Puducherry: Former President A P J Abdul Kalam on Tuesday suggested creating library in every house to encourage reading habit among family members.
“Reading habit would help to create a good atmosphere in the house and give a chance among family members to have a healthy discussion on common topics, which is essential for maintaining good harmony”, he said.
Inaugurating the 17th National Convention on “Knowledge, Library and Information Networking”, Kalam said, “The reach of home libraries could be enhanced by integrating them with mobile platforms enabled m.libraries.†The convention is organised jointly by Delhi based Developing Library Network (DELNET) and French Institute of Puducherry.
“With India having more than 700 million mobile subscribers, we can create mobile based books which could be shared by m-libraries across the nation”.
 He also noted that with advanced linguistic translation and processing power available in mobile phones, we can develop real time translation facilities by which any book can be translated in any language by the mobile application itself.
 “We can also enable voice over for these books so that people with visual impairment or limited reading ability can access the wealth of books and libraries”, he said, adding, “by this, we can truly transcend barriers of language, distance, cost and even reading ability and make books reach the last person of the nation”.
H K Kaul, Director, DELNET, said the organisation has around 5000 libraries as its members.
Delegates from within the country and abroad are participating in the three day convention.