tyfen

Recently, in a local newspaper1, I read that in 2035, my County Library “will only buy e-books”. It is important to be clear that the library the article was speaking of is a university library devoted to human sciences. In the following lines, while bringing together facts of the present and the past, I’ll try [...]

We experience that every day. Our e-mail, Twitter and Facebook accounts constantly pop up, distracting us with silly out-of-context messages, while we should be concentrating on this new short story, this one mile long e-mail, or this paper to be written for yesterday. A new software trend has seen the light: the distraction-free word processors [...]

Funny timing. Yesterday evening, Lausanne University (UNIL) Department of Human Sciences organized a symposium about what will happen after the so-called “death” of paper books. Its title: “Qu’y aura-t-il après le livre ?” (viz. “What will come after the book?”). A few hours ago, on the other side of Atlantic Ocean, Steve Jobs announced his [...]

As a librarian, I mainly order brand new books; as a book collector, I chiefly buy old editions. Typically, for Indian reference books (dictionaries, grammars, classics), I prefer carefully printed first editions than cheap, blurred and smelly reprints. Even if they need to be restored or re-bound, 19th century editions are far better than nowadays [...]

Oxford will always strike a chord with European sanskritists, and for many legitimate reasons, one of them being the library of the former Indian Institute founded by Sir Monier-Williams, now part of the Bodleian Oriental Institute Library, and its very rich collection of Indian manuscripts started by Horace H. Wilson. Last week, on Monday—June Bank [...]