget the commercial tradeoff. A recent press release said: “Operation Outreach-USA is an excellent marketing tool and public relations project for Chrysler dealers trying to increase sales and enhance image among their customer base.” So that’s what education has come to nowadays–a marketing tool?
Meanwhile, despite the above caveats about commercialism and lack of variety, we should applaud Outreach for its efforts–in the areas of both e- and p-books. With schools and libraries hurting so badly, let’s worry less about purity and more about helping children now, and that’s what Outreach seems truly about. At least the children can own the p-books, which they can’t do at present with the e-variety unless they have computers at home. In Las Vegas, a teacher told a local newspaper: “The students will be so excited to be the first child ever to use their books. They’ll pick it up, put it to their faces and rub it. It’s the sensation of having something new that they don’t get much.” Without a well-integrated TeleRead-style solution immediately available, and offering both a well-stocked national digital collection and ways for kids to read the books on computers at home, we should be glad that Outreach is around.
