“There are more mobile phones than toothbrushes on this planet,” David Risher, cofounder and CEO of Worldreader (and a former Amazon executive) said in a statement. “Together with our growing e-reader program, Worldreader Mobile connects us to millions of the world’s poorest people, providing the books they need to improve their lives.”

The types of books available free through Worldreader Mobile

The Worldreader Mobile app makes 1,200 ebooks available for free (see a breakdown of genres on the left) through the biNu app. The app compresses mobile data so that it can be downloaded quickly even on 2G networks, which are the norm in the developing world.

Participating publishers include Pearson, Harlequin, the World Health Organization and stories from Africa’s Caine Prize winners, among others. The ebooks available through the mobile app aren’t all the same as the ones available through Worldreader’s Kindle distribution program, but this year the company is working to get participating publishers to offer their books on both platforms.

Most of the Worldreader Mobile app’s users live in India, Nigeria or Ethiopia. Users are reading 19.5 million pages on Worldreader’s app per month, the company says, which translates to 17,000 200-page books read per month. Eighty-two percent of the readers are male, and 90 percent are between the ages of 16 and 35.

The platform’s most active readers, however, are women. Seventy percent of the platform’s “power users” are female, and they read an average of 17 books per month. I asked Susan Moody Prieto, Worldreader’s director of marketing, to explain the discrepancy: Is it an issue of access, with men more likely to own cell phones? She said the company isn’t sure but guesses that men tend to be early adopters of the platform.

Users are also sharing the books with others. Twenty-nine percent of Worldreader Mobile users read stories to young children from their mobile phones, and 88 percent said they’d like “materials to help young children learn to read” on their phones.”

For now, all of the books on Worldreader Mobile are free. But Moody Prieto said that the organization is looking into a paid platform down the road. “I don’t think people in the developing world will pay $9 for an ebook,” she said, “but they’ll pay something. This is a blooming economy.”

At the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference last week in New York, Paperight’s Arthur Attwell and Worldreader’s Michael Smith outlined several companies’ efforts to bring new ways of reading to developing countries. Here’s a brief introduction to each of those companies.

Paperight

Arthur Attwell worked in educational and scholarly publishing in South Africa for several years while cofounding and running a digital publishing company called Electric Book Works. But, he said, “The more I worked in ebooks, I found that I was essentially making ebooks for rich people. I didn’t think that was a very interesting challenge.” South Africa’s digital publishing market, he said, is supported by just one or two million wealthy people; the country’s remaining 48 million residents can’t afford it.

Digital wasn’t the solution for Attwell: The most recent South African census found that 65 percent of the country’s residents have no internet access at all. But, Attwell said, every South African village, town and city has at least one “photocopy shop” with copy machines and those buildings usually have internet access. His company Paperight, launched in May 2012, takes advantage of those shops to distribute books. A store registers on Paperight.com, opens a prepaid account of credits and instantly gets the legal right to download and print books for their customers. Over 200 South African shops, as well as a few in other African countries, are now using Paperight.

Worldreader

Worldreader, an NGO I’ve covered in the past, gives Kindles to students in sub-Saharan Africa and has become increasingly well-known in part because of its partnership with Amazon. (CEO David Risher was previously an Amazon executive.) The company has distributed 428,000 ebooks to 3,000 kids as of January 2013.

Worldreader is now pushing forward with reading on basic mobile phones. An app called biNu lets users download Worldreader books (and other content — including Facebook) over a basic feature phone’s data signal. biNu is now enabled on 5 million subscriber phones, primarily in Nigeria. (The top five book searches, Worldreader’s Smith said, were “sex,” “romance,” “the Bible,” “Harry Potter” and “physics.”) Worldreader is also working with students to self-publish their own writing on Amazon’s KDP platform.

Right now, Worldreader is tied to Kindle. Smith said the company is “definitely looking to get beyond” it, but right now Kindle is the only e-reader that supports 3G. And in many countries where Worldreader operates, internet access isn’t easily available. Smith said Worldreader also needs Amazon’s Whispercast technology to push books onto devices, and other e-reading companies don’t yet have that system in place.

Mxit and Siyavula

Mxit is a social network for mobile phones, with about 50 million users across the African continent. The network relies primarily on instant messaging but also allows access to other kinds of content — including books. One of the first books distributed on Mxit’s platform in 2009 was a novella called “Kontax.” Aimed at teens and available in both English and Xhosa (one of South Africa’s official languages), the book was distributed in parts, allowing readers to discuss it as unfolded. “Kontax” was read 34,000 times, and Yoza, the initiative behind it, has expanded to offer more cell phone novels (which it calls m-novels).

Now, the South African open-source creative commons textbook publisher Siyavula is distributing free math and science textbooks on Mxit. (Attwell’s Shuttleworth Foundation is a backer of Siyavula.) In 2010, following teacher strikes, the South African government arranged to print copies of Siyavula’s textbooks and distribute them to high school students. As a result, over 200,000 South African students have read Siyavula’s content. Now corporations are sponsoring books in new subjects and for younger students.

