Students from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Burma, Sri Lanka and Bhutan have easy access to cheaper books, which looked like a pipedream a decade ago. One of the initiatives in this regard is that of PHI Learning, which believes in spreading education with affordable and high quality texts.

Yogesh Srivastava, marketing executive of PHI Learning, said that under the imprint of Eastern Economy Editions, books of science, humanities, management, computer information, were available at cheaper prices. `'Basically, we provide Indian students with the best of both the worlds as books by Indian authors are also provided for,'' he said.

Books ranging from Reinventing the UN by Ajit Banerjee and Murari R. Sharma to Sociology of Religions by Ali Shariati, from Kotler and Keller's Marketing Management to Fossils in Earth Sciences by Anis Kumar Ray are available.

PHI Learning has collaborated with IT giants like Microsoft Learning and NIIT, and university presses such as Harvard University Press, MIT for publishing and promoting a wide range of their texts in India.

Finding your favourite book is now just a click away. A Delhi based renting website, Friendsofbooks.com empowers you to locate your favourite book without having to search for it in different stores.

It's a simple process, all you need is a computer and an Internet connection.

Log onto the site and register yourself. Then select your book from their library and add it to your bookshelf. And within two days, the book will be delivered at your doorstep.

Making book-reading simple for you are the brains behind Friendsofbooks.com, Aarti and Manish.

Set up by the Vadehra Gallery, the store in Defence Colony also has a large reading room sponsored by The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art.

As part of its opening, the gallery also organised a panel discussion - "Archiving Contemporary Art" - that stressed on the need and ways to archive contemporary Asian art and provide a database to collectors, dealers, artists, researchers and the industry.

The speakers included Claire Hsu from the Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive, Austria-based scholar and archaeologist Eric Neumayer, who has collected extensive material on prehistoric art, painter Raja Ravi Varma and Indian popular culture, and Annapurna Garimella from Art, Resources and Teaching in Bangalore.

Speaking about the importance of archiving the large body of contemporary art in Asia, mostly from China, India, South Korea and the Philippines, Hsu said the Asia Art Archive was trying to do its best as a collectors' endeavour to spread awareness, preserve and catalogue contemporary art.

Beginning as a personal project in 2000, it is now one of the leading archives in the continent with more than 20,000 titles accessible to the people free of charge, both online and offline.

Prof Dutta was speaking on the occasion of the release of the book `Historical Diversities: Society, Politics and Culture,' a collection of essays edited by K.L. Tuteja and Sunita Pathania. Many eminent historians have contributed essays for the book including Bipin Chandra, K.M. Shrimali, Indu Banga, J.S. Grewal, Aniruddha Ray, Barun De, Irfan Habib, K.N. Panikkar, among others.

The book consists of 19 essays spread over modern, medieval and ancient India and gives rather concise and indepth, introspective inspection on major historical eras. The essays have been written for Prof V. N. Dutta who has touched the lives of most of the historian-contributors in some way or the other.

Welcome to the new e-age classroom. In a few schools in India, the Intel's classmate PC (CMPC) programme is revolutionizing teaching as well as learning. In some schools it's at pilot stage while in others the actual rollout has started.

The class starts with the teacher uploading a small video on the topic she is teaching. She keeps on adding her inputs during the video session which plays on each child's laptop via a WiFi (wireless fidelity) connection. The students are required to take the PCs home and bring them back fully charged.

After the lecture, the teacher gives a small group exercise and forms their groups electronically. Students needn't sit together to perform the group task. They can interact via chat windows. Each one can see what the group leader is doing on his PC and add inputs.

During the class, some students start talking. Immediately a message pops up on their screens in bold -- `keep your mouth shut!' Meanwhile, Amit tries to surf the internet for the latest cricket score. Instantly, a message pops on teacher's master PC and she disallows Amit's PC's from doing anything but the exercise.

In fact, the teacher's master PC's monitor is nothing but an interactive white board placed on the wall instead of a blackboard. The teacher uses the interactive white board to draw or write. And for that she does not need a chalk or pen. She can do it with her fingers. At about Rs 13,900 for a Linux-based PC and Rs 15,500 for a Windows XP-based PC, each student is equipped with a small, blue coloured notebook PC with a 2 GB or a 4 GB memory.

In the pilots for the Millenium School, Intel provided 1,500 CMPCs. "Initially it was challenge for teachers to transit from the traditional mode of teaching to a new method but the turnaround happened in a month's time and the results have been great," says Abhinav Dhar, president, K-12 initiative, Educomp.

