On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Thaths <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The first question to ask is how "free" is the digital version of the > book going to be? Is it free as in beer? Or free as in re-mixable? Or > free as in redistribute, but do not change?
Hi Thats :) The easy answer, as Ashish so eloquently put it, when I asked it to him, is "as free as it can be, if not more" :) He has had extremely able lawyers helping him to reserve every possible right of free use on the digital medium which he is now happy to divest himself of. It is free as in you need an internet connection and storage space and you can download it free. It is free as in take the copy (or steal it, except that it was free to take in the first place) and do what you want to do with it - keep the original licence, attribute it to the author and then claim your co-authorship with it. Free as in redistribute if you want, but also rearrange, change, and tamper with the book, as long as you cite the apocryphal 'original' that began the journey. That, in itself, is quite a motivating thing for me in an academic world that relies largely on closed access. I recently had an infiruating experience where in a course that I was teaching, I had prescribed an essay that I had written a couple of years ago (shameless plug, I know), and got a notice from my publishers that the institute where I was teaching it, did not subscribe to their journal and that it was their duty to remind me, in their best interests, that I should not let the students have free copies... I of course, jolly well, went ahead and did all sorts of copyright infringements on my own essay, anyway. > > > Putting the contents of the book in PDF format is perhaps not the best > way to begin because of the unweildy nature of PDF. Spend a little bit > of time making it available in some common denominator of a format > (say, docbook) and HTML. And let your engaged audience convert it to > different other formats (ebook, audio, etc.). > That is another problem that we have been dealing with as well. An argument in the favour of the PDF is that for an audience that also might have academic scholarship and interest, it is necessary for them to sometimes get accurate page numbers and line numbers which correspond to the book in the print form... otherwise, just giving them access to the digital copy, still forces them to either search for the printed copy or buy it. However, the point of the PDF was only to make the book immediately available to anybody who wants it, and then exploring the possibilities of looking at it further. The notion of audience conversion and translations is fantastic though. This starts giving us ideas about what interactivity can possibly mean... and how the formats and the standards will be equally implicated as the content. > > Getting permissions from rights holders of the celluloid art > referenced in the book is going to be very time consuming as Sumant > says. Build a blog / wiki around the book where your audience can add > footnotes and links to online multimedia elsewhere (youtube, flickr, > etc.) around the celluloid media the book is referencing. Generate > interest among your readers and get them to translate the work into > other languages. Let people make mashups with your work..... > I think, though I need to check here, all the material that has been used in the book (because the book also contains pictures and in fact film strips in some instances) has been approved of and the necssary rights for all of it has been procured. Though, I am not sure about it and I need to check with this. The suggestions you have right now, are invaluable. I especially like the notion of footnoting by the audience. We had thought about scholia, where people could come and scribble notes in the margin and layer the copy, but the academic tool of footnoting and sharing it is very fascinating. My instinct is also to go with the popular existing networks and platforms in order to make this e-object... so much so that it is possible that the material is distributed and what we build is actually a common access repository to all the material with the text around it. People making mashups is awesome. Though I do wonder how much possibility an academic book might have in terms of mashups... need to think more on it. > > Thaths cheers Nishant > > -- > "I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping > its SPEED over fifty, and if its SPEED dropped, it would explode. I think > it was called, 'The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down'." -- Homer J. Simpson > > -- Nishant Shah Doctoral Candidate, CSCS, Bangalore. Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,( www.cis-india.org ) Asia Awards Fellow, 2008-09 # 0-9740074884
