Lets start an ebook library....

[Shadowdh]

Hi there all,

as I seem to be doing more and more of my reading on my phone due to time contraints and ease of use I am looking around for ebooks in Chinese (or even about China/Chinese)... quite a few of the titles I am not sure about so I thought perhaps we could post/attach a library of sorts... now due to copy right and so forth any books up loaded will have to be free or out of copyright...

We could put the info and files in the form of;

Title

Format

device

any other info...

thoughts?

[renzhe]

The Grand eBook First Page Project?

[sui.generis]

A forum thread isn't the best place to "host" files, because once it gets to a certain length, lots of files get lost in the shuffle and hard to find.

But I love the idea of a chinese text library. How about a wiki instead? We could organize the titles better, make it easier to find what we're after and make recommendations here in this thread.

[skylee]

now due to copy right and so forth any books up loaded will have to be free or out of copyright...

such as?

[renzhe]

Most of the early 20th century classics should be out of copyright. Lu Xun, Ba Jin, Mao Dun, Xiao Hong, etc.

And there are plenty of older works which have been out of copyright for centuries.

[skylee]

I see. So there would be a lot of early-20th century books in the ebook library. Or even older books. Or, I guess, books of which the authors don't claim the copyright?

How long does it take for copyright to expire? 60 years after the death of the author?

[renzhe]

Internationally, it's minimum 50 years after the death of the author, nationally these vary. In the US, I think they raised it to 90 years, because of Mickey Mouse. So, any author who died before 1940 should be fair game, and there were many interesting books from that time. This is also one of the reasons why older books are so cheap -- anyone can print them.

There could also be books which use a permissive license (like wikibooks) and where you are allowed to copy them, but I don't think that there are many novels using this distribution method at this time.

[sui.generis]

There could also be books which use a permissive license (like wikibooks) and where you are allowed to copy them, but I don't think that there are many novels using this distribution method at this time.

There's a fast growing market for novels by indie authors with this type of free distribution in the US (see feedbooks, smashwords and mobileread), but I don't know if authors in China might trying this model out on the same scale.

[Erbse]

Check out project gutenberg, which also has more than 400 Chinese books:

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/zh

[roddy]

As far as the forums are concerned, I'm not too concerned about copyright as long as we're talking about 'Chinese-for-the-Chinese' products which are already pirated on a massive scale. Where possible link to wherever they are located, but if necessary they can be hosted here, for the time being at least.

This does NOT apply to materials designed for Chinese learners. You can't post or link to those. Yes, this is double standards, but the markets, and the potential impact of this site on the markets, are totally different.

[Shadowdh]

Thanks Roddy... sounds ok to me, no double standards there, just clarifications...

I will up load some later as have to get dinner going now for the little uns...

[creamyhorror]

Oh, a First Page Project would be nice. Introduce some recent, engaging fiction to me so I can get the book from a bookstore (we have a fair few here) and actually have a proper read.

I'm guessing we should stay away from Western authors in Chinese translation, though...?

[taylor04]

The only problem I see with this is how easy it is to get Chinese books. If you can read a Chinese book, you can easily find it on the net. I guess I'm confused as to what the purpose of this is, although I could see a chinese-forums book difficulty rank thread quite helpful.

[chrix]

The only problem I see with this is how easy it is to get Chinese books. If you can read a Chinese book, you can easily find it on the net. I guess I'm confused as to what the purpose of this is, although I could see a chinese-forums book difficulty rank thread quite helpful.

Maybe I just don't know where to look, but I often don't find books I'm looking for online (mostly in the fields of history and philology). With the exception of "fine literature" of course. (I think most Books of the Month threads come with download links for the book in question)

[gato]

For history and classics, try

http://club.beelink.com.cn/index.asp?boardid=168&topicmode=11

百灵书库

http://bbs.gxsd.com.cn/index.php

国学数典

Registration is required.

[in_lab]

Most of the early 20th century classics should be out of copyright. Lu Xun, Ba Jin, Mao Dun, Xiao Hong, etc.

On the Chinese page, Project Gutenberg only has Lu Xun. I'm not sure why.

[renzhe]

Actually, Ba Jin only died a few years ago, that was a brainfart on my side. Mao Dun in 1981.

Xiao Hong's works should be available soon, though, if they aren't already.

[edelweis]

There's this site 百书库 but I am not sure what the contents are. Is it a Chinese version of fanfiction.net ? Or is it amateur original fiction? or are those published books?

My Chinese is not good enough, could someone have a look?

[Prodigal Son]

I hope this gets off the ground, it's a great idea

[xifbk]

What I think would be cool is a collection of links to Chinese text/posts/blogs, where the readers have the ability to rank the difficulty of the text. Would be a great (and more interesting) substitute for Chinese readers.