Burning books

A little while ago I read somewhere of the books of one Wendy Doniger being burnt in India, having offended one or other of the more rabid Hindu outfits there. Not much caring for either the burnings or the outfits, I thought I ought to show a bit of solidarity with her by spending some money at the Doniger shop. So I turned to Amazon to find that there anyway she appeared to concentrate on the sex end of Hindu studies, which did not particularly appeal. Furthermore, most of the prices were a bit outside my solidarity budget and in the end I settled on a Kindle version of the 'Britannica Encyclopedia of World Religions', for which she acted as consulting editor, whatever that might mean. Was she just lending her name to the endeavour or was she adding some more substantial value?

I have been dipping into the encyclopedia ever since. The first and most lasting impression is that this book was designed to be printed and the translation to Kindle does it no favours.

The encyclopedia is organised into an introductory section, a number of major articles - topics like 'African Religions - and several thousand minor articles, for example there is one about a chap called Haldi, the national god of the kingdom of Urartu, now part of Turkey East. But I can neither find a list of major articles, nor can I find a satisfactory way to browse among the minor articles, which last is good and instructive entertainment in our Chambers.

I suspect that the coverage is a bit uneven, and what little browsing I have done suggests that Judaism and the Old Testament punch above their weight.

The compilers make an effort with words which originate in funny alphabets or worse, which may be OK in the OED or in the printed version of this book, but in this Kindle version they just clutter. See for example the entry for Abd al-Ghan.

They include the pictures, which arrive on the Kindle in back & white half tone. Visually unattractive and a bit intrusive. They might have done better to leave them out, except perhaps in places (I have yet to find one) where the text would be incomprehensible without its illustration.

I have not found the index, if there is one. An important adjunct to a work of reference of this sort, because however cleverly the thing is organised one is always going to want something which is not going to spring out of that particular organisation. In database terms, if the thing is to be really useful, one needs more than one index and in terms of this book, just one index would do, although to be fair I am not completely clear how such a thing might best be presented on a Kindle.

I find the Kindle interface for anything other than reading simple text rather hard work. Maybe it would get better if I had more practise, but it is still going to be streets behind the sort of thing that Samsung offer, or could offer.

But I remain sure that, given a notebook computer on which to read the result, one could produce an electric encyclopedia which was much more competitive with a paper one, such as our Chambers, than this one is. But would it add enough value over Google and Wikipedia, would the considerable effort needed be justified? Thinking aloud, what it might offer is a homogeneous collection of material about the selected topic, homogeneous in the sense that there was some structure, that there were organising principles which one could get to know and that a reasonable standard of scholarship had been maintained throughout. There had been some editing and review of the outpourings of the hired help. Then if one was interested in the topic, which I am, I could spend profitable time with the thing and learn more than I might by just poking around with Google and Wikipedia. It might be a useful work of reference. It would be a lot more portable than Chambers.

In the meantime I offer the Kindle translators one suggestion. They should add to the start of each article a special character, for example '#'. The idea being that if I use the standard Kindle text search feature for '#aaron' I get the article about Aaron, if there is one, rather than a list of all the places that the strings 'Aaron', 'AAron' etc appear in the text, a list which is quite long and from which it can take quite some time to extract something which is really useful. A competent clerk should be able to do this by hand in a few days and a competent programmer in a few hours. Just think of all the user satisfaction that such a modest investment in staff time would generate.

PS: before starting this post this morning I turn to Wikipedia to find that she is nine years older than I am and is or at least was the elaborately titled 'Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago', and has taught there since 1978. A professor who is a Sankritist by trade, but one who dabbles in psychoanalysis and who has a taste for some of the more exotic - not to say erotic - Hindu texts. She appears to have stirred up plenty of controversy in India, where they cannot sort out between themselves whether she is a good thing to be lauded or a bad thing to be burnt. For myself, while being an atheist, I can see that as a hard core Hindu one might be a bit put out to have one's religion listed as number 13 (or whatever) in a list of World Heritage Religions. My religion is the one and only True Faith, not just number 13 of 33 and once you admit the other 32 as being of comparable status, you are well on the road to being an atheist, you might as well give up.