Talk:Osho Books on CD-ROM

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Osho Books on CD-ROM, or Osho Books Database, as it has become known among net sharers, is pretty much the most stupendous and awesome tool for finding specific words of Osho's there is and ever has been. Even now (2014), more than twenty years old, it still cannot be beat, though various forces are chipping away at it. Herewith a brief history and overview of its features, limitations, availability, errors (yes!) and missing titles, along with a space at bottom for questions and discussions.

History

In the beginning was the word. And the word was ... Oops, wrong liturgy! In the beginning was the Silver Platter, as it was first known. Emerging digital technologies were opening up an amazing array of possibilities, which dovetailed nicely with the need to "organize" Osho's words and make them more accessible than ever. And so it came to pass that all of Osho's English books (including Hindi translations) were scanned and the images read and "translated" with new, primitive but adequate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software into editable text.
And this text could be put into one giant file, 100MB for 303 books, in which word searches could be carried out. And for such giant files, a special kind of search was needed, and so one came along to fill the bill. Folio VIP developed a kind of search that still has no equal, with tools that would allow finding words in proximity to each other (i.e. within paragraphs) and much much more. Subjects, themes, specific quotes, jokes, all findable in that mountain of books. Now it was Osho Books on CD-ROM.
A CD-ROM is of course just a generic device, but for sannyasins with access to it, this was THE CD-ROM, needing no qualifying or descriptive terms. Access was restricted to certain workers for some years but its desirability was immense and it was inevitable that copies started leaking out. Soon copies of copies spread far and wide and it was not long before they were being shared on the net. Disconnected from its physical body, a disc, it became known as the Osho Books Database, or just the Database.

Features

The uniqueness of Folio's search tools is likely less because of their technical genius and more just because the market for such software is fairly limited, so that even now it has not been much developed. The history above referred to proximity searches. The basic building block of this function is first grouping all the words into paragraph units, so that searching for two or more words at once finds all their occurrences in the same paragraph. Other giant file search services do this too, but Folio added Boolean and other search modes, "or," "not," exact quote, "wild card" modes and so on, and its pièce de résistance, a search for two words with a specified closeness, eg within six words of each other.
Besides the variety of tools to refine searches, there is an excellent help section dealing with how to apply the tools specifically to Osho's words, and a well-organized set of appendices to assist in that application. Outside of their uses ancillary to the search tools, the appendices can be used directly by researchers as sources of information. One recent example in the wiki is at Talk:Who Is Progressive?.
Another feature of the CD-ROM/Database is its treasure trove of unpublished books. These are books whose text has been through a rough edit but never went further than that to actual publication. There are sixteen such Darshan Diaries, six volumes of Last Testaments and a few other books, most of which will likely never be published. Thus this is the only form in which this significant portion of Osho's oeuvre is available anywhere. Ah, this!
The CD-ROM also introduced us to the Archive Code. The Archive Code is a 7-digit code to uniquely identify any lecture by its date and time of day it was spoken:
e.g. I Am the Gate, lecture 1 is 7104140, i.e. 1971 April 14 morning,
The Zen Manifesto, lecture 11 is 8904105, i.e. 1989 April 10 evening.
The last digit represents the time of day, where morning = 0 and evening = 5.

Limitations

One obvious limitation is that it is only useful for searches in English. A Hindi equivalent may eventually happen but would require everything to be done more or less from scratch, both scanning and software. A related limitation in the English Database is that many titles have been translated from Hindi since the early 90s but have not been added. A list of such titles has been started below.
And there are these technical limitations: From the very beginning, this marvel has only been available for computers using Windows, or with such shoehorn apps as allow Windows to run on Macs and other OS's. A more serious limitation has developed in the last five or so years whereby the newer versions of Windows will not run the Database at all. Win 7 32-bit and older will, Win 7 64-bit and newer will not. Is the Database on its way to the scrapheap of history?
Negatory. There are signs that help is on the way. There are currents flowing. As before, it is too big to contain or stop, but the exact nature of the help that is being and will be developed to bring it back into use and accessibility by newer computers is not known. Stay tuned, and don't throw out those older machines just yet!
And with the technical fixes / updates, who knows?, may come content updates, all the new Hindi translations and ... well, that OCR was never perfect, so there are more than a few typo-type mistakes to clean up. Lots to do on the never-ending journey to perfection!

