Salam

In 2004/05 fall my friend Hannes and I went to London Book Fair. Here we could see 3000 publishers and distributors all over the world.

At this point I would like to put only 1 important point that I saw there.

It is :

• many technicians from India/ China produced many ‘How to do ..’ books and manuals for the public to read and use while using camera, video recorders etc etc.

It looks so simple and thin (about 50 - 60 pages ) but it reflects that those two countries had encouraged the workers from all sectors/ strata to write and document their expertise. By doing so, their technology improves by leaps and bound. India is famous for railway engineering and automotives while China is expert in making explosive elements like our fire crackers during the Chinese New Year and big events like Merdeka Tournaments. To add more to this, Thailand is famous in creating imitating ‘Bonia’ products and they do this profitably by the process of proper documentations. If I were the Minister of Education, I would request all the teachers and those that are in the line of teaching in the College Communities, politechnics and universities to write a book each .. before they retire. By this way we create our own book industries and save a lot of money flowing out of this country. Imagine writing a book about ‘how to prepare drinks from Tongkat Ali - dedicated to 50+ men’. See? Then there will be translated books in malay, mandarin, tamil, and many more languages. If in a year we could come out with 100,000 books written by teachers and out of these number there will be 10 very very good books .. I think ..the society will benefit a lot from the presence of teachers in this country.

These are the types of books that can be put in the libraries ranging from the schools to the universities. We can save a lot of foreign exchange. God Willing!
This somehow reflects that in Malaysia as a very rich country .. Imagine we have produced ‘keris’ a kind of traditional weaponery in Asia used by Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat .. and we can write books, manuals about it. Eventually we can sell it and may be New York and London Libraries would put them in for readings and references by their citizens. See?

TQ. Thats what I got after spending 4 days fully sponsored by the Late Mr Bakar (Melaka). He owned a big business specializing in importing university books for Malaysia. What happen after his death? Al-Fatihah.

Wallahu aklam.

Original link: https://nenez9595.blogspot.com/2010/11/world-book-fair-in-london-2004-2005.html