The internet, to a great extent, has thrown open all resources to the world , to acquire knowledge. The days of intellectual tyranny are over. Anybody with time and inclination to learn, can learn just about anything, with no conditions attached. One is not disadvantaged by lack of money or lack of a teacher. One just needs to find time and anyone can emulate Eklavya, probably the first student in a virtual classroom; the net itself will act as the formless virtual guru.
I do not suggest that authors or teachers should be deprived of their livelihood or importance . They too need to pay their bills and they should be given due recognition for their contribution to the society. The importance of intellectual property rights just cannot be questioned. But simple joys of learning a language, reading classic literature, learning to play a musical instrument or software programming cannot be denied to anyone just because of lack of funds or lack of a school or teacher.
Today , we have plenty of resources on the net for learning anything from baking a cake to web designing. The resources are in the form of audio/video clips or ebooks in different file formats.
I am particularly interested in the contents originally created as printed books and are now downloadable as digital files.
A phenomenal effort has gone into digitization of every recorded thought that humankind has produced through ages starting from the first cave paintings . As information technology kept evolving earlier formats are now getting obsolete. But the beauty of working in bits and bytes is that any information once digitized in some format can be converted to any other format, without the need for retyping the entire contents.
We have a plethora of ebook readers ;devices and applications; Kindle, Kobo , Boox , Nook and so on. One problem is that every device uses a different format for file system. For a price, you can get any book on any of your devices in any format.
But then , books are expensive , physical or digitized and that’s why we have libraries. There is an universe of books legally available in the public domain that just needs to be downloaded to your device. The problem is that most of these are in the form of pdf files. The pdf format owes its popularity, as its name implies, to the portability across platforms. Pdf also implies that the fonts size and margins are fixed . So the reading experience on hand held devices is not very good.
So, what we need is e-libraries storing digitized books downloadable in different formats . Particularly useful formats are Epub and mobi/azw (used by Amazon Kindle) formats . If the contents are free to be accessed and are available in the public domain why should there be any restriction on which devices or applications to be used ?
There are a number of free and paid applications available for reading digitized contents; Calibre, Eboox and FBreader are some of the popular applications.
Of these, Calibre is a complete library rather than a reader app. It is so feature rich that it caters to all information requirements of a knowledge lover . It has a built in conversion tool for converting contents from any format to any other format; say from pdf to epub or mobi.
In case of Indic languages , there is one more layer of complexity added as converting from pdf to epub is not possible unless the text is created using unicode as against ASKII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) . For those interested in knowing the difference between ASKII and Unicode , here’s a link.
For displaying Tamil characters , earlier a system called (Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange (TSCII) ) Character Set. Any document created using this system cannot be converted to epub format. For that you need a newer encoding system.
In a layman’s language ,we need our eBooks to display the contents in easily readable way. The paragraphs should easily flow when fonts are enlarged or compressed. The margins should be adjustable. For all that there is a need for our techies to make the eBooks available at appropriate formats.
In this area I intend making a few good Tamil books available for readers in user friendly formats. Please try out https://sibha.in/books_world/ and https://sibha.in/books_world/public/tamil.php . I intend adding a title or two every day.
Cheers !
Super! Great effort!
Great. By uploading your ebooks in Calibre does it help saving memory of the device?
Like my books are in Kindle App(on iPad) or Ebook on iPad.
Good to see you back doing what brings you joy. In this case your subject was what we had been discussing the past few days. Raj (I can see that his comments precede mine) that we create a sort of library on our website where anyone can access some expensive newspapers and magazines. Can we take a subscription for the admin or some way to do this. We can prepare a list (and I can help 😜) and then take approval of the GC to subscribe. Just wondering as to how to make it happen!
Great going Murali! Reviving stories in Tamil and preserving them for posterity