'amaBooks are working with Worldreader to help make good creative writing available to young people across Africa and elsewhere.
As a first step, stories from Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices, and selected stories from other 'amaBooks collections, are available to read free of charge on mobile feature phones using the Worldreader App.
With the first-ever book application available for feature phones, Worldreader is turning on its head the notion that reading e-books requires an e-reader, tablet or smart phone.
In order to achieve this ground-breaking feat, Worldreader has partnered with biNu, an App developer based in Sydney. biNu’s patented technology effectively turns a feature phone into a smart phone—enabling millions of people in the world’s poorest places access to Facebook, Twitter, Local News, Google—and, now, the Worldreader Book App, and so to stories from Zimbabwean writers.
To give you an idea of the enormous scope and potential: feature phones are the largest and fastest growing segment of the global mobile market, with over 60% of the global mobile market share of almost 5 billion mobile subscribers. As of April 27 2012, the Worldreader App is on 3.9 million mobile phones, mostly in India and Africa, and Worldreader hope to reach 10 million by the end of 2012.
As well as stories from the collection being available through feature phones, Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices will be available on e-readers as part of Worldreader programmes.
Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices is a book of twenty-eight stories and fourteen poems, written by thirty-three young people from Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo. The pieces cover many issues, including family, gender, relationships, race, alienation, disability, AIDS, border jumping and the struggle to survive in Zimbabwe.
Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices is a book of twenty-eight stories and fourteen poems, written by thirty-three young people from Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo. The pieces cover many issues, including family, gender, relationships, race, alienation, disability, AIDS, border jumping and the struggle to survive in Zimbabwe.
Silent Cry: Echoes of Young Zimbabwe Voices is available on a print-on-demand basis or as an ebook through the African Books Collective http://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/silent-cry
More information about the Worldreader programme can be found at http://www.worldreader.org
Photographs of children in school benefitting from the presence of e-readers are reproduced courtesy of Worldreader
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