Link: Rocketboom June 13 2007: Camel Book Drive video
A terrific story from Rocketboom about the old fashioned way of spreading Literacy: distributing books by camel in Kenya.
This is how it was for us Euro-descendants too, before the advent of mass reproduction of cheap books, and especially before the Typographic revolution.
Notice how 80% of the people reached by the Camel Book Drive program can not read, so the emphasis is on reaching children who will then grow up reading. After all, in most villages for most of literate history, only a privileged few could read, and as such, usually read aloud to groups.
(There is a great depiction of this in one of the episodes at the beginning of Pasolini's film version of The Decameron, where an old man is reading from a book to a large group gathered around him.)
Of course, digital books won't work - yet - in such a situation. Computers are still physical objects and so are the wires needed for access.
So if Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia wants to get a free encyclopedia into the hands of every person on the planet, it means those camels will get a lightened burden, but what will they carrying into that village? Fossil fuel generators ? PCs ? Fiber ? Uplinks ?
I hope he is talking to Iqbal Qadir, but I hope they are both learning from the Appropriate Technology model. Otherwise, all we are doing it plugging them into the cult of consuming Big Science / Big Technology.
Sometimes, camels are the most appropriate technology.
Books, too.

