I’ve been interested in e-book readers for a long time, and a good friend generously agreed to lend me his Bokeen Cybook v3 reader for a week or two to play with, since that is the only way you can really get a feel for this technology – just looking at it for a few [...]
The article below was written for the IFLA Section of Libraries for Children and Young Adults Newsletter, December 2008 (just published), edited by Singaporean librarian Ivan Chew, whose blog I have been reading for a long time, and whom I was lucky enough to meet in Singapore in 2007, while getting a new visa for [...]
The OpenLibrary I wrote about the OpenLibrary previously, and since then they have only gotten better. They have added a lot of books, but more importantly, their website has turned into a real portal, where you can access all of their scanned books (over 234,000). This is only part of their quest, which is also [...]
There are many different milestones when learning a new language. They are important to measure ones progress, especially important since often I am learning independently, and don’t have the crutch of thinking – if I passed the test successfully, then my studies must be on track. But equally or more importantly, they provide a great [...]
I absolutely love Chinese bookstores. They are often huge, and buzzing with activity. The biggest are often called “book cities”, and the one I visited in Shenzhen a year ago was about six huge floors. On the Sunday that I visited it, it was packed with people, sitting on everywhere voraciously reading. A big difference [...]
One incredibly progressive feature of the American constitution, is that it provides that everything produced by the government immediately enters public domain. I think this makes complete sense, and there is a slow movement among other countries to follow up, but it is something that should have happened a long time ago. Due to this [...]
(Background here, here and here) From Kompas, April 7, 2008, through [i:boekoe], Rab A. Broto, director of the Sekolah Penulis Pembelajar (School of Writing and Learning?). It cannot be denied that the policy of the government to buy copyrights of text books, as was mentioned in the Department of Education (DoE) Policy Number 2, 2008, [...]
I keep a list of books or articles to read. Sometimes I have kept it as a Google Mail draft, this one I transferred from there into DevonThink. It’s not structured in any way, the entries are messy, often quick copies and pastes, just enough information to be able to Google something. These are things [...]
(Read about the background here, and here). An update on the copyright buying project, from [i:boekoe], taken from an article in Kompas, March 27, 2008. The Department of Education has bought the copyrights of 37 books in 2007, and will buy 250 titles more in 2008. The books will then be accessible through the internet [...]
I have written about the plan to buy the copyright for textbooks in Indonesia and publish the books online (here, and here). Today I found out, through the excellent Indian book blog Scholars Without Borders that the Indian National Council on Educational Research and Training (NCERT) offers free downloadable versions of many Indian K-12 text [...]
