$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 2, 2006 18:55 UTC (Thu) by MasterPi (guest, #35689) [Link]

$ man the_world

not really, but my point is that just a compiler and man pages can be educational. _especially_ with the help of a teacher (like through a volunteer service). and there actually is internet in a lot of developing places for use by tourists or visiting volunteers.

as for books... well you could get 12 or so O'reilly pocket references, 5 of those "Foo Complete" books or 2 average books on computers and 1 or maybe 2 textbooks. Hardly enough to stimulate young minds.

=) unless of course you went to Ollie's Bargain outlets in which case you could buy their entire inventory

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 2, 2006 20:22 UTC (Thu) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

I agree with sbergman27, people who support this idea the most tend to regard a computer as a positive end in and of itself, which is perverse and not necessarily rational.

The idea is that simple exposure to technology will somehow raise the consciousness of the dirt-hovel-dwelling third world masses, regardless of the applicability of that technology to their daily lives. After all, a laptop can't help this years harvest if the rains don't come. You can't squeeze a computer and get antibiotics out. A laptop isn't going to protect you from the bullets fired from the guns of your country's corrupt dictatorial regime.

I'm not against this project, of course. I just think it's a bit pie-in-the-sky. Another example of misguided efforts by well-intentioned people.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 2, 2006 20:30 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Part of the concept of this laptop is that it will have various technologies to enable network connectivity (like ad-hoc mesh networking). While a stand-alone computer may not be useful, a network certainly can be.

And, I think to say that it won't be helpful is to underestimate people. See this story for example: http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/Beginnings.html

Obviously, just dumping a truckload of computers on starving people isn't helpful, but in addition to other help (Fair Trade, sustainable agriculture assistance, vaccinations, etc.) this seems like a good thing.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 4, 2006 16:04 UTC (Sat) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link]

sbergman and bk, it's nice to see that lwn has some nice common sense among it's visitors.

I totally agree, this scheme is really strange, definitely hatched out of some ivy league setting where people think that computers are the source of well-being etc.

I have a good friend who's worked in africa for years off and on, kids not having a laptop would not even hit top 10 of things they need to function. Sometimes the west can be phenomenally clueless.

Among things she told me, everything breaks, it doesn't get fixed. Especially computers. Computers are nice tools, especially for computer related topics, email is a mediocre way to communicate, there are far more important, and realistic things, to do.

But I'm sure the blackmarkets of those countries where they spread these things will figure out something to do with them, those windup radios became like that, a status symbol, would get you laid if you could get one.

What is it they say? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I can just see it now, some home grown group realizes that with these cheap machines they can establish a network of terrorist cells that floats under the radar, whatever. Not that I'm paranoid about that type of thing happening, or buy into the hysteria put out along those lines, it's just a likely outcome if they ended up getting used at all, that's what happened when satellite cell phones hit the second and third world.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 2, 2006 19:42 UTC (Thu) by rkpagadala (guest, #6588) [Link]

"So... the children connect to the internet ...and download the free PDF's from the publisher's web site?"

Yes. From Wikibooks actually.

Lots of books, yeah

Posted Feb 3, 2006 17:09 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Who is going to translate those books to all possible languages?

Lots of books, yeah

Posted Feb 4, 2006 1:24 UTC (Sat) by kbob (subscriber, #1770) [Link]

> Who is going to translate those books to all possible languages?

Is this a trick question?

The very same 3rd worlders who're getting laptops are in an ideal situation to translate material on an as-needed basis. 99 out of 100 of them don't read English? Big deal. I don't know USB protocols, but since I use the same Internet as Greg KH, I don't need to.

Besides, it won't be books from publishers. It'll be wikipedia, google, ibiblio, and the like.

kbob

Lots of books, yeah

Posted Feb 4, 2006 5:12 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

So kids in the third world are in an ideal position to translate technical and literary works. Great. Only 1 in 10000 speaks English, they are just learning to read, they have trouble getting a decent meal every day? No problem, since they only have to translate wikipedia entries.

