Negroponte On OLPC's New Path, Plans For XO 3

waderoush writes "After laying off staff and splitting the organization in two, Nicholas Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child effort may be hitting their stride again. In an interview with Xconomy, Negroponte says he has a new model for getting XO laptops to kids in Gaza and Afghanistan — and reveals more ideas about the planned XO 3 tablet and the future of books. 'Paper books are really dead — they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says."

Comments

I like paper books

[Nursie]

And seeing as I have no tablet or kindle or iPad or nook or whatever the hell, I shall keep reading them.

From my cold dead hands Mr Negroponte.

a visionary

[RapmasterT]

"'Paper books are really dead — they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says.""

He sounds totally rooted in reality to me.

Focus!

[WrongSizeGlass]

OLPC needs to reel in its ambitions and focus on something it can deliver as promised. These guys are starting to corner the market in low cost vaporware and pipe dreams.

Re:Focus!

[cgenman]

To be fair, when the OLPC program was announced, a laptop less than $600 was considered absurd. But the threat of the OLPC program lit a fire under Intel, and created their low cost platform initiative. Negroponte, in many ways, is responsible for the $200 netbook that I'm typing this on right now.

He seems aware of this phenomenon, when he says that threatening to build a $100 tablet may be enough to spur private industry to build a $100 tablet. He's learning.

I don't know. The OLPC project is basically founded on dreams and whimsy, but has become very real very quickly. They seem to be much more savvy now than when they started. I'm willing to give them a learning curve, especially with how grounded the XO 3 project seems compared to XO 2 or XO 1.

Paper books are easy

[digitaldc]

Books are quickly accessible, portable, need no batteries and just feel good in your hand while reading them.
I doubt books will ever die, unless we elect Sarah Palin for President.

Exactly: Paper books are like vinyl records

[zooblethorpe]

Or like radio, yeah, remember how TV killed radio? Or the VCR, remember how that killed the cinema?

Meh. Sure, the market for paper books might shrink back from its peak, but it's not disappearing, and certainly not overnight.

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, What a maroon!

Cheers,

Re:Exactly: Paper books are like vinyl records

[Coeurderoy]

Well, my first reactio was similar, but living in a 3rd world country where access to book is diffucult and "piracy" normal (including on books) I think he might be "righter" than we think.

Currently there are "roughtly" 1 billion people living in countries where the majority reads at least "some" and 5 billion who live in counties where only a minority reads.
(nb: of course india, china, etc have great literature, and la hogera in santa cruz is trying very hard to get good interesting local writers to the local market, but the realitly is that the wast majority of people in emerging countries do not read for "fun", they read if they are ordered to by their employers...., because:
If you are poor and a "cheap low quality pirated book" cost 4 to 5 hours of work you will not offer 100 hours of work every year to your child, so the child will not connect "reading with fun" (exept the statistical "lucky" one outlier)).

Moreover there is little avaiability of recent outside book (a hard cover foreign book can cost about 50% of a basic montly salary).
So execpt the pirated copies of some blockbusters made popular by pirated copies of foreign movies, you do not read recent foreign books (softcover classics are about the end of it).

But "everybody" has access to computers (mostly of course in cyber cafés)
and most students use pirated PDF's of school books, not just because they cannot affort the 30..40$+ * 10..20 they would need, but because:
Amazon do not deliver in many 3rd world countries
and other providers can take up to 2 month to get the book to you (assuming you have an internationally valid credit card)
and the local bookshop are not very efficient (or just would not bother because they know you will hassle them when they ask 3..4 time the "amazon" price because they have to pay: the book, the transport the customs (40%)..

So ebooks are the best way to get books to these 5B people

And in 10..15 years we might see that 80% of the population reads about 50% with a 90/10 cut for ebooks and 20% will have a 30/70 cut because they only use it for brain sugar and techno books, but at the end ===> more ebooks than books, and more "influence"

   

The machine that never was

[Ranger]

As long as Negroponte remains in charge of his baby the OLPC will never really take off. Eventually iPad technology will become cheap enough for the Third World. Too bad we have to wait for that to happen.