Michelle Loubon

Charles Dick­ens har­boured Great Ex­pec­ta­tions. Char­lotte Bronte cre­at­ed the hero­ine Jane Eyre. Wuther­ing Heights be­came the set­ting for her sis­ter Emi­ly Bronte's clas­sics. To savour these lit­er­ary ex­pe­ri­ences, the read­er had to pur­chase a copy or bor­row each book from the near­by li­brary. If a bib­lio­phile was on va­ca­tion, he had to lug around his li­brary. With the ad­vent of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy-the rev­o­lu­tion­ary Kobo (ana­gram for books) e-read­er, an in­di­vid­ual can de­light him­self in a wealth of lit­er­ary ex­pe­ri­ences at one's fin­ger­tips. One such per­son who swears by her Kobo e-read­er is re­tired per­ma­nent sec­re­tary at the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry An­gel­la Jack. Jack said: "I dis­cov­ered the Kobo at Nigel Khan. They are pop­u­lar nowa­days. They are pop­u­lar. He broke new ground and he brought down Kobo e-read­er. It's very con­ve­nient. It costs $900. This is a new dawn for read­ers and peo­ple who love to read."

Easy ac­cess to Clas­sics

The Clas­sics, which some­times en­com­pass Clas­si­cal Stud­ies or Clas­si­cal Civil­i­sa­tion, is the branch of the Hu­man­i­ties com­pris­ing the lan­guages, lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy, his­to­ry, art and ar­chae­ol­o­gy. They have been down­loaded on the Kobo e-read­er. Ze­ro­ing on its mer­its, Jack added: "You can read any­where and any­time at your con­ve­nience. One hun­dred books...in­clud­ing ma­jor Clas­sics have been al­ready loaded."

Com­pared to the In­ter­net ser­vices, the Kobo e-read­er is al­so a time-sav­ing in­ven­tion. Jack said: "It would take a long time to down­load the books. You can en­joy Un­cle Tom's Cab­in. It has a record­ing de­vice to tell you the ti­tle of the book you're read­ing. There is no need for book marks to turn pages. Read­ing in bed is no longer a chore. "It's easy to hold it in bed. You can prop on the pil­lows or roll over and read for plea­sure or amuse­ment. You don't have to turn pages. You are so com­fort­able in bed with a book. It en­cour­ages qui­et read­ing and you are read­ing them with new eyes. "At the click of a knob, the new page turns up. There is a fa­cil­i­ty to ad­just the font size. There is a dic­tio­nary right at your fin­ger tips to check the mean­ing of words." Mean­while, as tech­nol­o­gy adapts to the chang­ing times, Jack pre­dict­ed new fea­tures would be added to the de­vice. Jack said: "There is a new ver­sion in the works. It's a new ver­sion. Apart from the Clas­sic, you could down­load pe­ri­od­i­cals and mag­a­zines like Na­tion­al Ge­o­graph­ic. On a lighter note, the Kobo e-read­er has come in for ku­dos for its aes­thet­ics. "It's very cute... this light­weight de­vice."

Kobo e-read­er pro­motes lit­er­a­cy

Jack has al­ways been com­mit­ted to pro­mot­ing and de­vel­op­ing lit­er­a­cy among T&T's chil­dren and youth. A bet­ter in­formed and ed­u­cat­ed so­ci­ety re­sults in in­formed de­ci­sions on ma­jor is­sues such as ex­er­cis­ing the adult fran­chise. She feels chil­dren mor­ph­ing in­to tech­nol­o­gy buffs will grav­i­tate to­wards the piece. Jack said: "The in­tro­duc­tion of the Kobo e-read­er is in line with all the new tech­nol­o­gy. Chil­dren are more fa­mil­iar and they adapt well to tech­nol­o­gy. "The day is not far away when we would start hav­ing e-read­ers in schools as a way to en­cour­age chil­dren to read. We would have to get chil­dren to ex­per­i­ment and adapt to it. They are ac­cus­tomed to cell­phones and lap­tops. I am sure there are fa­cil­i­ties where they can down­load books. "I don't know if there are pri­vate schools al­low­ing the chil­dren to use e-read­ers. But I'm sure we'll get there. There are so many more op­por­tu­ni­ties for them."

About the Kobo e-read­er

The Kobo comes with 100 free Clas­sics. It has wire­less ca­pa­bil­i­ties. You have a choice of over 2.3 mil­lion books on­line. The bat­tery life lasts 10,000 page turns or up to a week. You can bor­row from pub­lic li­braries. It is a lot cheap­er com­pared to the Ipad and the Sony read­er. The Kobo e-read­er is an e-book read­er pro­duced by Toron­to-based com­pa­ny Kobo Inc. The orig­i­nal ver­sion was re­leased in Ju­ly 2010 and was mar­ket­ed as a min­i­mal­ist al­ter­na­tive to the more ex­pen­sive e-book read­ers.