Aozora Bunko

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Aozora Bunko ( Japanese 青 空 文庫 , Eng. "Library of the Blue Sky") is a Japanese project to build an electronic library of freely accessible texts, similar to Project Gutenberg . The website offers free literary works by Japanese writers and poets, mainly from the Meiji and early Shōwa periods , whose copyright has expired or whose copyright has been transferred to Aozora. Translations of foreign works and works of contemporary literature edited by the authors themselves are also offered. The project was started in 1997 by the editor and writer Michio Tomita.

overview

In Japan, copyright expires 50 years after the author's death. Therefore there are texts on the site earlier than z. B. at Project Gutenberg. In connection with improving trade, the US and Japanese governments launched the US-Japan Regulatory Reform and Competition Policy Initiative in 2003 . This initiative saw, among other things, extending the Japanese copyright law to 70 years for individuals and 95 years for legal persons. The project spoke out against extending the copyright to 70 years and collected signatures against the extension from 2007 onwards. With the change of government from the LDP to the Democratic Party in 2009, this initiative was overturned by the Yukio Hatoyama cabinet .

The contents of the works on offer range from politics and poetry to crime novels and entertainment literature. Most of the time, the complete works of an author are not available, but there are also writings on a small scale that can serve as introductory reading. In early 2011, the project exceeded 10,000 documents.

The source is an unformatted text file without images and illustrations, since the authors of the illustrations and the text are often different people and the duration of the copyrights therefore differs. The texts are available either as a text file, encoded with the JIS X 0208 character set , or as an XHTML file in Aozora's own formatting. The Ruby extension of the W3C is used for the XHTML files . The files can also be used on cell phones and PDAs .

One problem that the Aozora project has struggled with from the start is the lack of volunteer proofreaders. The texts are also entered and processed by volunteers and, in a second step, proofread and improved by the group of correctors. The texts are only made publicly available after the correction has been completed. The lack of proofreaders has always led to a large number of texts being declared waiting to be corrected and thus not accessible.

use

The website of the Aozora project offers both a subject and a person index. The data can be downloaded as a list in CSV format and as a compressed ZIP file. Details can also be called up as a website as follows: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/xxxxxx/cardyyyyy.html

  • xxxxxx is the six-digit identification number of the person you are looking for (with leading zeros)
  • yyyyyy is the up to six-digit identification number of the work you are looking for
    • Example: Faraday no den (ID: 46340) from Aichi, Keiichi (ID: 1234) results in: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001234/card46340.html

There is also a separate collection of essays ( Zuihitsu ).

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ List of signatures against the expansion of copyright law in Japan (Japanese)
  2. ↑ 青 空 文庫 、 収録 作品 が 1 万 点 に 到達 at Internet Watch
  3. ↑ Introduction and operating instructions (Japanese)
  4. ↑ 随筆 計画 2000