I hate it when I write something and then accidentally close the window before saving!

I just wrote something about how I came up with the idea for Cracker Jack Books. I'm lazy so rather than to try to remember what I just wrote I'll just copy a little from the blog post I just linked to:

One interesting effort I read about is Anywhere Books. The project outfitted a van with a laptop and printer and went into village schools in Uganda printing out off-copyright books from the Internet. There's a kernel of a really good idea here, but the project ran into numerous obstacles. Among the most serious problems was the cost of the enterprise.

I wondered how to reduce costs. One of the questions I asked was, "What's the cheapest book I can imagine making?" I recalled Cracker Jack books and thought about how regular paper cut into four lengthwise and the folded accordion style would be something like that. Even allowing production costs of ten cents a page, each book would cost less than three cents a piece.

Okay I'll add a little bit to that. First they got the off-copyright books by downloading them from the site Project Gutenberg which has over 20,000 books to download for free. The second thing is Cracker Jacks were a special treat I'd sometimes get as a kid. It was a little box with molasses candy covered popcorn inside. Along with the corn there was a little envelope with a riddle or joke printed outside. Inside the envelope was a little toy, sometimes a little book.

I haven't developed this idea, but it's one that I keep thinking about. You might ask, What good is a little book? Well, I still like to read comic strips in the daily newspaper. I'm impressed with how much information can be conveyed in such a small space. I loved these little books as a kid. Part of that was the special treat part of the box of Cracker Jack, but part was the books were often fun.

Little books have the advantage of being cheap to print and also cheap to distribute. And looking at the model of Cracker Jacks, the idea they could be distributed along with a product already widely distributed interested me. If the books had some use and were wanted, then they might provide a little incentive to buy the product. So companies might not only help to distribute the books, but might also provide some of the costs of running the program of small books.

I don't have children, and when you don't have children what kids like isn't always known to me. About ten years back American children liked Pokemon. Pokemon means "pocket monsters" in Japanese. The idea behind Pokemon is that in Japan collecting insects is an activity children do. So Pokemon is sort of a game where you collect as many of the Pokemon characters as you can.

I'm surprised by how much information can be made available on a little paper, even still one Cracker Jack book doesn't have too much information. But if you add in a game somewhat similar to Pokemon, where there is an encouragement to collect and trade many Cracker Jack books, the little information in one book adds up. It also encourages the little books not to be thrown away but passed along so more than one person reads just one book.

There are many more aspects of this idea that I like, but I won't go into today. But one thing that is important is I believe that a small version of this project could be tested, say for children in one school, without costing very much money. It's always good to have an idea which can start small and then grow.

I'll leave that idea for today. Please if you have ideas for ways to make materials available that connect with some ideas about where money might come from, add them to this thread.