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Quest Publishing Books in Electronic Editions

Jun 27, 2011 08:03 AM
by MKR


Tim Boyd
President
Theosophical Society in America
Wheaton, IL


Dear Bro. Boyd:

Let me first congratulate you on being elected to the office of President of
Theosophical Society of America. All the members should be grateful for your
volunteering to take on the great responsibility of the office.

In the recent issue of Quest, Betty Bland had indicated that Quest would be
putting out electronic editions of selected books. This is a very welcome
news in the current environment of many using computers for storage and
retrieval of information.

In this connection, few days ago I found out that that Theosophical
University Press has just released the collection of Judge's writings
compiled by Dara Eklund. It is available as print edition as well as HTML
and downloadable PDF file. Electronic formats are free to download.

 Pdf file is now de facto universal non-proprietary format that can be read
on any computer and high end phones as well. Creation of pdf file is a snap
because they can be created out of the electronic files used for hard copy
printing.

What TUP has done is going to make the electronic material easily available
to theosophists around the world since anyone from anywhere can download the
file. They are showing the best way to distribute theosophical material
especially to theosophists outside the Western countries.

There are two issues noticed in many of the recent well-known publications -
pricey nature and bulky size. The recent publication of Blavatskyâs
discussions by Gomes and Judge Case compilation by Pelletier, both cost
nearly $100.00 which most theosophists cannot afford. The later book is also
quite bulky.

Recently I purchased the two volume collected writings of Geoffrey Hodson
published in Philippines, with 900 plus pages in each volume, which is very
bulky and impractical to carry around.

An electronic file can be loaded into a computer or even a microSD card and
can be searchable by word. So there is a strong incentive to get an
electronic copy. To meet this need, some commercial hard copy books come
with a free electronic copy .

In the above circumstances, when a decision is taken to release electronic
editions, Quest may want to seriously consider the distribution file format
as well as the pricing so that there would be widest and most efficient
circulation of theosophical material to the students around the world.

Thanking you for your time

Fraternally yours,


M K Ramadoss
TS Member, San Antonio, Texas

cc: Nicole Krier, theos-talk


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]





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