Forsyth and Fry and the QBook app in Hong Kong
If you're in the book business, there are a million reasons to attend the Hong Kong Book Fair, which runs until next Tuesday. Along with the expected one million visitors, there's Stephen Fry saying that "Humour Should Transcend Language", while Frederick Forsyth holds forth on "Modern Spies Influenced by Ancient China".
And here's another compelling attraction: Kiwa Media, a New Zealand company, is displaying its QBook, an iPad application that converts children's print books into multilingual, interactive digital versions. Readers can point at a word and the app will pronounce it. They can also use their fingers to colour in the books' illustrations. Tap the screen and a pull-down menu offering English, Mandarin, Spanish, German and other languages appears. The text is automatically translated.
Small countries, such as New Zealand and Ireland, need to emulate Israel's model as a start-up nation and move into the Information Age. It's good to see the Kiwis doing it for themselves... and the rest of the world. All they need now is for the All Blacks to teach the Wallabies a lesson on 31 July in Melbourne. There's no app for that, yet, though.
There's a wonderful song, I wish I'd mentioned it to you earlier. We could have played Spanish Is The Loving Tongue, a very hauntingly, beautiful song. And he had a lovely voice, but he was also, I think, a great poet. And he was the background music to a lot of people of my age. I don't take a lot of stock in generational thought, as you know. I think generational solidarity is the lowest form of solidarity there is. But I think that for every decade or so, every generational set, there is a special voice. And certainly for my lot, it was him. And I would have liked him if he'd only written about lost love and blues and so on. But he also had a few things to say about the war and the civil rights movement, and so on."