Seriously, this is not a very good idea. You may not know USB protocols, but you have the capability to learn and use them. Kids in third world schools cannot translate anything; some of their teachers might know English, but they would probably prefer to write their own textbooks anyway. It makes sense, too, if you disregard for a minute our tendency to believe that western culture is the only one that counts: teachers in India will prefer to use their own literary works than English ones.

Translations done by the students of today may be the staple textbooks of tomorrow

Posted Feb 5, 2006 17:15 UTC (Sun) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> Kids in third world schools cannot translate anything

You said what??!?!?!?!!

There is no better way to learn a language than to speak it, read it and
write it, and to translate works from it into your own language. And
English is a language much in demand. I can think of no valid reason to
dismiss the idea of students translating international works into their
native languages for the benefit of their peers and their successors.

India's greatest modern literary works are written in English, and have
been for a century. You're certainly correct that developing countries
are better placed to write their own textbooks than Western
philanthropists, but don't underestimate the utility of a universal
language.

English is *the* Indian lingua franca. It is the only language spoken
fluently by many people in every state of India. It may even be spoken
by a majority in some states; I'm not sure. It *is* spoken by a majority
of literate people in (I think) every state but Kerala, which
incidentally is the only Indian state with >90% literacy. If you can
read and write your own language fluently, whichever of the dozens of
Indian languages it is, you can probably also read and write English and,
if you're exceptionally diligent, also one or two of the other Indian
languages.

That's the situation *today*. The result of putting networked computers
into the hands of millions of today's 'kids' as they become literate in
their several languages will be millions of connected, computer-literate
*adults* in a few years' time. Then tell us none of them can translate.

Not a good plan

Posted Feb 5, 2006 18:48 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

You said what??!?!?!?!!

I'm sorry to break the news: people out there have other priorities before learning English. I know several English teachers in Spain, within the EU, firmly planted in the west and surrounded by US brands and messages; English is being rammed down kids' throats since primary school, and yet most of them manage to avoid learning the bare essentials. Don't ask me why; theoretically it's in high demand, and yet most people don't speak the language. Certainly English is not required most of the time to get a good job, so maybe they are not so stupid after all. Still, I know kids in Spanish schools are not able to translate anything; maybe it's better in the third world, but allow me to doubt it.

IMHO teaching English to poor kids as a strategy to have more teaching materials is a bad idea. Your priorities shift when you are hungry; suddenly learning the universal language is not one of them. If it is going to be a prerequisite, as Latin was necessary to get any education at all in other times, then the $100 laptop is just a vehicle of cultural colonialism and as such it will be rejected in most third world countries, like in Africa or South America. Based on what you say India was a poor example.

Straw man not a good plan

Posted Feb 5, 2006 21:48 UTC (Sun) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

So you're saying that requiring fluency in English as a prerequisite for
using a computer network is counterproductive. I'm just not sure anyone
said that was the plan.

> ... most of them manage to avoid learning the bare essentials.
> ... most people don't speak the language.

As was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, no majority is necessary. A
few committed, capable individuals are sufficient.

> I know kids in Spanish schools are not able to translate anything;

I'm sure there are *some* kids in Spanish schools who *do* translate.
But as you say the demand for English in Spain is not as high as first
appearances might suggest. There is already a vast literature in the
Spanish language, partly because it's a former imperial language, still
spoken on an imperial scale. I'm quite sure it's a good No. 2 in its
global usefulness as a lingua franca.

(Several variants of Chinese have more native speakers than English or
Spanish, and written Chinese has more readers than either, but its
importance for international dissemination of information has declined
over the last three centuries. There's no saying when that might
change :-)

I don't think anyone suggested that English would be a prerequisite for
using this $100 laptop or that everyone should have English forced down
their throats. Rather, the suggestion is that, if there is demand for
information which is available 'out there' in some form, *even if* that
information is in English today, then translation is a possibility and
the computer network will facilitate it.

I don't even think anyone was saying it would in the first instance be
*children* doing the translating, though I don't see any reason why
students of a language shouldn't be translating useful, previously
untranslated work rather than rehashing the classics. Only the smallest
and poorest communities' educators would be completely unable to engage
decent writers or translators for educational purposes.

