Rest assured that all European languages are covered as most of them use the same script. For now, Kindle only supports a limited number of fonts that cover around 40 languages. Notwithstanding the opinions of those who prefer real books over Kindle, I have taken to serious reading after I bought myself a Kindle. To fear technology is like fearing fire.Kindle has revolutionised book reading. When there is demand there definitely will a need to supply. The Kannada institutions should take interest and insist on inclusion of Kannada at all levels. We need to make Kannada strong by enabling it to be strong digitally. To protest against new technology is anti-development. But today we are rich in online resources in Kannada. Nobody visualised at that time that Kannada would have such strong presence digitally soon. When I started blogging in 1996, I was the lone blogger. We should insist on Kannada being included in the digital format and not argue against it. Any publisher is predominantly interested in the commercial aspects. Vausdhendra dismisses Girish Rao’s sentimental reasoning as “this is similar to the protest faced during introduction of all electronic gadgets. Amazon is mainly interested in the commercial aspects of publishing and does not take into account the emotional quotient, he said, adding that even if Amazon asks him for his book he would refuse to give the permission. He agrees that this effort to exclude Kannada from digital world is similar to protest dubbing of film and when there are several applications like kaibooks, digital library of India, the times for e-books becoming popular is not far. Kannada publishing world is small and will be greatly hit by the digital market he says. The storm was not this, but the argument put forth by author, journalist Girish Rao Hatwar that demanding digital books is actually dangerous for the Kannada publication sector and that currently there are very miniscule percentage of readers for e-books and it would actually lose out on a large section of readers who are not tech savvy. I can just keep one or two Kindle there for people to browse through”. He argued that he is building a house and it is a big decision what to do with his book collection as “I don’t want to throw it but building a rack for books is so out dated in this digital era.
Amar Tumballi a techie has expertly shown how to make Kindle Kannada enabled. There were several supports for his petition as it is not a Herculean task and also because only when the regional languages are included that the digital divide can crumble. All these Indian languages have far larger user base”. If it can be done in Europe with such smaller languages it can surely be done with all Indian languages.
Suitable guidelines have to be issued from the Govt of India in this regard to all the manufacturers.”īeluru Sudarshana explained that “we need to respect linguistic plurality of the country.
The petition says “All the products (both software and device like SmartPhone/Tablet, Smart TVs, etc), manufactured by any IT Tool companies, whether Indian or Foreign, which target the Indian market shall be instructed to provide inbuilt rendering engines for Unicode and should be able to render any Indian language text without any hitches or glitches (All Scheduled and Non-Scheduled Languages) at interface level and also at user screen level. This news created a storm in the social media with global Kannada readers angrily thrashing Amazon for its “anti-Kannada attitude” and soon a campaign started with Beluru Sudarshana drafting a petition to the Minister for Information Technology, Government of India, demanding that all IT gadgets should have inbuilt Indian language tools. Without a doubt Kannada has very rich literature and need to be included in all digital possibilities.”
I believe Amazon will soon support five Indian languages – Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam and Gujarati. Many Kannadigas were thrilled to see Kannada fonts on Kindle. They have sent an email saying, “We do not support Kannada”. Said Vasudhendra, “Amazon has deleted the Kindle version of my latest book. In this context, it was really a reason to rejoice for Vasudhendra when his book was Kindle supported.