Arthur Attwell

With the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference coming up in February, James Turner (writing for O'Reilly Radar) interviewed me and Ramy Habeeb of Kotobarabia about ebooks in Africa (me) and Arabic ebooks (Ramy). We seem to be the conference's two developing-country experts, and perhaps this shows in our focus on ebooks and digitization as tools for upliftment and knowledge-preservation. We're clear that those priorities should be integral to our business interests.

I particularly like this practical approach Kotobarabia has developed to dealing with the difficulties of digitizing Arabic works:

The thing that we do is to scan the pages, and then we'll have people read the pages and pick out key words so that the books become semi-searchable. We do these for most of our books. But if we find that a book is being read over and over again or that this title has a particular interest, then we'll go back and retype it. It's actually cheaper this way to do it, it's a more sustainable business model.

If you don't feel like reading the article, there's audio of each interview there too.

I've been working on an argument (when it grows up it'll be a presentation) about how publishers should set up simple ways to sell licenses to their content. These licences could be bought by a small or large business from the publisher's site, and that business could then reuse and resell the content. (Publishers could make the licenses valid only for regions their supply chain doesn't normally reach anyway.)

I'm a little concerned that this is the suggested ICT tools page of South Africa's national education-resources portal. Perhaps I'm missing something, so to be fair, I should find out more. And anyway, pages like this should be built by us interested citizens. I'll try to draw up a list over the next few months and send it in – suggestions welcome.

Last year, Creative Commons began a study of what people think of its 'non-commercial' licence, and yesterday the report was published. Creative Commons licences are ready-made licences that you can put on your work to make it clear to others what they can do with that work. CC licences encourage sharing, and they cut out the hassle of dealing with permissions requests.

One of the optional features of a CC licence is to allow 'non-commercial' use, but it's really hard to define what that covers. The new study doesn't try to define 'non-commercial' in more detail. Rather, in the open spirit of the Commons, it records the views of people who use CC licences. Those views are not very surprising. Importantly, the report emphasises that putting a non-commercial licence on a work can be a bad idea, if your intention is primarily to share.

In a telling op-ed piece in the New York Times, legal-lingo expert Adam Freedman cuts to the chase on the debate about the 'right to bear arms' mentioned in the US Constitution's Second Amendment: it's all about a comma that means everything to us now, but meant very little to its writers. The article is worth a read just to see the power that a comma can have. Freedman's piece exposes the flaw at the heart of so many legal documents: language changes over time and varies from person to person, and it can never make a constitution or a contract truly watertight. Not even if the writer uses the fanciest legal terminology.

Mark A. Shiffrin and Avi Silberschatz believe America should control the Internet. They did invent it after all, and can't trust the rest of the world to keep it free. That's fine. There are a few things we invented in the Rest of the World that we'd like to control too, if that's okay.

According to the NY Times, "Investigators appointed by the Vatican have been instructed to review each of the 229 Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States for 'evidence of homosexuality' . . . ." The Vatican's document asks seminarians to answer a few questions (the real questions are in italics below). To make it easier for seminarians, and to reduce the chances of a brigade of Vatican investigators stomping across the grass in the quad and ripping the heart out of your Diana Ross collection, here are a few royalty-free suggestions for answers.

Selbourne Gawu is well-dressed and well-spoken, and is capable of something I could not have done at his age: approach a stranger in a wealthy suburb to ask for money. Selbourne Gawu is about 15 years old, well-dressed and well-spoken, and bears an uncanny resemblance to Tiger Woods at the same age. He shows the same fresh-faced astonishment at the world that I imagine I once did. Except he's capable of something I could not have done fifteen years ago: approach a stranger, who's just stepped out of a red convertible in a wealthy suburb, to ask for money.