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Obama Announces e-Book Scheme For Low-Income Communities
An anonymous reader writes: The White House has today launched an initiative encouraging top book publishers to supply $250 million worth of free e-books to low-income students. Partnering with local governments and schools nationwide, President Obama hopes that the e-book scheme will support low-income households who significantly trail the national average for computer ownership and digital connectivity. At Anacostia Library in Southeast Washington, D.C., Obama announced that libraries and schools in poorer communities would be supported by the scheme and efforts would be made to increase internet access at these establishments. Publishers involved in the program include Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. NGOs, such as book donation charity Firstbook, and public libraries will also be working together to develop apps to support the digital reading program.
Libraries already do this. How about supporting the vanishing middle class?
My mom regularly borrows ebooks from the library in regional Australia. The system used is called Bolinda Borrow Box. Sounds like it works pretty well. Only epub is supported though, no no kindles.
Meanwhile, here in Manila Hernando Guanlao, 60-something, converted his whole house into a library (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19547365), to honor his mother and father after they died. He said: "As a book care-taker, you become a full man.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
The way the US treats its poor reminds me a lot of the colonialism of earlier times. Patronizing, without any real care or concern and so far detached from the real problems that one has to wonder whether they are just stupid or whether their motives ain't what they claim to be.
The motives are clear. Getting votes. They make promises, ask for votes, and blame others. Keep reminding the poor its no fault of theirs and they should sit and wait until someone comes in and saves them. And in our all our 'political correctness' nobody is willing to talk about the primary elements of the problem, which are kids being brought up in broken homes or no home at all with no family or community support structure. All the schools, teachers, & Ipads in the world won't do anything to help most of them. But hey, as long they'll vote for you, tell them what they want to hear. As long as you look like you are doing something, you'll get the votes.
Unfortunately, the vicious cycle can only be broken by taking kids out of the environment, or limiting the number of kids in it. But if you propose solutions that try to do either, you will be branded as hateful, intolerant, racist, or whatever other slanderous accusation that can be thrown because your messing with guaranteed votes.
Obama is giving $250 million to big publishers and some software developers so that they can deliver out-of-copyright books that "the poor" could have downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg and Google already. All Hail our Crony Capitalist in Chief.
Now how exactly did they calculate how much the "free" ebooks were worth? (Smell the oxymoron in that?) Is this some sort of MPAA/RIAA accounting scheme where the price of an ebook is quantified by the price of a physical copy (DVD/CD)? And why focus on the so-called reputable publishers? Can't the government just hire the authors directly and have them put out Creative Commons licensed textbooks (BTW this has already been done by some independent groups)? This is like hiring the mafia to build your house.