Vanity Publishing or an Archive for the Future?

Three months ago, just before Christmas 2006 I bought a dot com domain name and found an Internet Service Provider to host it in the United Kingdom. There is an ongoing cost of hosting and a annual cost of paying Nominet a fee as the domain name registration authority. I have bought the cheapest package on the market, although this meant sharing a web server with associated poor shared bandwidth problems, slow loading of pages from perhaps an aged server as the backbone. I meant this to be a present for my gifted designer younger brother who is somewhat handicapped. Why did we want a domain and website in a world where a zillion such sites exist already, doing every single thing and where every business model has been thought about and exploited. This did not prevent me from thinking I had a unique “business plan”, not so much to rake in millions as one of my new friends thought, but to dream about unleashing a project like the “Gutenberg” on an unsuspecting world. Somehow I had to find a way of financing this.

My mission statement which I scribbled on the back of a virtual envelope says it all....what I was not prepared for was the sheer amount of work involved in designing a clean, user friendly, largely graphic-free site that would take months of hard work.

Here is my mission statement.

When a well known poet-writer-journalist died a few years ago, a mutual friend lamented the fact that with the passing away of such people all that is left is what is published and above the parapet whilst the rest is swept away and lost forever, Even published journalism is treated as mere ephemera and even if published online becomes unavailable with the passage of time. A whole lot of good journalism rendered before the days of the universal use of the Internet in any case remains un-digitized and unavailable as a resource for friends and family and admirers. My idea was to archive and make available for instant viewing of all that could be saved and shown from a website with a simple URL address. Greatly gifted and hugely talented writers and artists like Dom Moraes, O.V.Vijayan, Anil Saari, Shankar Menon Marath and thousands of others who are alive and writing merit such a archival treatment. Asia-major website is such a venture.

This is not a vanity publishing venture. Asia-Major does not wish to be a publisher or an editor. Asia-Major reserves the right to refuse to accept contributions without giving a reason.

No payment is sought and no payment made to the contributor, writer or his estate. The writer or his estate remains the copyright holders. Asia-major acts merely as a window to showcase the work which might otherwise be lost. This allows a writer to show his past work to a whole host of people including his current readers, researchers, biographers, and prospective publishers without having to go the effort of setting up a domain name or a single–occupant blogsite and design a website around it. With Asia Major hopefully the writer would be in good company of many distinguished writers. To make Asia-Major site more attractive the site already provides a rich and increasing collection of ready researched links to a variety of information on India which would save time using a search engine.

We secretly hoped that placing Google Adsense code on each page would deliver relevant ads and would generate a click-through revenue sufficient to pay for maintaining the site. It did not take long to realise that this was a pipe dream. The clever roaming robot of Google using the Adsense java script anchor might place ads relevant to content of the page, but the revenues are a fraction of a US cent per click and it takes thousands of click-throughs to accumulate a few dollars. Millions? A kind friend who is a talented humorist who was happy to contribute naturally asked if there were a “few quid” in it for him. A question I would have asked myself.... the answer is “not likely”. Even if there was a million dollar revenue stream, there is no means of measuring a segment of the revenue originating from any one contributor’s page ads and no way of working out a share out among –hopefully – hundreds of contributors in the fullness of time, and thousands and thousands of archived pages of work. Many similar projects – as my friend pointed out – shut down, because a credible revenue generating business model, sadly does not exist. Meanwhile it must remain a labour of love and therefore unremunerated work.

However such an idealistic project needs support. It needs good contributors to come forward and offer their work for free. To enable Asia Major come up in page ranking in search engines like Google, it needs cross links from other friendly websites. Here comes the appeal: Do you have a website of your own? We would be grateful if you would give  http://www.asia-major.come/ a cross link.

You can view the list of current contributors at  http://www.asia-major.com/Reviews/reviewsindex.html 

There are several contributors in the pipeline – awaiting copyright issue clearance, some famous some not so well known but like my  friend & talented humorist, eminently readable.