nilanjana s roy

Tag: ebooks

  • The BS column: Rule, Britannica (online only)

    (Published in the Business Standard, March 2012)The names on the spines of the Encyclopaedia Britannica form a litany. As a child, I browsed my way from Baltimore to Braila, Extraction to Gambinus, with a special stop at P-R: Plants to Raymond of Tripoli. That was from the fourteenth edition, with somber dark blue spines instead…

  • Book review: The Groaning Shelf, by Pradeep Sebastian

    (Published in Biblio, July 2011.)The Groaning Shelf and other instances of book lovePradeep SebastianHachette India, Rs 395, 295 pagesISBN: 978-93-80143-03-3In 1994, the Internet in India was an infant, alien presence, and to log on was akin to conducting an arcane temple ritual. With sufficient patience and enough supplication, the creaking modems of those days might…

  • Speaking Volumes: Reading on rent: ebooks

    (Published in the Business Standard, July 25, 2011. Will probably do an expanded version of this soon, with a greater focus on reader’s rights and how we stand in danger of losing them.)It takes less time than you might guess to convert a reader wedded to the idea of the physical book into a Kindle…

  • The BS column: Ebooks and Wylie’s War

    What Gutenberg really did when he invented the printing press was simple: he changed the relationship between book and reader. It’s often forgotten that pre-Gutenberg, you were either a patron—able to afford to commission your own manuscript, copied painstakingly by scribes from an exemplar—or a privileged member of the Church, or, more commonly, just a…