[Buddha-l] Good resource site shut down

[Christopher Fynn]

Gigapedia was full of medical books and journals, scientific,
engineering and technical publications as well as arts & humanities
material. The contents of some of those books is probably as essential
and valuable as medicine.

I suspect the site was largely put together by some university
librarian who had access to all this material in digital format and
thought they should be more freely accessible. It was not simply a
site where people uploaded books they had scanned

The approach of TBRC seems reasonable. They charge enough money to
university libraries and western subscribers to cover some of their
costs, but make everything freely available to people in India, Nepal,
Tibet and Bhutan (and many penniless western scholars as well).




On 16/03/2012, Joy Vriens <joy.vriens at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> One can't compare lack of medical material with lack of cultural
> material, but yet I dare to make that comparison. If one sees how hard
> it has been to lower the prices of AIDS drugs in third world countries
> and the pressure that was put on those countries to pay the full whack,
> there is little hope for cultural material. Finally it was accepted that
> the poorest countries had cheaper access to medecin, but those just
> above the arbitrariliy decided poverty level had to continue the full
> price. And here we are talking about medecin and AIDS, an illness that
> doesn't care about fronteers and GNP level. Culture is a luxury good,
> one doesn't need it to live, and certainly not to survive. There are
> currently cuts in its budgets and it's not an issue anymore in any
> election. I expect Chanel, Guerlain etc. will soon buy over publishers
> and commercialize books as luxury commodities.
>
> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/a-trade-barrier-to-defeating-aids/
>
> Joy
>
> "Where I live almost no one has a credit card, there is no library with
> books like that available, and even if they could be ordered many of
> those books would cost someone about an average months salary here."
>
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