Slashdot Mirror
Uganda, Where a Book Can Cost a Month's Salary (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shared with us a BBC report on Uganda, where books are unbelievably expensive to afford. The publication reports that it almost feels like a black market for people looking to purchase a book in the landlocked country in East Africa. A book Nothing Left To Steal by South African journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika (less than $15 on Amazon.com), for instance, is selling in the country for 140,000 Ugandan shillings ($42). This might sound reasonable to most of us, but for a country with a poor economy, BBC reports, this amount can "buy a week's worth of groceries for a family." People, in fact, look for friends going on a foreign trip to help them buy books. Many books are simply not available to them, and the ones that are, they are too expensive in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. From the report: I did splurge once on a book by Guinea's revolutionary leader Ahmed Sekou Toure. It set me back $60 -- the pan-Africanist in me got the better of me that day. Waitresses in downtown Kampala barely earn $60 in a month.One of the encouraging things mentioned in the report is a growing desire among people to read books and wanting to share it with their friends and families despite the struggle. Someone named Rosey Sembatya has started the Malaika Children's Mobile Library. "My sister has four children now and I've been finding it very difficult to buy them books because they're quite expensive," she told BBC. The library is in the spare room of a two-bedroom house she rents. For a $30 annual fee, each child can borrow three books a week. It's an incredible read, and we urge you to read it in its entirety.
Hackaday.io has a project to develop an automatic book scanner for Ethiopia. Uganda could use this to make books easily available.
https://hackaday.io/project/10...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Books are just a symptom of the underlying problems in Uganda. Considering the country's ranking on the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index (near the bottom on several important factors), an average person getting books at a reasonable price is just one of many issues plaguing this country: http://www.doingbusiness.org/r... I don't think Amazon on-demand access is at the top of their long-term solutions list...
That would work if Uganda's postal service was reliable. Unfortunately it is not. When I was there in 2014 I tried to find a post office to be able to send some cards home. Nobody even knew where it was, the basic reply was “Why would you use the postal service when you can use the Internet?”.
Tell them to go to Project Gutenberg!
Then, either read on-screen, or print 4-up, double-sided, to take home.