Since I had a slightly Luddite anti-digital publishing rant last week, I’ve been thinking about ways I do see a future for e-books and digital publishing, and more particularly uses for it that are different from the standard “replace the physical book” line.

So here’s one of my ideas for advancing digital publishing in New Zealand (and feel free to contact me to purchase the rights/negotiate a settlement if you have the backing and/or funding to put this scheme in place ) :

Every child (and yes I do really think it’s needs to be every child for this to work) in school from year 0 – year 13 in New Zealand is given an e-book reader – but this e-book reader needs to be more and do more than the hardware currently available, this needs to be a combination of a Kindle and an Ipod, and it needs to be able to have digital material “pushed” to it via a wireless network. The idea is that every child will have a huge plethora of material made available to them by their teacher that is directly related to not only what they are learning within the curriculum, but also to their particular learning level. This material encompasses all possible available digital material – textbooks, fiction and non-fiction books, comics, digital material from the net, music, movies, TV and other visual media, art representations, presentations both graphic and video – basically anything and everything.

This material will be constantly available to the child, both in class and at home. Parents will obviously have total access to the material so they can keep up to date with both the content and what has been used by the child. The hardware would also contain a schedule so that the parent could see what homework (for instance) has been scheduled by the teacher, and also what school activities are imminent.

Teachers spend a huge amount of time gathering resources for teaching, and my hope would be that the ability to have a majority of these resources centralised would help to cut that time down, or at least not increase it by adding an extra resource.

The business model would revolve around supplying the hardware for free (as incentive), and fees being paid by schools for supply and any applicable fees for use of content. I envisage details of available content being held on a central database for searching by teachers, and there also being options for teachers to request specific material or requirements and the supplying company doing the research and sourcing of available material. With the amazing efforts of organisations like National Library of New Zealand, Digital NZ and Te Papa in digitising content there is already a large amount of available New Zealand focussed content available (by the way, this model is purely an idea, and perhaps would work just as well or better the other way – paying for hardware and not for content, or just a set yearly fee for content management).

Obviously this is a fairly utopian vision, not to mention I’m lacking on the day to day practicalities and also the intricacies of legal requirements, etc. Plus I can’t think of any currently available hardware that would fit all the requirements of what I see this scheme achieving. But I really wanted to add a positive contribution to the digital books debate, and also see what sort of ideas I personally could come up with beyond the parameters of traditional book publishing and distribution.

Do you have any ideas? Any thoughts on my posts? I’d love to see some further comments and debate!

And, as mentioned, any investors who want to fund the BookieMonster in her future activities?

Feel free to tweet me any comments and follow me on Twitter also!