# Digitized books on Aceh - but are they accessible to Acehnese?


[![](/files/uploads/2009/04/picture-25-142x150.png)](/files/uploads/2009/04/picture-25.png)
[![](/files/uploads/2009/04/picture-26-150x150.png)](/files/uploads/2009/04/picture-26.png)

From [Klaus Graf](http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5638233/), via [Open
Access
News](http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/04/oa-collection-of-books-about-aceh.html),
The Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in
Leiden has digitized more than 656 books in their collection about Aceh,
in several languages (Indonesian, French, Dutch, etc). Their website,
[Aceh Books](http://www.acehbooks.org/). This is exciting news for me,
since I have found it very hard to access Indonesian language books
after returning from Jakarta. I have often wished that there were some
serious book scanning projects started in Indonesia, because the country
has a history of some excellent fiction, and of course there are many
important social science and other non-fiction books as well, that are
crucial to understand the history and culture of the country. However,
these often exist in very few copies, so that even Indonesians in one
part of Indonesia cannot access them, unless they travel thousands of
kilometers to Jakarta or other centers.

However, I am a bit concerned about how accessible these books are to
Indonesians themselves. Part of the reason is that many libraries in
Aceh were destroyed during the tsunami, and ideally people in Aceh would
thus be able to access and read the books made available. However,
currently they are only available as PDF-scans, the two books I tried
were 60-80 MB downloads each. Having worked in Jakarta, I know that even
in the best of circumstances, download speeds are extremely slow. In
Jakarta, we spent a lot of money on a dedicated satellite connection,
but it was still not fast - in the regional office in Tangerang, we
shared an ISDN connection or similar, and even downloading e-mail was
painfully slow.

There are already good interfaces for presenting scanned books online -
I've previously written about Open Library
([1](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/04/02/google-books-step-aside-openlibrary-makes-reading-fun/),
[2](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/08/03/openlibrary-and-universal-library-guys-work-together/),
3), and their interface, which only shows one page at a time, might be a
good option (also, it would enable people to find the books more easily
- rather than having to know about a specific page for Aceh-related
books). Another possibility would be to upload them to a place like
[Scribd](http://www.scribd.com) as well, which "streams" PDFs. I haven't
tested Scribd in a low-bandwidth environment, but I am assuming it would
be far preferable to having to download 60MB. Of course, ideally, the
books would be OCRed, and the text corrected by volunteers (or perhaps
KITLV could pay some students in Aceh - Indonesian salaries are low), so
that one could instead distribute text files weighing perhaps half a
megabyte. (These can also be put on e-book readers, which would be
important for me, if I wanted to read one of these in the future).

It would also be nice if KITLV could specify the copyright conditions of
these books - some of them are old enough to be public domain, but some
seem newer - does KITLV have special agreements? Am I allowed to upload
them to Scribd, or do other things with them?

All in all, a great beginning, but hopefully these are questions they
will think through - in collaboration with people on the ground in Aceh,
who know far more than I do about what they need! I also keep hoping
that some rich Indonesian (there are certainly enough of them!) will
want their name immortalized through funding a large-scale book scanning
project of the Indonesian heritage.

Stian (in Hong Kong, going to Guangzhou and South China Normal
University today)