The format of books is changing. As the emerging technologies converge, so too the way the world handles written text is also converging. This will affect three arenas of development – research policy communication; children's education; and adult learning.

The convergence of books and internet will be through "Apps". It may seem that the internet offers an increasingly media rich experience which covers the majority of information flows in the world. While this is one view of the movement toward a globally accessed knowledge base, a brief search for development sector information easily demonstrates the dominance of static text. While there is potential for media-rich access to information, the norm at the moment is still written words on a screen (webpage) leading to a pdf document for the detailed report.

In developed countries, there is an emerging trend towards ePublishing. ePpublishing differs from the Adobe pdf format because the international standard of ePub resizes the text and format for the device it is being read on. This is a key development. It is this aspect of the emergence that is particularly important for Africa where the mobile phone has become the norm, and the likely path in the near future is the growing use/availability of smartphones. It is important for four reasons:

• Convergence of devices means formats must be flexible.
• Information continues to flow when there is a mechanism for paying people to create it
• Beyond the executive summary.
• Prepaid data flows and offline reading.

This all has a poverty relevance!.