As for cultural colonialism and hunger -- yes, if your stomach is empty
and you have no roof then you are not in the prime target market for
computing hardware. But 'poor countries' are not uniformly hungry and
homeless; while there are always some very poor people and often
somewhere is in drought, the world has a food surplus to date and in any
one place famine is the exception rather than the rule. (The 40-year
exception which proves the rule is the Sahel, a vast region of marginal
rainfall which has lost its monsoon due to climate change).

Bring the price of a portable general-purpose networked computer down,
make it usable where electricity is unreliable, and its demand relative
to books and DVDs will rise.

Straw man not a good plan

Posted Feb 6, 2006 7:19 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Thanks for your response, it makes interesting reading.

My "straw man" was in fact related to another fallacy, begging the question. The $100 laptop is supposed to improve education, yet there are no teaching materials readily available for the project. Several people suggested that some Web 2.0 artifacts (Wikipedia, wikibooks, Google) could be translated and used as reading, but this requires knowledge of English; and then it was suggested that

The very same 3rd worlders who're getting laptops are in an ideal situation to translate material on an as-needed basis.

But then the $100 laptops are supposed to be used in children education, and it is hard to get an education if your only materials are in English (or, at most, a few occidental languages). In my mind this would be similar to giving Brazilian Yanomami a bunch of scooters to move in the jungle, and hoping that "roads and gas stations will be created by the local populace on an as-needed basis".

I think that third world governments could use their scarce money more wisely creating traditional teaching materials; $100 per kid would help create a lot of textbooks. If it does not work right now, it is a good sign that the money is not available or that it is lost in the process.

the world has a food surplus to date and in any one place famine is the exception rather than the rule.

Right, hunger as a consequence of famine is probably anecdotal (even if still very serious). However hunger caused by poverty is the rule. You can see people starving right near the crops grown for export; or hungry children sleeping in the streets of otherwise prosperous towns. And poverty is more difficult to fight than famine.

Investment is the antidote to poverty

Posted Feb 6, 2006 18:19 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

(If you would care to continue this discussion elsewhere, my address is
jonathan, at xoddam, dot net.)

> there are no teaching materials readily available for the project.
> Several people suggested that some Web 2.0 artifacts (Wikipedia,
> wikibooks, Google) could be translated and used as reading, but
> this requires knowledge of English...

These assertions might carry some force if there was any truth to them.

For many poorer nations a major source of income and hard-currency
investment is remittances from émigrées. A large measure of
international aid consists of scholarships for developing countries'
nationals to study in the universities of the wealthy nations. The money
might stay in the West, but some benefits accrue to the recipient
country. There are many educated, even wealthy, people who speak the
languages of the poor, at home and abroad.

Online material already exists in the principal languages of literacy of
most developing countries. Inasmuch as any of these resources are
translated from English, the translation is already well underway (and
I'd be surprised if a thorough search found no Spanish schoolchildren
amongst the translators). But that's hardly the point; these 'Web 2.0
artifacts', despite being a gift of Westerners to the world, do not and
never have suffered from monolinguism.

http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portada
http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trang_Chính
http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halaman_Utama
http://tl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unang_Pahina
http://ms.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laman_Utama
http://th.wikipedia.org/wiki/

I can't be bothered searching out other resources in languages I can't
read (I am limited to a single fluent language and one other I can get by
in). Rest assured they exist, though I doubt any others would be as
complete as wikipedia unless created by serious forward-looking
investment (which would be as well-placed contributing to these existing
resources as establishing independent portals or preparing textbook
materials for narrower distribution). This initial investment does not
immediately and directly benefit the illiterate and the starving, but the
infrastructure it lays down will be available to them as soon as they are
ready to take advantage.

> In my mind this would be similar to giving Brazilian Yanomami
> a bunch of scooters to move in the jungle, and hoping that
> "roads and gas stations will be created by the local populace
> on an as-needed basis".

That is exactly what it *isn't*. These machines don't need a wire to be
(minimally) useful. They're running free software and aren't about
locking in a market (as petrol-burning scooters or Microsoft laptops
would be). Add a *single* connection to the wider world and voilà, an
oyster ready for the shucking.

