Turn $100/$175 OLPC laptop into lean, mean $50 e-book machine without keyboard?

Anyone want a Fujitsu Stylistic tablet upgraded with Win XP? Turns out that I’m spending a lot more time reading off my used $155 DT 375, which is CE-based and doesn’t even come with a hard drive. The fonts on the DT screen are tack-sharp with uBook, and that counts even more than the greater power, flexibility and storage capacity of the bigger tablet. The point here is that the most powerful gizmo isn’t necessarily the best for you even if it may be better for others.

So I read with interest—in the unofficial OLPC News—of a proposed $50 laptop. Originator of the idea is “Dr. Martin Woodhouse MA MB BCh(Cantab),” who not only is real but who has written or cowritten 11 novels and even some episodes of The Avengers. Wikipedia describes him as “a former medical doctor, pilot, engineer and computer designer.” Simply put, whether you agree with him or not, he’s worth taking seriously as a Renaissance man who easily straddles the line between technology and the humanities.

The case for a lean, mean reading machine

In debating the OLPC hardware issue, you can’t separate machines from pedagogy, and Woodhouse is broaching some major questions.

Should the OLPC laptop be a lean, mean reading machine—trimmed to the bone, with the needs of cash-strapped schools in mind in developing countries? It could still be powerful enough to display books, among other basic uses, and even include the famous OLPC screen to show them off in full glory. Missing, however, would be the keyboard, microphone, video camera and other goodies.

The constructivist side

The other side of the argument is that such a machine would not suffice for a constructivist approach—for the learning-related creation not just of text but of images, video and sound. Should kids just be passive receptors of knowledge? While you can use paper in the middle of nowhere, supplies may be limited; it’s much easier when you can just type out on a screen. Also, what about Internet access? Not all knowledge will be at hand locally, even on a desktop hard drive from which students could download files for their $50 marvels.

In the end, I believe it would be wonderful to give countries and schools a choice of what machine they wanted, but include provisions for add-on physical keyboards. Better for kids to have a much-less-than-perfect OLPC machine than none at all. However, in OLPC’s place, I wouldn’t do the stripped-down version immediately; rather, I’d wait to try to drive down the costs of the more powerful machine—well, unless I could enlist the aid of publishers and others in financing and promoting the stripped-down version.

A different game if big publishing companies are supportive

Then the game changes in ways far beyond the increased market for the basic machines for K-12. Just think of the boost that such a cheap e-book reader could give to the global e-book industry in areas beyond education, such as recreational reading. Hello, HarperCollins, S&S, Random, Holtzbrinck and the rest? Can you see the possibilities? Furthermore, how about small publishers in developing countries: companies in which bigger publishers could invest. Talk about growing markets and turning a grand cause into sustainable businesses that promote lifelong literacy and local culture, not just the global variety! Imagine, too, the possibilities for libraries sprouting up in developing countries. They would have a much-wider range of local content to offer, because of the greater affordability of reading machines and hence the larger market for loaned books, not just bought ones. You bet this is TeleRead territory; the commerical, public-sector and NGO sides could all be synergistic toward each other.

Sooner or later, of course, even a full-strength OLPC laptop—well, the equivalent—will cost just $50 or even less. The current $175 is just one stop on the way to the famous $100 and below.

A cost guesstimade

Meanwhile here’s Martin Woodhouse guestimate of the costs of a linux-based $50 OLPC laptop:

–$28 Screen. Thanks to to brilliant [chief OLPC tech officer] Mary Lou, we have a superb one with minuscule power consumption and low quoted OEM cost
–$5 CPU Slow, cheap and again above all low in power consumption
–$5 RAM system memory, about 32 MB at a guess
–$5 Battery LiFePO4, suggested though not yet firm OEM cost
–$7 Case with backlight, plus probably four keys, ‘Yo-Yo’ charger, some kind of USB-style socket for plugging in books, which are held on RAM sticks
–$50 TOTAL guesstimated cost

“The books themselves,” says Woodhouse, “will include text in a number of fonts, and pictures, all pages in colour and with a little animation here and there, nothing fancy. Since we won’t be using Windows, let alone PDF files, my current estimate is terms of book size is a mean of 4Kb per page. So a plug-in 1Gb RAM stick (cost, what, a dollar, sooner or later?) will hold 250,000 illustrated pages, or say a thousand or so books?”

Quibble with the Woodhouse calculations: The $50 is only the total cost of the components. It doesn’t include the expenses of assembling them, or the inevitable markups. Still, just as with the full-strength OLPC machine, costs will eventually plummet to the point where $50 is realistic.