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Poster: richardkoman Date: Dec 11, 2003 5:06am
Forum: bookmobile Subject: the economist:

In their Dec. 4 issue, The Economist ran a piece on Internet Bookmobiles, internet trucks and email buses. Here's the bit about Bookmobile (including a short reference to Anywhere Books). If you want to read the whole thing, you have to buy a view from economist.com.

IT IS supposed to be an “information superhighway”, but as with real highways, there are still places where the internet, and its many benefits, have not reached. To extend its range, a number of projects are now exploiting the existing and far more extensive road network—in effect, putting the internet on wheels.

The Internet Bookmobile, as its name suggests, drives around printing books on demand, downloaded from the internet. The brainchild of Brewster Kahle, a software entrepreneur who did fairly well out of the internet bubble, the Bookmobile is a minivan outfitted with a satellite-based internet connection, a PC and a high-end printer made by Hewlett-Packard. One such Bookmobile has driven the length and breadth of America, printing out some 10,000 books, mostly copies of “Alice in Wonderland” and other popular books now in the public domain and available in electronic form online.

The Internet Bookmobile can also function like an on-demand library in other ways, providing music downloads, access to periodicals and other types of content, as well as standard e-mail and web access. This concept has been slow to catch on in internet-saturated America, though Mr Kahle remains hopeful. But it has drawn interest in other parts of the world. In India, the government plans to create 30 Bookmobiles of its own, two of which are already on the road. Egypt's Library of Alexandria has outfitted one. And in October, Mr Kahle's Anywhere Books project launched an Internet Bookmobile in Uganda, with the help of funding from the World Bank.

Mr Kahle jokes that his Bookmobiles are “just a mobile last-mile solution”, referring to the notoriously difficult process of bringing high-speed internet access directly into homes in the rich world. But in many cases the Bookmobiles are operating in areas that have limited access to the internet, or none at all.