Availability

So, dude, where can this, like, totally excellent product be obtained, eh? It is said that the CD-ROM was available as an authorized commercial product briefly in 1994-95 but this was discontinued. (The text on the image of the CD-ROM seems to support this possibility.) So now there are the copies of copies and whatever can be found on the net. Open sharing via file-sharing sites was prevalent for a few years but seems to have been finally (2010?) squelched by the (claimed) copyright holder. But web hosting in some countries such as India and Russia is out of reach of copyright holders and so there is a site in India where it can be downloaded. The site owner, Sw Rajneesh, enjoys his image as an Osho rebel and is willing to bear the bandwidth costs, so this situation may persist for a while.

Errata

Note that this is not intended to cover OCR "typos," as there are many and this is not our purview here. Also, in the early 90s there WAS an ongoing file being kept in Publications of all editing improvements needed for the next edition, relating to mistakes in the hard copy (plenty of them too, inevitable when you consider the pressures of putting out three new books a month). This errata section is for CD-ROM "admninistrative" errors.
  • The third Appendix, "Listing of Titles to Minititles," sounds very bureaucratese without much wide application, but a wealth of information is actually there with clues relevant to all kinds of questions. And there are a few errors.
The minititles are used (optionally) in searches to limit searches to any one book or group of books. Beyond that, the appendix lists all known English titles, what type of book, and whether their text is included in the CD-ROM. A "Yes" in the last column is what indicates that. Several books have that "Yes" but are not actually in, because they are compilations of other books that ARE in. They are:
A Must For Contemplation Before Sleep
A Must For Morning Contemplation
At the Feet of the Master
The Mind of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
In addition, Finger Pointing to the Moon is actually in the CD-ROM, accessible in all the usual ways, but is not listed in this Appendix.
For this Darshan diary, dates for the first twenty chapters are given correctly, with Chapter 20 on Oct 31. Chapters 21-26 are incorrectly dated from October 1, both as text and archive code. This should be November.
(The Darshans in October, e.g. 7610015, were documented in The Great Nothing.)
Dates of the chapters are wrong, they refer to the chapter numbers of The Inward Revolution, which have a completely different order.
The CD-ROM says about this book:
"Chapter 1 is called the ""Preface"" in the book, Chapters 2 - 17 correspond to Chapters 1 - 16 in the book. Chapters 18 - 34 correspond to the Appendix of the book, 1 - 17."
This is not correct: the chapter numbers on the CD-ROM correspond exactly to those in the book. But Osho's introductory lecture at the camp, which in the book is the preface (without chapter number), is in fact missing on the CD-ROM.
(Another discrepancy exists between the audio-tape series and the book. Tape-lecture 1 is the book's preface, lecture 2 is chapter 1, and the discrepancy continues until 7: tape-lecture 7 starts with book-chapter 6 and continues with book-chapter 7. From 8 the numbers are the same.)
  • CD-ROM-appendix "Listing of Discourse Series in Chronological Order":
Several dates are wrong, especially in the earlier series. Should be elaborated.

Missing on the CD-ROM

Here is a list of material from Osho that is missing on the CD-ROM v.1.01 (the most complete version). So these are Category:First Edition Series and Category:Translated_First_Editions which are missing on the CD-ROM, and also unavailable under another title. These are mostly Hindi books translated into English after 1994.
Behind a Thousand Names
Flight of the Alone to the Alone
Gita Darshan
Gita Darshan, Vol 2
Life Is a Soap Bubble
LSD: A Shortcut to False Samadhi (later published in The Great Challenge, but heavily edited)
Meditation: A New Dimension (later published in The Great Challenge, but heavily edited)
Pointing the Way
Showering Without Clouds
The Art of Living
The Fabric of Life
The Message Beyond Words
The New Alchemy: To Turn You On's Preface (actually is Osho's introductory discourse for the series)
The Way Beyond Any Way
There Is Utopia
Towards the Unknown
Work Is Love Made Visible

Discussion, Questions, etc

There was a note at the bottom about the second edition having removed "a handful of" Darshan Diaries. Would that be all 16 of the unpublished DD's? Or which ones exactly? Now the Last Testament mention is gone, presumably meaning that all of them are still in the second edition. In any case, any omission would make the second edition less valuable than the first. Which is i guess why it is the first which circulates on the net. -- Sarlo (talk) 10:24, 11 September 2014 (PDT)