Letter to the Publishing Industry

Dear Sir, 

 

My name is Shekar Hariharan and I am writing this note just to bring to your notice my thoughts on the recent ebook pricing conflict that your organization along with many others are trying to resolve.

 

While I admit that I am not completely aware of the entire argument, I just want to let you know my feelings as an individual book lover. I live in India and though our education has stressed on the virtues of book reading since time immemorial and culturally my country has been in center of literature for several centuries, we unfortunately are a poor nation by and large who cannot afford expensive books. 

 

Though people like me - who are affluent enough in relative terms, can very well afford whatever prices are quoted, our likes only form 5% of the entire population of India. Remaining 95% of the population struggles each day to make their ends meet.(especially considering the inflation we (the neo-affluents) have caused in recent times). 

You can well imagine, for someone trying to make their ends meet, purchasing a book is nothing but just a dream!

 

eBook has been a revolution in its own regards - especially for country like ours - where strong desire to read conflicts with an even stronger constraints of inability to spend on it. eBooks with its low cost of "existence" does promise to eliminate this "conflict".

 

Besides making the book affordable, it has revolutionized by democratizing the availability of ANY and EVERY BOOK regardless of its nation or culture of origin. What more can be a better benefit of this new connected world which is making it "flat" and "fair" for every one to gain from it, regardless of which part of the world they reside in.

 

So as a common book reader hailing from such a nation , I only urge all of you - the big publishing empire, to kindly keep "us" in your consideration while taking decisions or fighting legal battles against or with each other and finally deciding the entire business model around eBooks.

 

Please Please do keep them "affordable" so aspiring readers belonging to developing nation like mine or even poor nations also benefit from this paradigm shift that publishing industry is going through!

 

 

Best Regards

Shekar

 

The new FLAT world of Education – Sky is the limit!

 

The new FLAT world of Education – Sky is the limit!

I vividly remember the afternoons of my high-school-childhood when amidst reading an Erich Segal novel, I used to get into a world of fantasy. The fantasy was not about lands of chocolates or about star wars or supermen, it was about the world of Harvard business schools and its elegant class rooms, dorms, proms and all those elite species of people who used to become the backdrop of all (almost all) his plots. I used to almost recreate the entire city of Boston and the institution in my own way on my own canvas of meta-physical mind. I often used to imagine what life would be if I was part of that landscape too? What if I too attended those fancy courses/subjects which I had trouble even spelling them correctly?

25 years later, lot of things changed – both in what my notion of a fantasy is as well as the world itself. And with these changes - something changed for good which is simply democratizing the entire field of education.

Welcome to the new flat world of MOOCs. For those of you who have not yet been initiated into this new jargon, it stands for Massive Open Online Course -  A platform that opens up education from all leading universities to anyone in the world who cares to fulfill their learning desires – be it Aristotle's Philosophy , Social Psychology, Learning Python/Ruby or even exotic courses like History of world culture. Anyone with a semi-decent internet connection and relentless desire to learn ANYTHING now has an equal opportunity to attend a class delivered from leading universities via renowned professors of those specific fields! And what more – Its free and that too at your convenience at your own home which ever parts of the world it may be in.

Typically these courses last 6-8 weeks requiring the aspirants to devote 6-8 hours a week, listening to video lectures, doing class assignment and projects, evaluating peers submissions and a few weekly quizzes here and there.  And Yes – There are hard deadlines and interactions with "real" people and "professors" just like it would have been in a real class. You even get an official certificate upon completion with requisite score criteria.

Now why am I writing about this ?

Well, definitely not to promote a certain specific site or institution. I am writing this to hopefully "stir" some of you in taking the first step towards fulfilling some of your latent educational desires. We all might have had (in the past) or may now have developed a "hunger" for taking your subtle passion into a more formal level of education. (..And if not, why not think about that NOW )

My assumption is that anyone reading this post in LinkedIn is a working professional and hence is in constant act of balancing his/her time against zillions of competing needs. MOOCs offer you the opportunity to just sneak in that "small" space into your never-have-enough-time schedule and fulfill those desires.

My story continued…

Okay – So this is what I did. My chance encounter with a MOOC offering site called www.coursera.org opened up a whole new world of knowledge to me – specifically to all those "exotic" courses from "even-more-exotic" universities which I always wanted to.  Today I have done several courses from Universities such as University of Michigan, Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Wesleyan University on topics ranging from Model Thinking, Game Theory, Leading Strategic Innovation to even – Introduction to Philosophy!

And yes, fortunately during my stay in United States, I actually did visit the Harvard Campus too, just to "feel" those fantasies of younger years!!

In closing – Let me recap a dialogue from one of the recent-popular Indian movie where the protagonist (who is a nerd sorts) speaks to a non-affluent poor boy who serves him the tea. The tea boy apparently is narrating his tragedy of why he couldn't afford education because he didn't have money. The protagonist's casual response loosely translates to "…but then who said you need money to get education…Knowledge is available everywhere, you just need a school uniform to go and sit in any class you want to."

That's the new reality.  What are you waiting for?

PS: A simple Google search on MOOCs can help you get a listing of all sites that offer such courses. Will not bother listing them here so I don't give you a list that will become obsolete even before my next post.