[Buddha-l] The state of buddha-l: a brief report

[Alberto Todeschini]

Richard Hayes wrote:

> (Something to  
> consider: it is not always wise to piss off the members of one's  
> examination committee, and they might be pissed off if they had to  
> print out a thesis themselves.)
> 

Makes sense! I guess I'll do the printing. At least I know it will be
printed on both sides.

> My principal worry about material being available in electronic form  
> is that people will eventually get out of the habit of using books and  
> journals that haven't yet been made available in digital form,  
> resulting in a lot of excellent scholarship being doomed to scholarly  
> oblivion. That may sound improbable and futuristic, but just in the  
> past two years I have received an increasing number of essays from  
> students that have nothing but websites in the bibliography. This past  
> year, to my horror, I received a senior thesis for an honors B.A.  
> student that did not have a single printed work in the bibliography.  
> Every reference was to a website. The thesis itself was printed on  
> paper. Try to imagine what a pain it was to check out some of the  
> references. Well, OK, it was no worse than the old days when I had to  
> take a bus to the library and spend several hours in the stacks to  
> check out references.
> 

I had a student who used wisegeek.com as main source for a paper on
caste in India.

> When I eventually turned the thesis into a book, I  
> furnished it with plenty of irritating endnotes, hoping someone might  
> read it. But the price of the book was so high that no one has ever  
> read it anyway.

I'm not sure about your book (I have the UVA library's copy here) but
nowadays one can find tens of thousands of academic books in PDF, DJVU
or HTML through Gigapedia.com. They don't host the material, they just
have links to filesharing sites. Routledge, Oxford and Cambridge UP,
etc, most of their recent books, including those on Buddhism, can be
found there. Obviously, depending on what country one lives in,
downloading them may be illegal. Even so, while publishers are failing
to provide what readers want (affordable books in the format of choice),
people have taken upon themselves to obviate the situation.

Best,

Alberto Todeschini