Two books, two views - no agreement, but certainly a lot of sparks. Is the Internet full of junk and by killing off the conventional media we are loosing all our good information sources? That is a point of view of Andrew Keen, author of the book Cult of the Amateur. On the other hand Weinberger, with his own book Everything is Miscellaneous, agrees that there is a lot of bad stuff on the Internet, but argues that there is a lot of good stuff too. More importantly, new mechanisms are being developed that would allow us to find good stuff faster and ignore bad stuff easier. In fact the Internet may make good stuff easier to find than currently possible outside of the internet.

Both authors have argued their points separately and against other people. But now they have squared-off against each other and the sparks are flying. The full text of one of such debates has been published by the Wall Street Journal. Earlier, they also argued at the Supernova conference and the video recording of that debate has been published.

For myself, Weinberger’s argument makes much more sense. I don’t really care about sports, popular music or so called ‘Entertainment’ industry, so most of the content produced by the off-Internet media is of no value to me and often is actually annoying. On the other hand, Internet allows me to track and participate more fully in topics that are actually of interest to me, my work and my research.

Still, even with my alliances so clear, it was fascinating and educational to read and watch both debates. They certainly make you think.

(Update: August 17)

David Weinberger has written a great and  very well thought out follow-up article on the issue. I agree with it completely and just wish I could argue the topics as well as he does.

These days, learning a foreign language is considered a useful thing. The advantages are many: from travelling to foreign countries to getting a preferential treatment in the ethnic restaurants of your own to keeping the dementia away.

This was not always a case though, at least for China. Until 1844, it was illegal for a foreigner to learn Chinese. That changed for America, when Caleb Cushing had negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia, which made it possible for Americans - and Americans only - to learn Chenese. Later, the privilege was extended to Britain and other countries.

This whole story comes up, because China has a new project of translating Chinese classics into modern Chinese, English and - potentially - other languages. This Library of Chinese Classics spans 5000 years of Chinese culture and includes all the famous works.

It should be useful for language learning as well as for general reading pleasure, as it will come with original and English text on the facing pages.

It would also be very interesting to find out what other languages are planned and in what order. Russian used to be a language that many official documents got translated to early on. Would Russian be even on a list now? Would Esperanto, still one of the transmission languages of the China Radio International?

I am interesting in publishing (as in books, e-books, etc). I think the field is rapidly changing due to e-books, print-on-demand and other factors and watching the change is quite exciting.
Unfortunately, I don’t have time or wherewithal to get into the topic seriously. So instead I dip into a sub-genre mailing list, get the feel for their challenges and recent advances and move on.

The latest list I am on is the ebook-community Yahoo group. It has some interesting discussions, but mostly I am ready to move on and come back to it in a year or so.
Except for one person holding me back: Marion Gropen, who I just discovered also has a blog always writes interesting posts. Her questions are to the point and her observations are well thought-out. I wish there was a way to subscribe to her conversations directly (rather than to the whole mailing lists).

So, if you are interested in publishing, you can do worse than subscribe to her blog and look out for her on the mailist list.

P.s. This is not a sponsored plug or bidirectional promotion link. In fact, if she does not find out that I linked to her, so much the better.

I frequently say that public domain books are a great source of further innovation and small business ideas. Today I found another example that brings together several of the themes I track: Language acquisition, Publishing and Public Domain books.

Mark Phillips has taken Tarzan of the Apes book that is now available in public domain and rewritten parts of it to teach grammar as part of the story. The resulting self-published book Tarzan and Jane’s Guide to Grammar (or Amazon link) has been selling quite well in schools for a year or so. The book’s idea is similar to the one of The Twisted Doors, but is targetted at English readers wishing to increase their vocabulary rather than at learners of a foreign language. It also feels to me like a precursor to my 3rd idea from the earlier article on How e-books could revolutionize language-learning.

About a month ago (from what I can tell), Mark decided to push the book to the general public more aggressively. He set up the website and sent some copies out as promotion. I heard of it in one of the Grammar Girl‘ podcasts.

He did not contact me (this is not a sponsored post), but I liked the idea of the book since - as I mentioned at the start - it connects to multiple of my interests. I hope his work will become more known and spur other people to experiment with using public domain material in innovative ways. Especially, if they are innovative language-learning ways.

There is a fight brewing between David Rothman of TeleRead and Bill Janssen of Plucker fame. The point of contention (as I understand the issue) is what would be good format to produce e-books in.

Bill’s position is that any format that is not already accepted (specifically not html) is a lock-in and a disadvantage, whether that format is an open standard (like OpenReader) or a proprietary one (like Sony’s BBeB). He advocates using web browsers as ebook readers.

David’s point (and he invokes me in there) is that HTML format is not sufficient for all e-books, mostly due to the layout and browser changes issues. So, if HTML is not sufficient, we have to chose a new format. Thefore, it is better if the format is an open standard that can be implemented and maintained by multiple parties.

I am with David here and mostly for the reasons he pointed out. For my interests (language learning e-books), HTML is not a good enough format. Sure, I could hack HTML into submission for some of my goals, but it will require so much javascript, that it will not work in anything but a full-blown browser. I invite Bill to replicate the functionality of the Pocket e-Sword. so that it works well in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Maybe that’s why Pepper Pad is integrating FBRReader despite already having a built in Firefox web browser.

So, where does Esperanto comes into it? Well, here is Bill’s quote (emphasis is mine):

Trying to standardize on a common “ebook format”, be it some IDPF creation, some OASIS masterpiece, or even the so-called OpenReader, would only be an attempt to force them all to publish in Esperanto, instead of their house languages. They still wouldn’t have customers.

Publishing in Esperanto does not bring customers? Really! I wonder where Bill gets that data. I don’t know how many (human) languages he speak, but the only reasonable way I could interpret that statement was as “publishing English material in Esperanto would not bring any more English customers”. That could be a a point, where he would be mostly correct. Of course, the market for Esperanto is not English, it is global.

As an example, I want to take the book/movie Night Watch by my favourite author Sergey Lukyanenko. The book started in Russian, was made into the Russian movie with english subtitles, impacted American market and finally was translated (quite well) into English. What about Chinese or Egyptians? Would they be interested in this book? Maybe, but there is no easy way to find out because translation or even subtitling is very expensive.

Except that there is a way. Night Watch has just been translated into Esperanto (announcement in russian). There is even an excerpt available (unfortunately in PDF). Now, the book is accessible to people in China, Egypt or Germany, as long as they can read Esperanto. And if there is enough interest from those people, the book can be translated into their native languages as well to reach to the rest of the audience. The push model of finding the markets suddenly becomes a pull model of market finding you. This is not a new idea, it is already used by newspapers and even Vatican. It is called establishing a beachhead, I believe.
And that’s exactly the strength of open standards. They can expand the audience beyond original planned targets and bring new markets to your solution, adapting the solution to the market needs in the process.

Closed standards control the markets they know about, open standards create new, unplanned markets. I am currently in the market segment, Sony does not want to think about. Do I wait another 5 years for Sony to catch up or do I look for open standard and open source alternatives? There should be no need to guess.