My Book: Digital and Printed

How would your children feel if they could make their books with their own hands?

This project is designed to enable children to relate to both printed and digital information, an essential requirement to cope with the rapid technological leaps of today. The project teaches children that written words can be transformed from digital format to printed format and then to a bound book and vice-versa.

What will your child learn to do?
The steps of the project are very attractive to children as they are allowed to print and bind books, and then keep them as their own. They will be able to:

• Select a book from a list of hundreds of digitized books
• Print the digital book to be transferred into a hard copy
• Cut the book to size
• Bind the book together to form its final shape
• Read the book, as they will be encouraged to read books they made with their own hands.

A mobile unit
One of the unique features of this project is that it delivers its services to the poorest parts of the community and helps introduce them to marvels of the digital age through a fully equipped touring van—the book mobile. The book mobile was donated by the Rachid Mashreq Group, a multinational company, while the equipment was donated by the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Till date, it has made over 150 visits to primary and preparatory schools and orphanages.

This is the fourth book mobile of its kind in the world. The first was in California, the second and the third were in India.

Extended scope
The project is accompanied by a number of social and pedagogical studies that aim at fostering the relationship between children, information resources, and their fields of interest. The studies will assess the extent of benefit and children’s evaluation of the books they read in regard to their contents and layout, then link all these topics to the children's social and economic backgrounds.

Where can you find it?
The stationary unit of My Book Digital and Printed is located within the BA premises in front of Children's Library, where you can take your child to practically try and get acquainted with the process of producing a book.

There is more..
A collection of well selected Arabic books for children is published online. Through this link http://mybook.bibalex.org, you can find books in various fields including literature, technology, history, geography, religion and science. Your child will benefit by reading the book on one hand and get familiar with using computer applications on the other hand. It is like having a library of about 200 books at home.

Website: http://mybook.bibalex.org