Historical Amnesia - thanks IT!

We have long ago entered an era where the instruments of recording our memory are not just books. Contained within old grainy black and white photo's to modern multimedia presentations are some of the more modern records of human culture.

While we have become experts at preserving and disseminating the written and printed word, we are still unsure about what to do with anything else. For example, see the following - One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures

If NASA can get it wrong, then what about us. It's possible that all those files you keep on your computer may, through some accident, get deleted. You'll lose a bit of your history, especially if lost data includes all the photo's you've taken with your digital camera. Not many of us print-out photo's or keep photo albums anymore. But more than that - there may have been some article, novel, or any project you were working on. Some of you may even keep a daily journal in their computers. The value of information stored in our computers is becoming higher as we move more media into digital storage.

One commentator states that we live in the digital dark ages, as we are losing our cultural history by anything that gets deleted and modified everyday on computers worldwide.

As always there is hope, libraries and other memory institutions worldwide have become aware of this growing problem and are preparing to create Digital Archives, that shall permanently store digital records. Even tougher is that they are planning to provide public access to this storehouse. They have a near impossible task ahead of them.

Then, there's the famous call by a user to a customer service centre - 'I want to download the internet, do I need a bigger hard disk?'

Shakespeare Repackaged

In the newly independent India and even some time before that, the British education pattern had been adopted and is still largely followed today. There are a lot interesting stories about how the clever Indian folk grappled with the King's English.

My dad told me this one ...

One of them is when a young schoolboy approached a book shop and spent some time searching for a book. After a while he scratched his head asked the shopkeeper "Kya aapke paas 'Maimne ki dum se hilti Naashpati' hai?". The shopkeeper quietly picked up a book handed it to the boy, and pocketed the payment. Once the boy had left, the shocked shopkeeper's assistant asked, "Which book did you give him?". "Lamb's Tales of Shakespeare", replied the shopkeeper.

For my non-Hindi speaking readers, the boy had asked (rough translation) "Do you have the book - lamb's tail shakes the pear (tree)?"

Shakespeare's work in now out of copyright and available to the general public, without any lawyer breathing down their neck! Yaaay! This now also means that anybody can now repackage Shakespeare's content in their own context and present it. Uh-Oh!

Some of the sites offering Shakespeare's work are

• Google Books
  
• Project Gutenberg
  
• Wikisource
  
• The Literature Network
  
• Internet Public Library
  
• williamshakespearefulltext.com
  
• william-shakespeare.info
  
• Interestingly Shakespeare Oxford Society, The Shakespeare Society, Britannica, Encarta and so on do not seem to provide the texts freely or easily. Perhaps they are avoiding a duplication of effort.
  
• and so on ...
  

I wonder when Mickey Mouse comes out of copyright! ;)

Battles for the future of Literature

Define a book.

1. Is it that paper thingy we hold in our hand full of printed words, which does not need any batteries.
   
2. Or is it a sum of an author's output compiled into a structure for an audience.

Think carefully, because the ground beneath the literary world is undergoing a major shift.

Outside the Media/Publishing/Librarian world, not many realize the battles being fought in for the future of the book. Who will be the major publishers of the future? What is the best format for books to be published - digital text or printed or audio? Who controls the experience when books are sold/retailed or sampled-before-selling? Who catalogs these books? Who reviews and rates these books? Finally, who reads them?

Also, one could also wonder how the Nobel Prize for Literature is defined 20 years from now.

Though large publishers (like Random House, Penguin, McGrawHill, Wiley, O'Reilly) and book shop owners and Online retailers (such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble) and Online search providers (like Google, Microsoft, Project Gutenberg) and Ebook pioneers (like Gemstar, Rollable display, Sony Reader) are all competing for this space (note that there is usually an overlap). The future at this stage is still unclear.

There are only two sets of people who really hold the answers - one of them are the authors and the other more significant is You. You, the User, the Reader, the Customer.