USAID funded the Worldreader Ghana study and independent firm ILC Africa did the research. iREAD “involved the wireless distribution of over 32,000 local and international digital books using Kindle e-readers to 350 students and teachers at six pilot schools in Ghana’s Eastern Region between November 2010 and September 2011.”

The full results are here (PDF). Some findings:

• Kids learned to use e-readers quickly even though 43 percent of them had never used a computer before. Also, not surprisingly, they were quick to discover “the multimedia aspects of the e-reader, such as music and Internet features.” (Kindle has an experimental web browser and can play MP3s.) Worldreader is “exploring ways to limit functions on the e-reader such as music” so that kids don’t get distracted during class, but points out that e-readers can also be a useful “bridge” device for students who’d never used a computer before.
• Near-zero theft. Only two e-readers (out of 600) were lost in the whole study, partly because “community involvement was encouraged through e-reader pledges, community outreach programs, and support from community leaders.”
• Kids got access to way more books. Before the study, primary-school students (whose average age was 11) had access to an average of 3.6 books at home. Junior-high students (average age 13.5 years) had access to an average of 8.6 books at home and high-school students (average age 16.6 years) access to an average of 11 books (mostly textbooks they had to buy for school.) With the e-reader program, kids had access to an average of 107 books, including books Worldreader “pushed” onto the Kindles as well as free e-books that kids downloaded themselves.
• Primary school students’ test scores improved, but effects on older kids were less clear. The reading scores of primary-school students who received e-readers increased from 12.9 percent to 15.7 percent, depending on whether they got additional reading support. That was an improvement of 4.8 percent to 7.6 percent above the scores of kids in control classrooms without e-readers. But results for older kids were mixed: “Student reading was affected almost exclusively at the primary level, and not at the junior and senior levels. This conclusion supports external data that students are most affected by reading interventions at the primary school stages between the ages of 4 and 10.”
• Students sought out access to international news. “Amazon data revealed that students were downloading The New York Times, USA Today, and El País etc., demonstrating that students want to access a wide range of reading materials that were previously inaccessible.”
• Some teachers worried kids became too dependent on the e-readers.  ”For example, one teacher stated that students thought that everything on the e-reader was the ‘absolute truth.’ He had to correct them by  explaining that the e-books may contain mistakes just as paper books do. Teachers also observed that some students have started to favor classes that use the e-reader and neglect classes that do not.”
• Kids shared their e-readers with their families and friends. Students, even primary schoolers, got to take their e-readers home at night and many reported sharing the devices. Kids in the study had an average of five siblings, so “the e-reader’s reach potentially extended to many people beyond the device’s owner.” Some kids whose parents were illiterate read to their parents from their e-readers.
• Kindles break too easily. Worldreader had not predicted how many Kindles would break: 243 out of 600, or 40.5 percent. Each time an e-reader broke, Worldreader sent it back to Amazon to conduct “a post-mortem analysis.” Turns out “fragile screens are the main weakness” and Amazon is working on Kindles with reinforced screens (at the same cost), which started shipping to Ghana in October 2011. Plus Worldreader is providing more rugged cases for the Kindles and providing more instruction on how to use them (don’t sit on it, for instance).
• The program appears cost-effective. Worldreader estimates that “for the years 2014-2018, using a calculation focused strictly on the provisioning of textbooks, the e-reader system would cost only $8.93-$11.40 more per student over a 4 year period [$0.19 to $0.24 per month] than the traditional paper book system.” That calculation is made with the assumptions that e-reader prices will fall and e-readers will become more rugged (so they break less). And of course, e-readers give students access to many books, not just textbooks.

In many African countries, 80 percent of the population owns a cell phone. Up to now, Worldreader has focused on distributing Kindles to classrooms (the organization’s founder is former Amazon exec , but by making e-books available via cell phones the organization can reach a much wider group of readers.

Worldreader’s app, now in beta, was developed by Sydney-based startup biNu. The Bookseller explains that the app uses “cloud-based data compression technology to enable any Java-enabled ‘feature’ phone (non-smartphone) to download e-books and access news websites and Facebook over an ordinary mobile signal.”

In this video, Worldreader director of digital publishing Elizabeth Wood explains how the app works.

Worldreader partners with international and local African publishers to make e-books available for its e-reader program and for the app. It also offers public-domain books. In some cases, Worldreader digitizes African publishers’ books for the first time. Here’s a list of the books the company offers for free or at a very low cost.

The Worldreader app

The ultimate goal is to have “thousands” of e-books available on the app, Worldreader’s director of digital publishing Elizabeth Wood told The Bookseller: “Yes, this is a leap of faith for publishers, giving away some of their content for free. But once you give these kids in the developing world the tools and hook these kids on books, they will become book buyers.”

A new classroom tablet from Intel?

Separately, Digitimes reports today that Intel will release an educational 10-inch tablet, the “StudyBook,” into emerging markets and regular retail channels this fall. The company has already released a basic laptop, the Classmate PC. The report says the StudyBook would target China and Brazil — countries more prosperous than those in Africa.