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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6251 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 33 of 47 23 November 2011 at 1:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'd like to see better print-on-demand services, but for the vast majority of older books that aren't in the public domain, they will make almost no difference, and neither will ebooks. If the publisher isn't interested in making the book available again (for instance, because it would cost more to prepare a copy than they care to invest, or because the copyright holder is dead and the work is orphaned, or....), then there's still nothing to be done. Executives aside, orphaned works under copyright are a huge problem. The calculus text is in Italian, not English. Some university libraries appear to have copies, but no one seems to be selling it: the vendors that have pages for it say it's not available.
Ah - I generally don't consider absolutely unreadable **** of that kind to be ebooks, although some people have the chutzpah to sell such. I don't see it as a problem of ebooks, though, any more than "English as she is spoke" is representative of language learning materials. The problem is incompetence, hastiness, and/or greed, and while you won't tend to find examples that typographically egragious in physical bookstores, it's not difficult to find physical books which are hugely lacking in other ways. Without naming names, I could point to some books that are sold in stores, which are full of screenshots and filler text that were clearly laid out by an amateur using Microsoft Word. Electronic 'books' that have automatically been converted badly between formats are often nearly unreadable, as are scans that have been poorly OCR'd, but so are print books where the bottom half of each page failed to get any ink - it's merely that someone's more likely to quality control those before a copy ends up in your hands. Most books today, to the best of my knowledge, are printed from electronic print-ready manuscripts. Barring that, while plain text isn't beautiful, it can be very readable. You won't get the color and texture of illuminated manusccripts, but in terms of typography, I'd rather read a PDF typeset with LaTeX than a typical physical book any day. Older books that look like they were produced on typewriters are often eyesores. I've read quite a bit of math that hasn't been printed out - on web pages, in papers, and yes, in electronic copies of technical books. Done competently, as it often is, there's nothing about transferring it to paper that makes it look better. I buy electronic books at times, as long as they're in sufficiently open formats, and with no DRM. I've found their quality to be essentially the same as that of a typical modern physical book.
No, no, and no. Books with DRM are likely to completely bar me from accessing massive portions of literature in most languages (including English - I do not live in an English-speaking country). We fully agree that they are a huge problem. In Switzerland, it's actually particularly bad: you wouldn't believe the number of websites and companies which force German on me, despite it only being the language of barely 6 Swiss out of 10. I'm lucky if I even get a choice between German and one of Italian, French, and English; this irked me to no end before I learned German. Public domain electronic books, like those found on Project Gutenberg and copyright-restricted books in open formats with no DRM, such as those on Perseus digital library greatly expand my reach. And, for a non-trivial number of texts, these are the only way I can conveniently get access to them, since no one is currently bothering to print them and used copies are rare or unavailable. If you can't stand reading on a computer screen, you can print them out, or find someone willing to print them for you.
Again, this is a matter of open formats. Project Gutenberg texts, which are plain text, are just as readable today as in the 1970s. PostScript dates from 1982, SGML from 1986, and PDF from 1993, for when you need complex formatting - and there are various open-source, cross-platform readers. And, with Unicode, foreign languages are rarely a problem. If you use an unusual and/or proprietary format (such as the defaults of most word processors), you're in for pain sooner rather than later. But there are plenty of formats that are adequate for long-term accessibility of ebooks, and plenty of people using them. Historically, most books which have ever been written have been lost. With digital books in open formats, we have the possibility for humanity to never lose another book again, ever. And, as it stands today, there are plenty of books I can only get physically, and plenty I can only get electronically - but I can make backups of the electronic ones.
I've heard bad things about some kindle books as well - but I've never bought one. The vast majority of ebooks I see are either plain text, or PDFs, and a large percentage of the PDFs are identical to print books.
