Via the Mises Blog:You will note that Kinsella's book Against Intellectual Property is the #2 bestseller in the store. This is despite its having been online for six years and remains so, in two formats. What a way to demonstrate a thesis. If you have something that is valuable to others, people might be willing to pay for it.

Via Boing Boing, the story of a translation success.Tamil language, widely spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu in south India, has a large body of pulp fiction. But it hasn't been available to non-Tamil speakers, until now. A new publishing house, Blaft translated a bunch of these stories and published an representative anthology of the stuff. I loved the book myself when I read it (I raved about it on my blog). The book ...

Two stories from the Times of India's Teach India campaign. Click through to read the full stories.The first details an experience at an NGO briefing session in Bangalore.There's a new media campaign in town to encourage people to volunteer their time with select NGOs. The idea is simple: As a volunteer you can pick any NGO from a predetermined list, decide if you like their philosophy, submit a schedule that works for you (2 hours ...

This is a post being republished from Atanu Dey on India's Development Blog. He publishes under a Creative Commons License. Thank you Atanu.Please take the time to read this lengthy post, it's a veritable gold mine of thoughts on educational content and more...______________________________________A new worldThat the world has changed radically in just this generation is nowhere more evident than in matters that have something to do with information and communications technology. The evidence is all ...

We reached the school around 9'0 Clock. It already got started. We were a group of some 7 people - all young and energetic and was present there with a definite purpose of life. I looked around the school building. It was a small compound with a good stretch of land in front of it. I came to know from one of my friend that this land was donated to the group to support the ...

With just five medals (if you don’t count hockey) in its 60 years of participating in Olympic events as an independent nation, India is not exactly hot property. But there is always hope.Kolhapur to Beijing is one such story of hope. With the country sending out a swimming team (earlier, it was just the odd contestant) for the first time to the Olympics, 17-year-old Virdhawal Khade’s story will hold a lot of meaning for every ...

Before you say, China, of course, hold on. A while ago, the Financial Times carried a wonderful article about how China recruits athletes in remote villages and trains them (to the exclusion of everything else) to become world-class athletes. The story talked about one Olympic kayaker, Yang Yali, who was recruited from the provinces even though she didn’t even know how to swim and had never seen a kayak before her recruitment. But Yang Yali ...

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, ...

Utkarsha sends her best wishes to Veer through this card....

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 ...