It's not the Yanomami who will be the first customers, though there's no
reason that they shouldn't find the machines useful to some extent. It's
the kids in Cidade de Deus, and some of them *will* benefit, because they
will become better informed. I don't see this as a mere hope -- it's all
but inevitable.

> Right, hunger as a consequence of famine is probably anecdotal
> (even if still very serious).

'Anecdotal'? Hardly, but neither is it endemic, except in the Sahel
which is becoming depopulated (violently) as a result. (If we don't get
serious about carbon dioxide emissions other marginal regions will
follow.) Famine is usually not a complete interruption of the food
supply, but an escalation of food prices at the same time as a collapse
in agricultural income (as a result of poor weather, land theft or other
violence). The result is that people who, with a good season on their
own land, would have grown most of their own food and had surplus income,
lose market power to purchase the necessities of life. Alternative
income besides agriculture and money in the bank is as important a buffer
against famine as a well-stocked granary.

> However hunger caused by poverty is the rule.

I'm sure many people are hungry all the time, but I'm equally sure it's
not a majority in most parts of the world. You write as though there is
no point investing in the education of relatively poor people who already
have enough to eat and a roof over their heads and can write their names,
if there are destitute people nearby. But how can such people achieve
anything at all if the most well-off of their neighbours is barely
scraping by? Only investment in their entire community, including its
doctors and technicians and shopkeepers and teachers and lawyers, will
help the poorest in the long term.

> And poverty is more difficult to fight than famine.

Famine isn't a mere anecdote, but it is *solely* a consequence of
poverty. The best way to defeat poverty (ignoring the distortion of
agricultural markets by EU and US subsidies) is investment. Education is
investment. Am I begging a question now?

> I think that third world governments could use their scarce money more
> wisely creating traditional teaching materials;

This is the only place where we are really in disagreement, I think. The
rest of our arguments are waffle at cross-purposes. *YES* 3rd-world
governments can make better use of scarce money than spending it in the
global market (Where are these machines to be made, exactly?). Basic
needs must be tended to first. Only a smaller investment is required, as
in the example of Kerala, to achieve minimal literacy. But as Kerala's
disinvestment under 'liberal' governments in the early 1990s and again in
2001-2004 also illustrates, a failure to invest further negates the
achievement of the basics.

("The UDF government did not take any initiative to bring the 1.8 million
neo-literates to a stage where they could do more than write their name
and read the destination boards on buses." I was very disheartened to
read this story after quoting '>90%' literacy above:
http://www.indiatogether.org/education/articles/brokenlet... )

You are correct that secondhand textbooks, pencils and slates are cheaper
than a notebook computer. You would be *absolutely* correct that it is
more valuable to spend money on human teachers than to put a computer in
front of an illiterate child. But is it really more effective to 'push'
teaching materials in print than to provide students with the ability to
'pull' them?

Don't dismiss this project on the grounds that it is not the best tool to
provide the bare basics, or that it competes with food and housing for
funds in the poorest places of the world. That isn't what it's about.
The internet already competes favourably with technical books, for it can
always be opened to the right page and it is always up to date. That
it's cheaper is, to date, almost irrelevant. This project is an attempt
to cut costs to one *tenth* of equivalent technology commercially
available today. As other teaching materials become available online and
the costs of the network are driven down, it will begin to compete with
them as well.

You seem to think that anyone who is in favour of this project thinks it
is a silver bullet. It isn't. What it *is*, is an enabling technology.

Yes, that's the plan

Posted Feb 2, 2006 19:50 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

I read something last year about this. Part of the plan is to save on the cost of textbooks. Remember, this is for the third world, not Ivy League schools. Think dirt poor kids who need a dirt poor solution. Some of these kids are learning from books decades old because it's all they can get cheap. They can't afford new books, and even if they could, they would fall apart too quickly.