Cheek-by-jowl with a dozen shops in the bylanes around Chawri Bazar metro station are a row of second hand books that stock study material for engineering and medical entrance examinations as well as course books for MBBS and engineering courses.

Popular picks
BBD Chaurasia's book on Anatomy (Part 1, 2 and 3) is available at a 25% discount at Krishna Book Shop.

Real steals
The IIT course material of Brilliant Tutorials, which is originally priced at Rs 7000 can be had for Rs 1500-1600 here.

The popular series of study material of Arihant Tutorial for the all-India engineering entrance examinations is available at Vidhya Book Centre at a discount of 35-40 per cent. Books on Physics, Chemistry and Biology by Dinesh Publications for the medical entrance examinations are also available at 30 per cent discount.

The 1,000-page "Rog Nidan" has practically come as a godsend to medical undergraduates in northern India, who begin their studies with an obvious disadvantage -- they are from Hindi medium institutions.

"The language barrier trips many of these promising pupils into performing poorly in exams," said S.S.L. Srivastava, who noticed the problem as head of medicine at LLRM Medical College here.

So he took upon himself the task of writing a textbook of medicine in Hindi, though some of his friends and colleagues tried to dissuade him from the daunting if uncertain venture.

The importance of the venture was underscored by S.P. Bajaj, former head of the burns department of the Delhi-based Safdarjung Hospital.

Said Bajaj: "Though handy books on medical disciplines are available in Hindi, there were no textbooks on medicine in the vernacular."

Srivastava determined that his textbook should help raw undergraduates negotiate the complexities of clinical landscape, grasp signs and symptoms of illness, show them how to read the pulse, sound heartbeats, palpate the liver, in the comfort of their own mother tongue.

The backbreaking work took him seven years to complete and printing took another year. "Rog Nidan", launched without fanfare, quietly hit the bookshops in 2007, priced modestly at Rs.500.

Next time you visit the National Zoological Park, make it a point to see some of the rare trees it has.

For instance, whole of Delhi has just four Baobab trees, commonly known as Kalpavriksh (Adansonia digitata). The Delhi Zoo has three of them. It also has two of the only four remaining Winged Calabash or Gourd tree (Crecsentia alata) in Delhi.

When the zoo was conceptualised in the 50s, trees from Indian (Asia), African, Australian and American continent were planted to suit the needs of the animals from these places. "Because of that, the zoo has a rich variety of flora with many rare trees," said Zoo Director D.N. Singh.

The book tells us there are as many as 5,591 trees of 125 species, which includes four species of palm and seven species of bamboo, both not indigenous to Delhi. The book is a result of a two-year long project, meticulously carried out by Dr H.B. Naithani, retired botanist from the Forest Research Institute (FRI), Dehradun, and IFS Dr N.S. Bisht, former head of FRI's Resource Survey Division apart from Garden Superintendent Ravinder Kumar.

Zoo administration has already put 800 nameplates on trees and further plans to put up display boards at different places on the ring road inside the zoo. "Plantation of trees that are five or less in number would be taken on priority this monsoon," he added.

The book lists the names of the species alphabetically .

If you thought training modules by e-learning companies can only be delivered online, think again. Anil Chhikara, president, 24x7 Learning, an e-learning player, claims that the company has already started delivering its modules through podcasts and mobiles.

"The younger generation wants a more collaborative and interactive interface to learn, something they can carry in their iPods and mobiles," he says.

The growth in the e-training market is also pushing Muralidhar Rao, COO and president, NIS Sparta -- an Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group company -- to extend its training modules beyond desktops to mobiles and iPods.

"By the end of 2008, we will enable employees to use e-learning modules on various handheld devices and PDAs during their tedious commutes," says Rao.

Action in India's e-training market is also attracting global e-learning players. Crossknowledge, a Europe-based distance training solution player, has announced an exclusive tie-up with NIS Sparta to launch over 248 e-learning modules.

Crossknowledge boasts of over 1 million users and has tie-ups in 45 countries. "We have a network of 12,000 professionals across 65 countries, who meet regularly to exchange information about managerial issues," says Hervé Gouchaux, co-creator of Crossknowledge.

Back home, NIS Sparta's Rao says that corporate training via ipods and mobiles will help employees make good use of their commuting time. Companies, on the other hand, will get the best out of their investment in e-learning tools.

The content NIS Sparta will make available on the mobiles is designed as a follow-up to classroom teaching and will include text summaries.

These summaries will be simplified to facilitate easy navigation on the mobile phone keyboard. The quizzes will be restricted to short multiple-choice questions.