Indian Bookmobiles

bikaner_2-copia
Originally uploaded by error 402.

How do you get a copy of your favorite classic Gandhi treatise when you live in rural India, miles from the nearest Borders? Try a Digital Bookmobile or kitaabwala:

Helped by the crowd, 70-year-old Roopwati hobbles toward the van and demands Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's My Experiments with Truth. The van doesn't keep a copy but there's an easy way to remedy that. A command is given on a laptop, the signals are relayed and received by a dish antenna with KU band.

Then, it's printed and bound all in a few minutes. For a little less than Rs 20 [$0.50], the village woman gets the book she wanted saving an arduous journey possibly to a library or bookshop in nearby Delhi. Welcome to the world of Digital Bookmobiles.

That's right, for the cost of a pack of gum, you can get access to any book in the public domain that they've scanned into their system. This new tech is unlocking whole new worlds for India's poor:

"Books are the key to knowledge but they are no use if we hold on to it. Therefore, the moral of the story is digitise and replicate,'' says Dr Om Vikas who heads the Digital Library of India Initiative.

I love his napsterized reasoning: "digitise and replicate." Remember information wants to be free, if we let it.