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Originally Posted by europas_ice
 Now that I think about it, the issue of a sufficiently robust ebook for children has already been solved. The One Laptop Per Child program ( http://www.laptop.org/) distributes extremely robust and very simple laptops to children in third world countries. They could, of course, be used for reading books -- I think there's even a specific mode for doing that. It's a bit pricey to buy one in the US though, I think about the price of an ebook ($400?) |
The OLPC project was
trying to get the price down to $100, and couldn't. To help get manufacturing volume to lower costs, they had a "twofer" promotion: buy two for $400, and you would get one and a kid somewhere would get the other. I don't think the deal is still on.
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On a slightly different note, does anyone think that schools could save money long term by switching over to ebooks rather than pbooks? Or would it just be more expensive overall?
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More expensive over all. They have the cost of the ebooks (and textbooks would be expensive, even assuming the textbook publisher would
make electronic editions), plus the costs of the readers, as they couldn't assume every kid would have one or the parents would have the money to get them one. Not to mention the problems with loss/ breakage, etc. Pbooks are a lot more durable, and stand abuse and still be read that would kill a reader.
Besides, when would you start doing it? Kindergarten? First grade? Later? There would still be pbooks in the mix.
I don't see this happening any time soon, nor do I necessarily think it
should.
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Dennis