I'd be the last person to speak against a good quality critical edition. I bought some absolutely beautiful parallel Greek-Italian texts of Homer's work recently. I've had someone that knows both Greek and Italian vouch for the quality of the translation to me, the footnotes are copious, the formatting is good, and the books feel and smell nice... That's all nice and well when I want a particular book. If I want to dip my toes into a few dozen ponds and see what languages and works look particularly interesting, or simply do a bit of grazing to widen my perspective on what's available, having access to a large library is extremely helpful - and if that library is electronic, there are some additional benefits.
You're right about low-quality MP3s. High-bitrate ones tend to do well in sound tests, and there are a variety of formats that are CD quality. Some, like FLAC, are open. A good digital file is no worse than a CD, which is just a collection of digital files, after all. As with ebooks, we're both against low-quality nonsense and idiotic restrictions. But I'd like to emphasize that neither are inate properties of digital books or music, and that there is a lot of high quality material available in open formats.
A lot depends on what you are looking for. I certainly know where to find pirated ebooks that would more than suffice for advanced study in a number of topics, even if I were unable to understand a word of English - while other topics are an absolute wasteland. I'm not recommending them, but they're out there. On the other hand, I can't name a single source for comptemporary legal Italian ebooks off the top of my head.
I'll refrain from getting started on this topic.
There already is more than one price for almost anything you care to name that has more than one vendor, except when there is collusion or laws which prevent this from being the case. Within the same town, you can find the same book at more than one price. You can get physical books for different prices from amazon.com vs amazon.co.uk vs amazon.de, even without venturing to other vendors. The demand for books is fairly elastic, as far as I can tell. I expect lower prices would help a number of vendors make both more sales and more money. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6251 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 34 of 47 23 November 2011 at 1:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Here's an example of what I consider a good-quality ebook, in terms of content and typographic quality. Look at any of Knuth's pre-fascicles for Volume 4 of his "The Art of Computer Programming" series.
These days, I view such files in okular, but I've used a number of viewers over the years, with no problems. The format is open, and the typography is far superior to the average print book (as it should be - Knuth wrote TeX). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5003 days ago 245 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 35 of 47 23 November 2011 at 8:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Because physical borders can no longer enforce the artificial pricing as could be done previously before the existence of the internet. Any governments or companies thinking that they can still employ such pricing are in for a rude awakening because the customers will always be ten steps ahead of them in seeking better deals and avoiding restrictions. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6362 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 36 of 47 23 November 2011 at 9:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This will require a credit card or bank account with a fake address. If you know of a way to get one, post it. Otherwise, admit that your wonderful idea won't work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5157 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 37 of 47 24 November 2011 at 12:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This is true. There are important publishers in foreign languages that seem to be making good use of print-on-demand though. I have discovered for example that German publishers like Mohr Siebeck are now offering many titles that were previously unavailable in what I assume are print-on-demand editions, of excellent quality too. Many significant books in French have also recently come back in print.
You've trumped me there Volte, because I was not able to locate a copy either. But like I said, a dependable online used book market exists mainly for English-language books.
Perhaps therein lies the reason for the on-average superior quality of physical books -they are more enduring hence more worthwhile to carefully prepare. Ebooks, with their multiplicity of formats and venders along with the fleetingness of technology are treated as disposable goods. Another random example of a phenomenon I have repeatedly encountered when browsing books at Amazon.
This is what two ebooks I once downloaded look like on my PC (and I do not download many of them at all, so I gather this is not infrequent). The first is a Bengali textbook and the second a Russian play: 
Maybe the solution to this is trivial, but I remember spending valuable time looking for it with no luck. With a book on the other hand you simply open it and read it, and I would rather do this than fiddle with technology.
This on the other hand is very enticing, however given everything we have been discussing so far, I am skeptical it will come to pass.
Thankfully, it is still not too late to not give this up.
