This Simple cheap cell phones App Could Put E-Books On Millions Of Phones In The Third World

It cheap cell phones sounds counterintuitive, but in certain developing nations it¡¯s easier to get hold of a cell phone than a good book.More than one in three adults cannot read in sub-Saharan Africa, yet almost every home there has access to at least one mobile phone, according to USAID. Developing nations are among the fastest growing mobile markets in the world, but literacy is still a big problem.

David Risher, a former executive at cheap cell phones Amazon and c0-founder of non-profit organization Worldreader Mobile, thinks there¡¯s an obvious answer here: offer free books through all those cell phones.

On Wednesday Worldreader Mobile comes out of ¡°beta¡± mode. About a year ago it partnered with biNu, a mobile app platform for feature phones in developing countries, so that cheap cell phones its Worldreader Mobile app would appear on the home screen.

Richer says that in the last year, 10% of biNu¡¯s 5 million-user base have accessed the Worldreader Mobile app. That¡¯s about 500,000 people. Risher cheap cell phones hopes to get that number to 1 million by the end of 2014.Worldreader¡¯s biggest readers are in India (nearly 107,000 users), with 60,800 in Nigeria and 33,100 in Ethiopia.

Most of them are using low-end, pre-pay Nokia phones with physical buttons, that cost about $50. They will typically spend about $2-3 a month on their data plans. Out of the 6.4 billion active mobile phones in the world today, 5.4 billion are fdsfRd43 so-called features phones like these, according to Worldreader statistics sourced from Analysys Mason.

The books they¡¯re reading are short, typically taking up 150 screenshots. Though men are early adopters, women are the ¡°power readers,¡± Worldreader says, reading an average 17 books a month.

The most popular cheap cell phones books are romance novels. Among the top five most popular books in the last month, the No. 1 was a children¡¯s book about school, the second an basic algebra book, and No.¡¯s 3 and 4 were entitled My Guy and Can Love Happen Twice?

Risher says it¡¯s not unnatural in sub-Saharan African culture to see people hunched over reading their cell phones for long periods at a time. So pervasive have mobile device become that some elementary schools in Ghana have even started banning them, he notes.

Most of the books on Worldreader Mobile are in English, with a few in local languages like Swahili, French and Spanish, though the number of cheap cell phones overall is increasing. Currently there are 20,000 titles available, donated by local and English-language publishers.