About a year ago, 500 children and teachers in Kade and Adeiso, Ghana came to school and found e-readers filled with a total of 25,000 e-books. In the United States, a similar thing happened at Clearwater, Fla. High School—2,100 e-readers loaded with math and language arts books were being rolled out as new classroom learning … Continue Reading →

These last few weeks we’ve been chatting up our iREAD Vacation School. Now, that we have dug into the results and see the impact, we can’t stop thinking about it.  It started out as a really simple idea: Give kids access to books during their long vacation. Worldreader couldn’t let them take their devices home … Continue Reading →

I have to say when we put the finishing touches to our iREAD Vacation School I thought of it as a “best we could do but not good enough” kind of gesture to keep kids interested in reading and e-books through the summer. My visit to Ghana last week however not only assuaged my earlier … Continue Reading →

Today I spent some time reviewing our blog posts over the past year and reflecting on what I’ve experienced with Worldreader.  Now, I am going to make a prediction:  E-readers will change the way the developing world reads.   Most predictions take a lot of nerve and guts, but this really isn’t the case here.  … Continue Reading →

I’m heading to Kenya at the end of this week to lay the groundwork to bring e-readers into classrooms in East Africa. I’ll be meeting Caren McCormack of The Kilgoris Project, which serves 435 students in five schools near the Maasai Mara. Caren’s husband, Jon, heads up software development for the Kindle, and Caren is a … Continue Reading →

Trashing a government agency is an easy sport.  Take your pick of insults: they’re hidebound, ineffective, isolated from the real world.  But our experience has been the opposite: twice in the past few weeks we’ve received great news from Washington.  We’ve already written about the first, but this one is even bigger: official approval from … Continue Reading →

We’ve read some illuminating research about the power of books recently.  David Brooks’ column in the NewYorkTimes called “The Medium Is the Medium” succinctly makes the case for the power of access to books.  In particular, he points out that when researchers “gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books of their own choosing over three successive years, their … Continue Reading →

Worldreader conducted the first-ever trial using e-readers and digital books in a Sub-Saharan Africa classroom, at the OrphanAid Africa School in Ayenyah, Ghana.  Phase 1 of our trial is complete, and the full 39-page report of our findings is now available for download here: Worldreader E-Reader Trial Report Ghana. Our experience using e-readers in classrooms in … Continue Reading →

A guest blog post by Christianna Pierce While many people enjoy portable e-readers as a convenient luxury, I believe e-readers have the potential to transform lives on an unprecedented scale. Here’s why:   One of the greatest assets of the e-reader is the near-instant access it provides to thousands of books. Available topics range from … Continue Reading →