David Risher

Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.

 Years ago, David Risher, a former Amazon executive, came up with the unlikely plan of distributing Kindles to children in the developing world to help increase literacy.

Why take a fragile piece of technology that requires charging and Internet connections to places where infrastructure can be sparse, especially when there’s an inexpensive, low-tech alternative in print books?

But Mr. Risher has gradually found acceptance for the nonprofit he founded to take e-books to Africa, Worldreader.

Within a few years, Amazon.com’s creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing power.

Every day, a start-up called the Climate Corporation performs over 10,000 simulations of the next two years’ weather for more than one million locations in the United States. It then combines that with data on root structure and soil porosity to write crop insurance for thousands of farmers.

Non-profit Worldreader kicked off a campaign Thursday aiming to put 1 million e-books in the hands of children across the planet, with a little help from players on one of the world's most popular sports teams. This may sound like a crazy goal, considering the widespread absence of books from African classrooms, but the organization is aleady well on its way. So far, Worldreader has donated 100,000 books to 1,000 students in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. The non-profit now wants to expand its reach throughout sub-Saharan Africa and has enlisted some capable

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