CC-India Discussion List

[Anivar Aravind <anivar.aravind AT gmail.com>]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Kannan Moudgalya <kannan AT iitb.ac.in> wrote:

Dear Anivar Aravind,

Congratulations - the role of Swathanthra Malaalam Computing in achieving this is excellent.

Dear All,

From the Aakash team, we need your input on the following:  We are in the process of converting the NCERT books into ePub form to work under Aakash.  We have ported 130+ books, with about 70 remaining.  Mostly, Hindi and Urdu books are yet to be completed.  We are concerned about the distribution of these, however.  Although the newspaper article says that NCERT books can be distributed for free, their site does not.  Your comments are welcome. 

AFAIK http://nroer.in/home/ is under CC-BY-SA .  I dont know about textbook availability in that . If it is available it must be  redistributable under same license . It will be good if you can make epubs avaiable for public consumption too.

After completing the NCERT books, we would like to begin this work for the books of state boards as well.  Your comments on these are also welcome.

About SCERT & Kerala Text books,  There official order will take few more days . please wait for that

BTW Swathanthra Malayalam Computing is working closely with SCERT for bringing out  HTML, EPUB and PDF versions of all text books .

We are helping SCERT to build a Mediawiki based textbook preparation system for collaborative content preparation by text book commitees and  FOSS based XeTeX setup for book authoring and PDF/EPUB/HTML generation.  So without any technical issues you can start using official Epub versions once it is released.

 

Regards,
Kannan

On 15/11/13 6:10 PM, Anivar Aravind wrote:

Dear all ,

Some happy news for all of us .


The School curriculum steering commitee of  Kerala Govt's SCERT(State Council Educational Research and Training)  decided  3 majors points in our interest yesterday

1. SCERT is improving Book printing infrastructure by shifting from Adobe 's softwares to FOSS based XeTeX and free licesned fonts.

2. They will shift from ASCII to Unicode . This will also help in universal access for differentially abled via technologies like Text to Speech even in Malayalam Language .

3. The books will be licensed under  CC-BY-SA . 

Official Order is still pending. But I am posting this since it is already in media reports.

Read a repotrt in TOI http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/news/Now-free-software-to-set-school-textbooks-in-Kerala/articleshow/25781341.cms

The Change will be applicable to all newly publishing books from now Starting from Malayalam Text books in 5, 7, and 11th standards

Myself, Hrishikesh K.B and a team from Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (http://smc.org) are working closely with SCERT from last to help  them in initiating this change process.  

Thanks to Dr. P.K Thilak, Research Officer  SCERT , Director SCERT, and  Biju Prabhakar IAS (Director of Public Instruction, Govt of Kerala )  for initiating this Change.

~ regards

Anivar Aravind

Secretary

Swathanthra Malaalam Computing

http://smc.org.in

Ph. 09448063780

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