Would you be interested in a reader trade-up program

[breccan]

Hi everyone,

I'm doing a proposal for an ereader tradeup program and I would appreciate knowing if this kind of program would interest you.

Send in your old reader and get a $50.00 credit to the new model and your reader will be loaded with etextbooks and sent to Africa to help with education in impoverished communities.

Yes / No comments or recommendations are all welcome.

[exscentric]

Yes. Know however you will be getting a lot of poorly to non-working units so you might want to clarify "working" units or have someone available that could repair units.

[HarryT]

Question: is this a serious business proposition or some kind of academic exercise?

[susan_cassidy]

There is already one trade-in program, on Amazon, that is run by a third party.

[Jessica Lares]

That is not a very smart move. You're basically paying double the price of what most readers are worth after one or two years. The basic Kindle is only $69.00 brand new.

[usuallee]

If it was real, I'd certainly be on board with trading in my old K3.

[speakingtohe]

Just curious. To whom are you proposing this to?

Helen

[jehane]

There's not enough detail in the proposal.

1. Do the units have to be working to be traded in?

2. How many generations back can be traded up? eg I have a Sony PRS-300 - can I trade that in for a T3?

3. Where is the credit coming from - do you have to buy the new unit from a specific store? (And will it have a convenient $50 mark-up?)

4. Who pays postage?

5. Will you need to "unlock" the readers if the previous owners don't bother to de-register their devices with the relevant DRM group.

And finally a comment - given the current prices of new units, $50 is a lot. In some cases, more than 50% off list price.

Since we are talking about impoverished African communities, are ebooks really the way to go? These will be older and probably well-used models (since the people likely to trade up will be regular readers) so battery life will be shorter (consider the availability and reliability of electricity supply), and software/hardware failures more likely. What do you see as the advantages of ebooks over pbooks in this situation?

[carpetmojo]

Originally Posted by jehane

There's not enough detail in the proposal.......................................... ......................Since we are talking about impoverished African communities, are ebooks really the way to go? These will be older and probably well-used models (since the people likely to trade up will be regular readers) so battery life will be shorter (consider the availability and reliability of electricity supply), and software/hardware failures more likely. What do you see as the advantages of ebooks over pbooks in this situation?

All excellent points, and enough, to my mind, to make this a non-practical starter that could help/make a real difference.
(One further glitch springs to mind ......... would there be the infrastructure to provide ebooks in the countries concerned ?)

I feel pbooks are still the answer over technology heavy, and support-reliant alternatives.

Originally Posted by carpetmojo

I feel pbooks are still the answer over technology heavy, and support-reliant alternatives.

Developing nations differ a lot in terms of their both their needs and capacity to support technology. For some, ereaders would clearly be inappropriate. For others, ereaders may be appropriate. Also keep in mind, the logistics of distributing physical books is much more difficult than carrying an SD card full of ebooks from community to community.

Anyone interested in this topic may be interested in digging up some stories from the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, which tried to do much the same thing with inexpensive computers. (Granted, these were computers designed for their needs, rather than unreliable hand-me-downs.)

[cromag]

No.

Not for me. I really like mine and expect to run it into the ground. I'm already bummed that there are no ereaders available with the same feature set as the one I use.

In all seriousness, you can buy inexpensive Android tablets for less than the $50 trade in you'd offer (especially if you buy in bulk) -- put in an ereader app and the same ebooks and you can send them off to deserving clients with the side benefit that they could have access to, and learn about, other educational apps.

[speakingtohe]

I always thought the one laptop per child project BWinmil mentioned was not that practical in terms of do-ability. I recently read The Truth About Canada by Mel Hurtig and a comparatively rich country like Canada still has astounding levels of poverty, although we and even I personally, should be able to do a lot better for those around us. I can't begin to imagine the problems in undeveloped countries.

Helen

[jscarbo]

There are several ongoing e-book/e-reader projects in Africa. One of the best-known is Worldreader: http://www.worldreader.org

There are also several charitable organizations that accept used e-readers as donations, such as E-books For Troops: http://ebooksfortroops.org/about/

I support both of these organizations with financial contributions and think they're doing great work.

I can't see how the OP's proposal could possibly work, either financially or logistically. There are much better models than an e-reader trade-up program offering a $50 credit. Most people who are interested in supporting this sort of charitable work aren't looking for financial incentives and would probably view this sort of proposal as being rather hair-brained and not likely to succeed.

[Penforhire]

I took advantage of a similar trade-in from Sony when I upgraded to their PRS-650. But as noted above, e-readers have mostly crashed down in price.

[NickyWithNook]

The Nook Simple Touch is going for $40 now, so sure I'd do that. LOL.