16. Cell Books What is it? Book that downloads via WAP to your cellphone (can be long e.g. 100 pages of A4) Positives: It’s pretty cheap; no character restrictions Negatives: Need to have WAP, so about 60% of phones in SA can use it. Unfamiliar tech. Can be hard to find the ‘book’ once it has been downloaded to the phone. Cost: About R2 once-off (free to read it after that – it is on your phone) Handset: Must be WAP and Java enabled Examples: Metropolitan “B the Future HIV-AIDS CellBook” (SMS the word HIV to 32907)
In fact, some of the poorest countries in the world are adoptingcell phones. This shows the number of subscribers, as a percentage of the population, by country in Africa. The countries are sorteddescendingorderfrom the UN’s HDI, from 74 in Mauritius to 179 (out of 179) in Sierra Leone. Weseethateven in those countries with a HDI lowerthan 160 – where the per capita annualincomeislessthan $1,100 – an average of 22 percent of the population has mobile phone subscriptions.