Indian Epics Options Update

Here's an overview of how things are coming together really nicely!

KINDLES. I had a great conversation with our OER goddess Stacy Zemke this morning, and we are moving full-speed ahead with the Kindle books! Lots of questions still to investigate, but it looks like we will have SOMETHING ready for Fall so that students will have access to this wonderful set of books on Kindles in the Library, including audiobooks, with details to hash out later. I am so excited! If anybody is using institutionally-managed Kindles in their Library, I would love to hear about your experiences. We are pretty much making this up as we go along.

COMIC BOOKS. The big box of comic books arrived at the Library, and I am working away on those reading guides. I am EXTREMELY happy with how that is going. Here are the guides so far: Amar Chitra Katha. Here's the Library unboxing picture that Stacy sent me:

VIDEO. This is going to turn out to be trickier than I thought, so I am feeling less optimistic about this, but it's not essential — if this piece of the plan falls through, it falls through. And who knows: we might still manage to get access to Peter Brook's Mahabharata in a streaming arrangement, but Stacy is not really sure what our options are going to be. And I was just now wondering if maybe our Language Lab might come to our rescue here. Anyway, we have possibilities yet to investigate!

MUSIC. Even if I am not having good luck so far anyway with the video, I am having so much fun creating my YouTube music channel of Indian music. I've embedded it in the sidebars of the Indian Epics blog spaces, and I'm really excited about encouraging students to make their own YouTube channels and share them in their blogs too! Meanwhile, I am officially obsessed now with ghatam music!!!

BOOKS. For the books not available on Kindle, we need to get a Library copy on reserve. I see they already have Buck's Ramayana, so they just need to get a copy of Buck's Mahabharata, which the Library currently does not have, and we'll be good to go there!

PUBLIC DOMAIN EDITION EPICS. My public domain "anthology" editions of the epics are going great! I more-or-less finished the Public Domain Edition of the Ramayana, and I have the first round of the PDE Mahabharata done: images, text, but I will be swapping out the text with better options as I worked on the other public domain sources (see next item).

PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS. And, of course, the public domain ebooks are going great, with students able to access those on any computer anywhere anytime. I am now working on the Reading Guides to go with those; I'm doing Romesh Dutt's verse Ramayana and Mahabharata first, and my goal is to have those books both done by the end of next week. Fingers crossed! Each of those two books is good for three weeks' worth of reading each; here's the Guide for the first week of Dutt's Mahabharata.