Educational research shows gadgets alone may yield ‘computer literacy,’ but without content all you get is facility with the device. Especially in education: content-local content-is vital. “And we know that although the gadget’s needed, content is that without which there’s nothing of meaning. Ebooks are a well-evolved form of content that readers, authors and publishers know how to handle,” Clurman said. It’s stories that give our lives meaning, sometimes understanding. “Smartphones and even tablets are becoming common in Africa, especially in cities. Will Clurman, the chief executive officer of eKitabu, a digital book publishers could not agree more (Kitabu is the Swahili word for “Book”).ĮKitabu gives readers options to purchase and read local and international books on their phones, tablets and computers. Rather than seeing technology as a disrupter of book publishing, perhaps a new shift in thinking needs to be applied to use technology to help this industry in Africa. In Kenya, more young people are gaining access to feature phones and even smartphones, spending hours on these gadgets. Publishers, therefore, have to think of new ways of getting the written word out. In particular, book publishing in Africa is an expensive exercise: a luxury that many Africans may not be able to afford. The quick adoption of mobile technology in Africa has not only realised new opportunities in telecommunication but in how content is delivered. Think digital or else be swept to oblivion by the undercurrent. It’s free.This is a warning for publishers. Kitabu 1.0.1 requires OS X 10.6 or later. This is a good app to have around if you’re not into collecting e-books on your Mac, but occasionally need to inspect an EPUB document. It has some essential features, and implements those gracefully. It has room to grow if the developer sees fit. I found it to be stable, except for the bug noted above, and fast. The app is modest in its ambitions yet does the job nicely. (See TMO’s Guide to Writring, Publishing & E-books for more on those apps.) Even if I didn’t take the meaning of “drag and drop” correctly, that bug needs fixing.Īll things considered, for a free app that doesn’t aspire to go toe to toe with the major apps like Bookle, BookReader, Calibre, and Murasaki, it’s a convenient, small (0.8 MB), and stable during reading of docs that gets the job done nicely. Not knowing for sure what that meant, I dragged an EPUB document into the library (using Lion 10.7.3) and the app promptly crashed.
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