Publishers Back African Literacy Effort With E-Books

Years ago, David Risher, a former Amazon executive, came up with the unlikely plan of distributing Kindles to children in the developing world to help increase literacy. Why take a fragile piece of technology that requires charging and Internet connections to places where infrastructure can be sparse, especially when there’s an inexpensive, low-tech alternative in print books? But Risher has gradually found acceptance for the nonprofit he founded to take e-books to Africa, Worldreader. Now he’s getting a significant boost from book publishers that could help expand its reach. Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Egmont UK, Rosetta Books, Hardie Grant Egmont and Ripley Publishing have all agreed to donate e-books to Worldreader, allowing the nonprofit to triple the size of its digital library to more than 900 books. About 500 of those titles are African textbooks and storybooks, while another 425 originate from publishers in the United States, Britain and elsewhere. All of them are free for the roughly 1,000 children in Ghana and Kenya to whom Worldreader has handed out Kindles. Worldreader says it has distributed more than 200,000 e-books into the hands of children in its program.