Carmen-Maria Hetrea in the Britannica Blog:Lifting a book out of the print medium and dropping it into an electronic format I call “publishing electronically.” That is a reductionist view of a print product in the new Web economy.But no longer trapped in static linear pages, electronic information on the Web can now take on a life of its own. Concepts and ideas can be liberated from the context of the page and juxtaposed in novel ...

Nicholas Negroponte's project, OLPC or One Laptop Per Child, has finally made it to India via private partnership.Via TC-I:After weathering multiple rebuffs, Nicholas Negroponte’s much touted One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has finally found a foothold in India, in the form of ADAG (Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group). The Digital Bridge Foundation, part of ADAG, is providing the technology backbone and logistics for installation of OLPC’s white and green laptops in primary schools. Dubbed as ...

At the recently concluded iSummit in Sapporo, one session was devoted to the issues of translation and multilingualism on the web and in the Commons and a problem that has proven to be difficult has been to maintain the cultural contexts when translating.Wojciech Gryc writing in the official iSummit blog:The session itself was a series of presentations, with Chris Salzberg moderating and focusing on the difficulties of working in a multilingual web. Leonard Chien presented ...

Khade: Book LaunchClick on the picture to see our album...

Jeff Jarvis asks why "... shouldn’t books have ads to support them as TV, newspapers, magazines, and radio do? Ads in books would be less irritating than commercials interrupting shows or banners blinking at you on a web page..."Kevin Kelly states that "...people want to pay. They really do! People, mobs of them, will grab stuff that is free. They will try stuff for free that they would never touch if they had to pay. ...

How do you go from a rural India in 2006 in which:- close to half the children in grade 1 could not recognize numbers or letters- almost half the children in grade 2 could not read a grade 1-level text fluently or do a 2-digit subtraction problem confidently- about half the children in grade 5 could not read a grade 2-level text easily or do a simple division problem to a situation by 2009 in ...

Via the Deccan Herald:Ishita, an articulate fifth grader who has the country's current affairs and key issues on her fingertips, penned the short story that was adjudged one of the best by Scholastic's panel of judges comprising authors Anupa Lal, Samit Basu and senior CNN-IBN journalist Suhasini Haider."My story is about a girl who wants to make it to the Spelling Bee because she is a good speller and the odds that she has to ...

A few videos:More at Vir@Youtube

We had a book launch earlier today in Bangalore.Nisha Millet, Hakimuddin, Virdhawal Khade, Mr. Ashok Kamath, Managing Trustee Pratham Books and Mala Kumar releasing 'Kolhapur to Beijing - Freestyle.Pratham Books launched their 150th title "Kolhapur to Beijing---Freestyle!", amidst great excitement and fanfare. The book was released simultaneously by Virdhawal Khade, Olympians Nisha Millet and Hakimuddin Habibulla , Ashok Kamath [Managing Trustee, Pratham Books] and the book's author Mala Kumar.In a run up to the launch, ...

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. This is a Wordle of our blog, click on the image to see it full size.

Via the Hindu:Pratham Books, a not-for-profit publisher of children’s books, will now bring this story to young readers in the form of an illustrated book called “From Kolhapur to Beijing – Freestyle!” in English and seven Indian languages. The book, written by Mala Kumar, is for children between 11 and 14 years, and will be launched in Bangalore by the end of the month, before he leaves for the Olympics. You could also send your ...

Daniel Hillis on the future of the printed book:Romance novels may have a future, but we are witnessing the sunset of the tome. I believe in George Dyson's vision of a tomorrow where books of knowledge are oddities, relegated to the obscure depths of monasteries and search engines. It makes me a little sad and nostalgic. But my sadness is tempered by the sure understanding that is neither the last nor the first change in ...

Author Andrew Keen has challenged book publishers to fight back against the "tyranny" of free content. Speaking at The Bookseller's conference "Digitise or Die", Keen warned that publishers and other intermediaries were being pushed out of the new economy by the prevailing "northern Californian libertarian mindset" that demanded everything for free.Jason Hanley, strategic development partner at Google Book Search, stressed that digital would most likely supplement rather than displace existing revenue models, with multiple rather ...

Another such initiative by Pratham, Read India, aims to inculcate the 3R's among children across the country — reading, (w)riting and (a)rithmetic. It focuses on the introduction of 'learning to read' (and arithmetic ) activities in schools. This includes simple interventions like incorporating a reading period aimed at improving fluency in reading to teaching the use of alphabets."Read India is a focussed campaign and we have received excellent feedback. We have been using various teaching-learning ...

Via Masnick, another data point that seems to suggest that giving away your books for free via the Internet really does boost sales of hard copies.Neil Gaiman, who was part of Harper Collins experiment with giving away free ebooks, discovered (like so many others) that giving away the free ebooks helped increase sales. And, of course, it wasn't just for the one book that was offered for free, but across all of Gaiman's works. The ...

From the India Today, the story of a magazine with a difference.In a world driven by cut-throat competition, what does one make of a publication that wants to sell less? That is the claim being made by Sameera, a Bhopal-based niche magazine.Yet, it is not as if the magazine is aiming for a diminishing readership. What it really wants is to develop the habit of sharing among people to help save the environment.This unique approach ...

Some pictures and a story from spending a day with the Read India campaign in Bihar. | View | Upload your ownIf you are reading this via RSS or email, please click through to see the presentation.

Samanth Subramanian has a write up on our story cards in the Mint today:The Read India campaign was designed to solve the problem of reading skills, and it has involved efforts such as incredibly inexpensive books and a network of around 5,000 libraries across the country...Innovation in learning: Pratham, a non-profit publishing house from Bangalore, has sold four million story cards, most to the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, India’s universal education initiative.