But again, there is a great, great deal more material subject to the kind of treatment music and books receive from the likes of Apple and Amazon, and the more people migrate to their way of distributing culture as opposed to physical formats, the more threatened access to universal culture becomes, notwithstanding independent efforts such as those cited by you. Edited by Juаn on 24 November 2011 at 1:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6251 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 38 of 47 24 November 2011 at 1:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
That's positive.
The online market for English books is fairly good, but it's not that rare for me to casually look for an old text and be unable to find it, or for the only copies to go for upwards of $400 - which is more than I'd pay for an analysis of Finnish to give to a friend who likes the language. And, without being immodest, I think I can claim to be a rather good searcher. The used book market is very good, but plenty of works are unavailable, even in English.
Absolutely. Secondarily, there's the issue of overhead: it costs almost nothing to write a script that generates 'books' from a random set of wikipedia pages. The concept of book spam is hard to imagine without modern technology. Edit: an analogy can be made with print books, actually. Most print books are rather low-quality fluff - but I suppose we're both in the habit of rarely taking these books into consideration, because they're simply not particularly interesting, or something either of us invest much time into. Similarly, and analogously, Amazon tends not to even cross my mind when I think of ebooks.
Ugh, yes. Poorly converted books for contemporary ereader formats have that sort of problem far too often. I'll download a free classic text with no complex formatting requirements from Amazon, but I'm certainly not paying for an ebook which is DRM-laden or with unreadable formatting, much less both.
Those both look like encoding problems. With Unicode, that is increasingly becoming a rarity, and good readers are rather good at auto-detecting encodings as well. The problem those screenshots show isn't dead, but it's got one foot in the grave. Edit: to be more precise, I suspect the Bengali book was using an old trick. Many older computers only supported something called "ASCII", which was suitable for encoding English, but not much else. So, what a lot of other languages with non-Latin alphabets did was to take each symbol, and replace it with one of their characters, and have special fonts to make it all look ok. This was an absolute horrible mess, and without the specific font, impossible to read. Fortunately, this is now rare, and people are converting texts like this to use Unicode. For Russian, due to the same problem, there have been several major ways of encoding texts. The old and tedious way to deal with this was to use a program that could handle each Russian encoding, and try one after another by hand until you got something looked like Russian (it's not quite as tedious as it sounds if you use this kind of text a lot: the misencoded texts look quite different, and you can learn to recognize the encodings fairly quickly). Nowadays, people use Unicode, or programs which automatically guess correctly most of the time. Once you're familiar with this problem, it'll cost you 15 seconds if you know the encoding, and less than 5 minutes if you have to guess and have appropriate software on hand. Personally, for plain text files, I tend to use firefox. I have "Universal autodetection" (View -> Character Encoding -> Autodetect -> Universal) selected, and I see pages which are unreadable due to encodings barely a handful of times per year, at which point a couple of guesses almost always sorts it out. The other big arrow in my arsenal is iconv, which I use to convert texts to Unicode. You can do the same with a bunch of text editors and word processors, but I don't have concrete recommendations off the top of my head for those. Bear in mind, though, that this will not work for old texts that rely on ad-hoc encodings and custom fonts: many Indic texts are in this category, though new ones usually use Unicode.
In a perfect form, where not a single text is ever lost, I doubt it will. For preserving well over 99% of texts, as far as I can see, it would be technologically straightforward.
I don't want to give up physical books. I simply want the option of having electronic copies (high quality ones) of books as well; they have complimentary advantages. Electronic books are more searchable, can be backed up, and are far easier to travel with. Physical books are nice for curling up with.
