Reading Rainbow Kickstarter Heads Into Home Stretch

An anonymous reader writes "A month ago, LeVar Burton and his friends at Reading Rainbow created a Kickstarter campaign designed to bring their app for the iPad and Kindle Fire to the Web at large. They asked for a million dollars, and quickly blew the doors off their goal, receiving over three million dollars in three days. There are 48 hours remaining in the fundraiser, which has garnered over 4.5 million dollars, and with over 92,000 contributors, is the most heavily backed Kickstarter campaign of all time. To sweeten the pot, Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane has offered to match any pledges over the $4 million mark, up to an additional million dollars."

Comments

Seth MacFarlane

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't necessarily like everything he has done in his career, but he has certainly been putting a lot of money into solid causes lately. The Cosmos series was pretty good and now this. Respect.

This isn't going to do much

[asmkm22]

The problem with (new) Reading Rainbow is that it will end up targeting and catering to kids that are already interested and proficient in reading, due to those kids being in families able to buy into the subscription. Twenty years ago, it worked because even poor families generally had at least a single crappy TV with rabbit ears, which was enough to get PBS. That 4 or 5 million that ends up getting raised would go a lot further by addressing actual core issues with poverty, rather than giving kids who already know and like to read even more reason to do so.

Re:This isn't going to do much

[raydobbs]

I thought one of the things they were hoping to do with the extended stretch goals is give subscriptions to poorer communities (libraries in rural or inner-city settings, etc) so that it could be utilized by the people who couldn't normally afford it.