Bureaucrats [LWN.net]

Bureaucrats

Posted Apr 23, 2008 0:14 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953)
In reply to: Bureaucrats by dmarti
Parent article: Walter Bender's "goodbye OLPC" note

The value of the OLPC wasn't as technology, but in that it was a way to deliver EXPENSIVE
textbooks to children. Textbooks in poor countries are purchased very infrequently because the
cost of dead trees delivered to every remote village with any kind of frequency to keep the
books updated is a huge burden for the education in these countries. IIRC countries like
Mongolia and Peru spend over 3/4's of their education budget on textbooks. The value of the XO
was that with a single network connection in each village the textbooks could be written and
delivered electronically. The screen on the XO allowed the computer to switch to black-white
mode and consume almost no power while in ebook mode.

Now expand that out, a single XO could be given to a child and remain with that child from
grade school till the end of education, during all that time the cost of books no longer
impacts the countries education budget, not only that but with the mesh networking and the
shared network connections the machines could provide more information than the children have
ever had access to, opening their horizons and educating them to a far greater level than in
the past.

It wasn't about a laptop, it was about technology that in the long run would save these
countries millions of dollars in textbook costs while delivering the highest quality education
for the money spent. We take for granted in the west that a textbook is relatively inexpensive
by western standards. Those same costs in the developing world are not, a single textbook can
cost more than the teachers yearly wage in some countries. Creating, printing and delivering a
100lb's of processed paper to the remote areas of the world is not cheap.

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Bureaucrats

Posted Apr 23, 2008 3:05 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

IIRC countries like Mongolia and Peru spend over 3/4's of their education budget on textbooks.

I call this number. The claim is 75% of the nation's elementary education budget being spent on textbooks.

I don't speak Spanish so I couldn't check Peru. I've had a look at the English-language budgets for India and Papua New Guinea and I don't see that they spend anywhere near that proportion on textbooks. As you'd expect the majority of those two budgets is consumed by people and buildings.

The figure for Mongolia is interesting. Japan, World Bank, ADB and national aid agencies have all poured funds into Mongolian education. A large part of those funds to go textbook development and production (but still not 75%, as far as I can tell from a quick look at UNICEF figures). But this is a product of Mongolia's history. Tibetan monks didn't use textbooks, Soviet-era textbooks are old and are wildly inaccurate in some fields, and there is no other country which is going to create Mongolian-language textbooks. The figures on expenditure on textbook authoring and publication in Mongolia are an outlier --- the circumstances leading to that expenditure are unlikely to appear elsewhere.

Bureaucrats

Posted Apr 23, 2008 5:37 UTC (Wed) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link]

Textbooks aren't expensive because of printing costs. They're expensive because the business
is a racket.

I have a copy of the Unicode standard sitting on my desk right now, 1,500 pages, hard cover,
well-bound. It cost $60 with free shipping. I have the Chicago Encyclopedia in my bookshelf.
Over 1,000 pages, very well printed with a *lot* of plates. I can't remember how much it cost
but it wasn't much over $50. I also have a very slim book from school (about 250 pages,
printed practically on magazine stock) about computational theory, $120.

I compare technical books, printed using expensive methods, being offered on the open market
with those being offered for consumption in classrooms and every time there's a *good* 50%
markup on the latter. Why is the dragon book so fucking expensive? Because it's a hardcover?
Because it's *so* expensive to print 800 pages?

Hardly. It's because it's intended as a textbook, where the people who are buying it are doing
so because they're forced to rather than because it's a good value. For the record I got my
copy of the Dragon book used, and if I had to pay full price I wouldn't own it, I would have
chosen one of the many more reasonably priced compiler books.

Had the OLPC really taken off and had it really been used as a textbook operating platform, it
wouldn't have saved one *red cent* on the cost of the books. The publishers still would have
demanded their cut. They would have insisted on DRM that would have made the MPAA blush before
they would even *consider* such a platform. And then the selection of which e-book for what
absurd price would have gone through the same corrupt process that occurs now for the dead
tree variety.

In fact after they got greedy with the DRM and started nickel and dimeing (you have to pay
extra for the kids to read them after school hours!) it probably would have ended up costing
quite a bit more, on top of the investment in the computer.