Who says they have to be downloaded from the net, and who says a traditional publisher has to create them? It's the very cost of printing which makes this cheaper. All that paper and the bookbinding factories, think of how many books that is for millions of kids in countries which have massive poverty. Much cheaper to buy a million of these and preload them with books.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 2, 2006 19:55 UTC (Thu) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

Perhaps in the near future, publishers of textbooks might offer schools a site license for PDF versions of their books, which would be then given to their students to use for the course of the class. Now, without some nasty draconian DRM, I don't know how there would be *actual* protection preventing these documents from being copied to others, or even from being kept by the students after the class is long over, but that could be mitigated by the legal requirements that the schools must abide by as part of the contract with the publishers, as well as audits performed by the schools and their districts, which must be public (at least in the US). Most schools would accept the site agreements and then pay the new fees when new editions are released.

To me, it just seems a matter of the publishers adjusting their pricing models and contracts, and the schools would benefit in several ways (not having to buy new books just because they become worn, lost, or damaged, book storage, running out of books, etc.). I haven't heard of any initiatives like this yet, but I don't think it would be hard to envision this as the future arrangement.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 2, 2006 20:30 UTC (Thu) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link]

Except that, as I understand it, the laptops will be the property of the kids not the school. I think that was planned to be part of the purchase agreement.

http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 2, 2006 23:50 UTC (Thu) by sanjoy (subscriber, #5026) [Link]

The free high school science texts project in Cape Town is writing physics, chemistry, biology, and math textbooks under the GNU Free Documentation License (a terrible license by free software standards, but free in many ways and much better than most book licenses).

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 3, 2006 4:37 UTC (Fri) by soundray (subscriber, #688) [Link]

Remember, these laptops come with very limited mass storage -- no hard disk drives. There is no need for publishers to fear massive proliferation of restrictively licensed works via these laptops alone. Given the incredibly high profile of this project, I could easily see the publicity benefit alone outweighing the risk for publishers.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 2, 2006 20:19 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

The majority of text books (especially at primary or secondary levels) are locally produced to match the local curiculum.

If the best way to get the texts to students is electronically, I'm sure that it will be done that way (probably with the help of the local ministry of education).

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 3, 2006 2:49 UTC (Fri) by OldRabbit (guest, #30886) [Link]

>Now maybe the target audience doesn't have easy access to text books. But if they have laptops they can... what? Are publishers going to just start giving away PDF's?

At the moment, text books are generally written as a labour of love by academics, who receive little more than their expenses in return. Nearly all of the cover price goes to the publisher.

What is needed is an initiative to encourage text book authors to instead publish electronically, in an open format such as OpenDocument, and place the work online under a suitable free licence.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 3, 2006 2:59 UTC (Fri) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link]

The thing is that books are scarce in developing countries, mostly you can find copies, but even those aren't that easy to find. This would enable people to access alot more books than they can right now.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 3, 2006 3:58 UTC (Fri) by irios (guest, #19838) [Link]

> I still run down to Barnes & Noble

I find astonishing the difficulty some have in finishing a sentence without a trademark in it. They don't go to a bookstore, they go to Barnes & Noble; they don't go have a coffee, they go to Starbucks; they never wear jeans, it's Levi's ...

Well, many people in the world cannot go to B&N (TM) and part with $50 to get something to help them through a boring weekend, then browse it for an hour over a $5 Frappuccino (R)

> what? Are publishers going to just start giving away PDF's?

Most likely not "Interview with the Vampire", "Splinter Cell", "The DaVinci Code", "The Dragonlance Chronicles" or other such wonders of modern literature, but:

* There already are THOUSANDS of titles with expired copyrights and offering FAR better literature (if one were to consider the previously mentioned titles to be literature)

* There WILL be school textbooks they will not have to buy or borrow, either written for free or commisioned by the government.

So these children may actually miss the B&N/Starbucks experience, but they could indeed enjoy the wider bookstore + coffee experience.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 3, 2006 6:37 UTC (Fri) by carcassonne (guest, #31569) [Link]

So these children may actually miss the BN/Starbucks experience, but they could indeed enjoy the wider bookstore + coffee experience

There's nothing like picking it fresh and roasting your own. That is, if their governements let them do that.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 4, 2006 1:05 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

> I find astonishing the difficulty some have in finishing a sentence without a trademark in it.

It seems I hit a nerve with someone who has a personal nit with Barnes & Noble®.

