With Digital Technology, Worldreader Brings Knowledge to Africa’s Neediest Children
The article includes an interview with David Risher, founder and CEO of Worldreader.
First, some background.
From ArabicKnowledge@Wharton:
Worldreader.org, a nonprofit based in Barcelona, Spain and Seattle, Washington, seeks to put digital reading into the hands of needy children in the developing world, by giving them access to international and local digital books on e-readers, like the Kindle, or mobile phones.
David Risher, founder and CEO of Worldreader, is leading the effort to raise money to buy e-readers and e-books, drawing upon his experience in the technology industry. As a former general manager at Microsoft and former senior vice-president for retailing and marketing for Amazon.com, Risher wanted to share his love of reading with children lacking access to books. Holding a comparative literature degree from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, Risher is also a Draper Richards Kaplan Social Entrepreneur and Microsoft Alumni Foundation Integral Fellow.
Worldreader has partnered with schools in Ghana, Uganda and Kenya to distribute Kindles, e-books and apps for mobile phones so people can read international books, as well as African books that have been digitized. People have embraced the opportunity, he tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton, as Worldreader’s app traffic is at half a million readers per month reading 24 pages and is growing on average at 20% per month.
Read the Interview with David Risher
Filed under: Interviews, News, Profiles
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.