Theos-Talk Archives (December 2010 Message tt00139)

There are also other obvious benefits. When an book is written, each chapter
as it is produced, even in a draft form, can be made available on-line. The
normal time lag between the book is ready and it is printed and distributed
could be several months. Further more, even after a book is fully released,
it can be updated by the author(s) at will if in electronic form.

Looking at a case in point - SD Commentaries. As soon as they were
discovered, they could have been scanned and uploaded to Internet. The
originals are in beautiful handwriting - a sample is on Daniel's website -
and anyone could have commented.

After several years, when published at an exorbitant price - nearly costing
about $100US, the added material, in the opinion of many, was marginal and
value added is also marginal.

Now out of reach, for most theosophists in third world since most
theosophists are not rich. All it has done is to generate some money for the
publishers and perhaps royalty to the author.

BTW, let us see if theosophy company - the custodians of the documents -
will see the writing on the wall and make the electronic edition available
for download for free to all theosophists.

On another anecdotal matter, nearly a decade ago when I was in touch with a
very well known theosophical leader (I do not want to publicly embarrass
him/her), while I used email and fax etc., to communicate, this leader
always used to respond in print - and of course the cost was not borne
personally, by the organization which displayed the 18th/19th century
mind-set.

Man/woman does not want to change unless forced to, I guess.

MKR



On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 3:59 PM, chandrasekaryas <
chandrasekaryas@UZpaB1mLc63SkMKL7DU-2I-RXcHg_duQG6QfB2-Ccz7A9l2QlnSPaklATtSM-L9IUMWsKUmcyal8b59OEbPz2F7EaL4lFVE.yahoo.invalid> wrote:

>
>
> Additional advantages of pdf format:
>
> Space, paper and tree economy, lower cost, portable (I use i-river
> e-reader), remote accessibility, easy search document and selective printer.
>
> Chan
>
> --- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com <theos-talk%40yahoogroups.com>, MKR
> <mkr777@...> wrote:
> >
> > We have time and again discussed why in todayÃââs world, we need to
> provide
> > electronic copies of books available for free on Internet if our intent
> is
> > to disseminate information to the benefit of Humanity and not to make a
> > ÃâËbuckÃââ.
> >
> > Just today, I was looking at a voluminous publication in pdf file format
> and
> > wanted to search for key words. Of course, there was an index which could
> > have been used. The traditional index created by someone using judgment
> as
> > to what should be in it and what need not be in it. So, any traditional
> > index suffers from this limitation and in many cases, the traditional
> index
> > is severely handicapped.
> >
> > Lo and behold. I found out that the pdf file can be converted to a
> > searchable pdf file if you have full Acrobat program. Conversion to a
> > searchable file is a piece of cake. Once done, you can search by any key
> > word and this is very powerful when one is looking for a needle in a
> > haystack.
> >
> > So it is time for authors and publishers to wake up to the reality of the
> > need to make all publications available as a pdf file for free.
> >
> > MKR
> >
> >
> > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> >
>
>  
>


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