Anthere wrote: Dear Marlies, We look forward collaborating with initiatives such as yours. I presume you are familiar with the concept of our project, collecting and organising information, which may be used or reused by anyone. The ultimate idea being to help increase access to information to anyone in the world, regardless of his country, race, gender, age, financial situation etc... The fact is that we are good at collecting information. We are good at organising it. We are frankly not very good at publishing it on a medium other than internet. And we are not good at all at distributing it (except that through internet channel). In short, creating content is one job. Publishing/distributing is a different job. And one which requires for us to set up collaborations, in particular when distribution is done in countries where rather few of us live (such as South Africa) or in specific situations (such as distribution in school). To make it clear immediately, we do not give money to organisations. All what we collect ourselves is needed to make our own organisation run. Quick overview of the South African initiatives. Basically, three projects are of a size which might interest you. Wikipedia (encyclopedia), Wikibooks (textbooks and manuals) and Wiktionary (dictionary). Only two of your languages are decently covered in wikipedia as far as I know : english and afrikaans. If other languages exist, they are probably essentially inactive due to lack of participants. I do not think we could trigger translations initiatives in other languages due to the lack of human force :-) (your help would be welcome :-)). As for Wiktionary and Wikibooks, you may consider they only exist in english for now. English wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org (roughly one million articles) Afrikaans wikipedia : http://af.wikipedia.org (roughly 5000 articles) If you are looking for a kid version of an encyclopedia, there was recently an initiative by SOS Children (contact Andrew Cates). See here for more : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia-CD/Download That's actually a selection of articles, not articles written for children. It is in HTML version, may be downloaded for print. But it will not constitute a book per se. Still, it may interest you. More interesting probably are what we call wikijuniors. These are books developped on Wikibooks. As all of our content, these are free to use. These books are developped specifically for children. They are partially or totally translated in other languages (probably not those which interest you at this point). I invite you to have a look at this initiative. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior There are rather few books for now, but the concept is now set up and there is no limit to what we could do. I'll add that knowing that a book is used, in particular to children in need, is a great incentive for an author. Most of the content originates from Wikipedia, but is re-worked to fit kids needs. You will notice that some of those books are now "finished". Some are currently in the works. Amongst those finished, there is one which may be purchased as a print version by LULU (please see http://www.lulu.com/content/346504 for reference). To realise these Wikijunior, we got financial support from an american Foundation. This support was just renewed, so that we could push forward this initiative. I consequently expect that we'll get more books soon in the future. It would actually be interesting to have a feedback from an organisation from yours as to which books would be most necessary. So, at one end of the rope, we have content. At the other end of the rope, we have Biblionef. What we need in between is a publisher and money to publish. I actually went to South Africa in september 2005, to participate to discussions over FLOSS (free and open software/content) in South Africa, and in my case, over the creation of a Wikiversity project (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity) During these discussions (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS%2C_South_Africa_200…), I remember a presentation about the HP i-communities initiatives (http://h40058.www4.hp.com/icommunity2/index.asp) and discussions over printing issues in South Africa by an SA publisher, further discussed in Wikimania (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2005_Presentations#Wikimedia_in… for general overview), where legal issues over teaching text printint in South Africa where raised by Achal (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Transwiki:Wikimania05/Presentation-AP1). ... which lead me actually wondering if any printing in South Africa would be a good idea :-) but also suggest that we have many contacts and several potential sponsors for projects in that country (which we absolutely don't for projects in say... Algeria or Nigeria). I'll be interested by your thoughts on the matter, such as which types of books would be most necessary for kids (and problematic for you to get by other means). If you would be interested by collaborating with us (which would imply finding a publisher to produce some of the wikijunior, and of course cash to produce them). Of course, this would not happen in 3 months of time, but I doubt the issue of kids needing books badly will be solved by the end of the year. I look forward to your answer. Anthere / Florence Devouard PS : I presume other initiatives might be of interest, but these are those at the top of my mind. I also remember south african editors working on a books dealing with mathematics (or was is physics ?) at high school or university level, but I lost memory of those. Maybe someone will remember a link or two as well.