This seasoned educator watched her fifth-grade students at Edith Bowen Elementary School shift their attention from her and to the words on the pages of their "own" new books.

Freshly printed and bound, their titles of choice were a gift from Utah State University's Center for Open and Sustainable Learning Microlibrary.

Project Director David Wiley Sr. manages more than 20,000 holdings - enough books to stretch the length of several football fields. Yet his "library" weighs fewer than 100 pounds and easily fits on a rolling cart or in the trunk of his car.

A laptop, printer, paper cutter, heat-binding tool and a DVD loaded with best-loved books - available to the public free through Project Gutenberg - combine to make the traditional Bookmobile look like a lumbering giant.

Wiley said the center's yet-unfunded goal - to distribute more than 5,000 printed-on-the-spot books to elementary and home school students this coming year - is only the beginning.

“You can take that disc into a retirement home, a correctional facility, a home for youth having problems, a Third World country - and you've immediately got a library there,” he said, adding that 37 languages are available in regular or large print.

“I guess in a perfect world, all information that's relevant would be available to everyone so that we could all make informed decisions.”

Wiley's son, David Wiley Jr., a professor in USU's College of Education and Human Services and director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, said the fledgling center's mission is to share educational opportunities with people who can't get it any other way.

Junior pulled senior out of retirement to nurture the Microlibrary, which was born in October.

Gutenberg offerings - books with expired copyrights - are converted into a format that can be printed and bound inside of 10 minutes, Wiley Jr. said.

There's no need for a warehouse to store inventory and no cost to ship books, because the Microlibrary prints requests only - for pennies on the dollar.

“The whole administrative cost of cataloging a book, checking it out, getting it returned and back on the shelf is more than the cost of printing the book and giving it to somebody,” Wiley Jr. said. “So putting something like this in a rural library would be super cost effective.”

Jensen recalled her first teaching job at a remote K-12 school in Park Valley, in northwestern Utah, and she remembers the scarcity of books in the tiny school's library. She purchased and shared the popular Harry Potter books with eager readers there and watched them devour the tales.

“By the time I left there . . . we'd had two book funerals because the books had been read to the point where they fell apart,” Jensen said. “Those kids eat up good books.”

While Jensen imagined her shelves lined with new Microlibrary literature sets, her students helped Wiley Sr. print and bind their favorite titles, such as Huckleberry Finn, Aesop's Fables and Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Ten-year-old Dennis “Hayden” Stock fondled his personal copy of War of the Worlds, saying he reads, “not really that much,” but was eager to dive into his new classic because it was printed just for him. “I think this is so great. It's so nice of them to give us these new books. They printed it off the computer and binded it themselves,” he said.

abrunson@sltrib.com

* To learn more about the Microlibrary, go to cosl.usu.edu on the Internet or visit Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org.