In this, we're largely agreed. In the end, we're both having to rely a lot on independent efforts, whether they're to create free ebooks, create high-quality systems like TeX, or reprint older books. And we both starkly see the risks that current trends pose to access to culture: not only universal access, but any access whatsoever to significant parts of it. Edited by Volte on 24 November 2011 at 2:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ketutar Triglot Newbie Sweden Joined 4595 days ago 20 posts - 31 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: French, Italian, Maltese | Message 39 of 47 24 November 2011 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I am very sorry to hear your sorrow, and you have my compassion... but I can tell you some things that might put your troubles in a different perspective. I have been ostracised by Amazon because I'm poor. I don't have a credit card, and Amazon.com doesn't accept any other method of payment. Some other internet bookstores opened up the opportunity to pay through paypal only recently. 10 years ago there were practically no internet stores available for me. My only option was a local bookstore. Now, I started studying Albanian. Interesting language, culture, country, people... but - the local bookstore has no connection to Albania. No Albanian books available in Sweden. I found the books I wanted, I found the ISBN, but no - the bookstore cannot take in those books. So - what to do? I found an Albanian bookstore that sold the books, but - alas - only with credit card. I have been trying to find an Albanian person who could buy me the books and send them to me. I have not had such luck. 2008 an acquintance designed a cover for new fantasy book for children. It sounded interesting. I have been hunting for that book since then. After that parts 2 and 3 in the series have been published. I added them to my booklist. The problem is - these are in Maltese... Malta belongs to EU, like Sweden, but - the local bookstore has no connection to Malta. I managed to find a Maltese "book depository" sort of internet store where I found parts 1 and 3, and part 2 in another bookstore. I am eagerly waiting for the packages, a little afraid of being cheated, but - what can a girl do. I want the books, I am ready to pay what was asked for, and - now I wait. I am studying French now. I am really interested in a French tv series, which has been published as DVD, is available in French Amazon.com... with other words - not available for me. Again, for some reason, my "local DVD provider" only gets in DVDs from UK, USA and Sweden. Heh. But why would any of that stop me from using the resources I have and not learn languages? I'm sorry, but to me your complaint sounds like what Khatzumoto calls "luxurious worries". http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/luxurious-worries The thing is that people learned languages to learn how other people think and feel and how they built their cultures already thousands of years ago. Kató Lamb managed to learn several languages with nothing but an old book and a dictionary. She was ready when the opportunity to get her hands on other material opened up. You can learn the language using which ever material you have at hands NOW. Besides... what stops you from leaving the country you are living in right now and moving to a country that is more suitable to your preferences? What stops you from traveling and fetching the material from the country of origin? Is this material going to be confiscated at the border back home? Do you have friends or acquintances who travel? Could you ask someone send you the material you want, just like millions of other people do? Do you have any people who come from a country where your target language is spoken around you, and do they perhaps have books, magazines, DVDs etc. you could borrow, or perhaps exchange? Could you teach your language to an immigrant for exchange of his/hers? Can you write or call to the country's embassy in your country and ask them for help? Is there a "country to country friendship club" or something similar in your country? I mean... there are options. I have social phobia, so I'd rather use old-fashioned material than go to talk to people, but I cannot understand how someone would opt to quit studying languages all together just because he/she can't get hold of PERFECT material? I'm sorry if I sound harsh. I have empathy for you feeling disheartened, just not understanding of your reasons. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5157 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 40 of 47 25 November 2011 at 12:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Language learning materials... these are grievous offenders. That is why I like to stock up.
Thanks for the advice. I will keep it in mind the next time I encounter this. One problem that keeps recurring is subtitles in foreign languages showing up like the Russian sample above. I had tried opening the .srt file in Notepad and saving it as Unicode, and sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. I will try Firefox next.
I just hope the choice is not made for us.
Agreed. By the way Volte, your PM is not working anymore: "Volte has exceeded the maximum number of Private Messages they are allowed to receive."
Your situation can more easily be mended though. You might find different employment alternatives that generate greater income, apply for a credit card, and use it to acquire your materials. If on the other hand the kindle, the ipad and similar devices gain foothold and manage to displace physical media while maintaining the distribution scheme used by them thus far, there will be very little you or anyone else can do to access most of what is available to read, listen and watch in our target languages. This is a very serious challenge and it would affect everyone everywhere. Edited by Juаn on 25 November 2011 at 12:31am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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