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 and […]

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 […]

Google Books vs OCA
We’ve heard a lot about Google Books, whether it’s Google’s grand plans or them getting sued by publishers, as well as various complaints about quality control (see this First Monday article). There have also been discussions about the terms of use (many books that are clearly in the public domain show up […]

In February, I translated a news report about the Indonesian government planning to buy the Copyright for Indonesian text books, and let libraries distribute them freely. At that time I made a plea for these books to be also released as Creative Commons on the web. Since then three more articles have been published on […]

My problem with doing research is that I come across so many interesting topics, and it is hard not to pursue them, and get lost. Sometimes I write books down in my “books to read” list, or download pdfs meaning to read them later. Sometimes I spend hours on things that I absolutely do not […]

3.
In the morning I cast my net into the sea.
I dragged up from the dark abyss things of strange aspect and strange beauty - some shone like a smile, and some glistened like tears, and some were flushed like the cheeks of a bride.
When with the day’s burden I went home, my love was sitting […]