Richard Koman, who's travelling with Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile, has written up a great travelogue detailing his journey for Salon. Brewster's Bookmobile is a van with a sat dish, a duplexing printer, and access to thousands of public-domain children's books. As a dramatic demonstration of the value of the public domain — which Larry Lessig is arguing today before the Supreme Court — Brewster is driving the Bookmobile across the country, stopping in working-class neighborhoods and printing books on demand for school libraries.
In a print-on-demand world, where the cost of creating a book runs about $1 and the capital costs run under $10K, libraries don't lend books, they give them away. Schools aren't dependent on the textbook readers the state board of education buys at a cost of millions of dollars — every district, every school, every teacher can create their own reader at minimal cost.
"Wouldn't that be amazing?" says Seth Marshall, community education manager for the Newman School. "This presentation needs to be made to administrators. Our library is limited in terms of the number of books we can offer students."
"This is the coolest thing ever," says Paul Black, a sixth-grade teacher at Newman. "Where I taught in Chicago, the school library has hardly any space, hardly any shelves, and what shelves they do have, have hardly any books. You walk in the library and there's no there there. Having something like this could completely change kids' lives. My last job was in an adolescent lockdown facility. The resources are just pitiful. This would be such a great thing for them."
