E-books are not the answer to a literacy crisis

[Commentary] The White House recently announced the launch of Open eBooks, an app giving access to thousands of free e-books to any educator, student or administrator at one of the more than 66,000 Title I schools or any of the 194 Defense Department Education Activity schools in the United States. It’s an admirable endeavor and recognizes that we have a literacy problem. However, it brings to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous line: “Water, water, every where/ Nor any drop to drink.”

Technology is repeatedly touted as a cure for the United States’ educational woes, promising everything from banishing boredom to widespread reform. There is more technology in our classrooms and homes than ever, but too often these expensive technologies yield few gains in learning or gains not commensurate with cost. Serving as the executive director of the Virginia Children’s Book Festival, in the heart of a literacy desert, has taught me two things: Literacy is an instilled value, and too frequently reading is a luxury instead of a necessity. The Open eBooks initiative is laudable, but it fails to address the root of the country’s literacy crisis. While it will make textbooks and storybooks accessible to those lucky enough to have the technology, without critical intervention to create a culture of reading in every home and school, that access has little chance of making any meaningful change. At best, the program and ConnectED must be seen as supplementary solutions to a problem we haven’t addressed in a sustained and intensive manner. At worst, Open eBooks will go the way of Crewe Primary’s iPads: well-intentioned but extraordinarily insufficient.

[Juanita Giles is the executive director of the Virginia Children’s Book Festival]