Saturday, May 11, 2013

Africa as in tiny

We've all seen people read novels on a tiny cellphone screen. Maybe we should realize that they obviously really wanted to read that title. That's called motivation and we often underestimate the value of motivation, or just plain need. So here comes Africa where cellphones are "a huge component of how consumption is happening," says Angela Wachuka, executive director of Kenya’s Kwani Trust, which publishes the popular Kwani? literary journal. Ms. Wachuka notes, in a Christian Science Monitor story, that she's seen Kenyans devour hundreds of pages of text on their tiny screens, plowing through tell-all memoirs and other accounts of the country's recent political turmoil. In the U.S. we are obsessed with the newest trend in e-reader devices (of which the newest is Microsoft buying Nook) as if the perfect device will render the perfect reading experience, as opposed to the perfect content rendering the perfect reading experience, the device be damned. Even here in the U.S. though things are changing: Microsoft, rumor has it, will use Nook to develop apps for somebody else's device. Mmmm.

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