It happens to be in the form of a web site, but you have been turning the pages just as though it were a paper-based book or a magazine (this is the way it has been deliberately constructed).     There will soon be hundreds of thousands of such ‘books’ : electronic versions of everything now printed on paper.    Which, apart from being environmentally sound, will make a large library as easy to carry with you as your mobile.

It will also, far more importantly, give the world’s poor access to education.   

Of course, if we didn’t insist upon a machine which consumes twenty watts but rather — let’s say — a hundred  times less . . .

. . . well . . . then . . .

The “One Laptop Per Child” initiative ─ OLPC ─ has already made a start on launching this, the most important philanthropic enterprise in a hundred years and more.

There’s a snag, though, and it’s a huge one.    Reading on a laptop PC consumes a lot of electrical energy — 25-40 watts, in fact.  Which means batteries, and power sockets, and other things which we take for granted, but are simply not available to the millions of the Third World  who badly need education, and therefore books.

Lightbook?

What’s so special?

What you’re doing now,  if you care to think of it that way,  is reading a book.