(I find astonishing the difficulty some have in staying on topic and not turning every thread into a discussion of an item that happens to be on their own personal adgenda. But that's irrelevant here, isn't it? ;-)

At any rate, I don't see the relevance of a tirade against B&N with respect to my question as to whether the OLTPC initiative has a viable plan. The fact that they are using Linux(tm) allows the project to bypass many people's sanity filters. In a previous post, 'bk' chose the phrase 'pie in the sky' to describe the plan, and in my opinion that description is quite apt.

I remain skeptical.

I can't comment on B&N's coffee or coffee pricing as I've never been to the cafe' section.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 9, 2006 7:07 UTC (Thu) by irios (guest, #19838) [Link]

I have nothing against B&N; as a matter of fact, as a spaniard living in Spain I have never been to it but once in San Francisco, and my feelings towards it are nothing but great admiration and envy.

Pls, read my whole response before biting back (then bite back if you so wish). It is NOT a tirade against B&N and I indeed mean it to be relevant respect to your question and in respect to the point of view from which it seems to have originated.

Yeah, right: textbooks for third-world kids

Posted Feb 3, 2006 4:07 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

*You* may be able to run to B&N or whatever, but third-workd kids typically have problems getting a mid-day *meal* at school (or, quite commonly, at all). Books are a luxury item there.

Then there's the problem that book learning is just that -- you need some way to work with the material, i.e. solve problems, write essays... While you can write on dirt, with a stick, pen+paper is indispensable for anything longer, non-ephemeral (did you ever do multi-week projects at school?), or just if you want the teacher to examine the kids' homework. Ideally, you'd also need a library so that the pupils can see beyond the textbook's narrow focus on teaching. Etc.

The laptop replaces the logistics of physically distributing 100 different books with the logistics of distributing two -- a laptop, and a couple of USB sticks (one per school?) with all the course matter.

Consider: a typical textbook with a couple of b/w illustration eats only a MByte if you use a decent file format. One USB stick vs. 1000 books, for a large school's entire curriculum? If a government commits to high-standard education for their people, the $100 laptop may well end up being *cheaper* than book learning, even if you disregard all the other effects the project is going to have.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 3, 2006 6:17 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

But when I really want to sit down and learn something, I still run down to Barnes & Noble and get a book.

What do you really want to learn? Java in 7 Days? Investing for Dummies?? Barnes & Noble is about entertainment, not education. If you want to really advance your knowledge in a field, you either need to go to a campus bookstore and drop a few Franklins on 30 lbs of textbooks or go online.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 3, 2006 7:00 UTC (Fri) by fjf33 (subscriber, #5768) [Link]

Well I came from a developing country (which makes it possible for people to have $500 computers) and still we didn't have books, as you think of them. Why? Because they were too expensive for what you get from them. Class notes would be passed from student to student and professors actually taught without reading from a book. There would be notes mimeographed (yes I know it is an ancient technology but still cheaper than photocopies) that was in highschool. In college it gets a bit more complex but still, the professors developed the books (or class notes as they were called) and the student organization would print them in small runs of cheap paper on the sides of runs that were done for higher paying customers at a very low price so us students could afford it. Overall, probably $100 worth in books for an engineering degree. If one needed more detailed highly advanced information from a Developed World book, one could go to the library. Then the problem is that all of those are in English but people manages, although probably in highschool all those English books would not have been too useful.

$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 3, 2006 10:03 UTC (Fri) by kh (subscriber, #19413) [Link]

I just purchased a (new) Physics textbook for my wife at lulu.com (She is going back to school at University of Texas, Austin). $9.32

Here is the book. In contrast, I have a Physics textbook that cost me over $150 last semester that I can't sell back, and is riddled with errors and ommisions - it just came out last semester - can you guess why no one wants it? Thank goodness I kept my old physics book to help her get through the class - and I am also thankful that I was allowed to lend it to her and it was still in a readable format since it was over 10 years old. (Yes, it was printed - but what will happen with 10 year old electronic books with drm?)

The book is also available for download in non-DRM'd format. It's my understanding that all of the textbooks at MIT are available in a similiar fashion. So I do think their are sections of the publishing industry that are starting to treat their customers fairly.

I really recommend lulu.com - they sell music also. (Yes, it is Bob Young's company.)