by arun » Oct 26th, '08, 10:48
Sukanya wrote:Good Suggestion.
Last year we had approached few Oriya (now it's Odia

) authors and publishers to make their work available online. But many of them were not intersted because of the fear that people won't buy those after seeing the contents online. Then we stopped. U may notice, many writers these days want their books to be purchased by libraries and NOT by people!
But a better idea would be to invite the Odia writers to submit e-copy of their work "partially" so that users of OrissaForum can have a preview and decide whether to buy or not. Also we can publish those literary work which are free of copyrights. Any interest from authors, publishers in this regard are most welcome.
Lets put aside the "money" factor for a moment. How would it be to get the classic odia literature online? This can range from "Bhagavata by Jagannath Das, Geeta Govinda etc." to the literary works (Granthabalis) of great odia leaders (e.g: Gopabandhu Das etc..). My idea is not to sell them but to make them available online "free". We can put them in Wikibooks.org.
I don't think we have lot of challenge in the tech front for creating/distributing odia content. All we need is to get started. Get hold of a book and start putting the content online.
Any volunteers for this?
Need inspiration? Here's a feel of how we are doing with other Indian languages (its primitive but surely we're doing great progress):
http://hi.wikibooks.org/
http://sa.wikibooks.org/
http://bn.wikibooks.org/
Can someone advise the right way here? How to contact the publishers etc?
<ps>Sorry for bringing this old topic up. I think this issue needs a bit more attention. Thanks</ps>
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)