here, here (was: Re: What Devanagari text would you most like as an e-text_

[Stephen Hodge]

I think that the need for digital / searchable editions has different 
priorities for different people. Not wishing to labour the point, but 
further to what Stefan has just written, one must bear in mind that the main 
professional users of BHSD are going to be people like Stefan and Andrew in 
their field and people like myself who work with Buddhist texts which 
usually do not have any surviving Skt material touse but try to read through 
Tibetan and Chinese translations to find the possible or probable underlying 
Sanskrit -- or as is now increasingly recognized, Prakrit -- by identifying 
likely candidates through parallel passages which have been cited, through 
the Pali equivalents which BHSD invariably notes.

Again, the sheer convenience of an electronic version of such works is 
immense.  As you yourself may do, I do like the touch and feel of proper 
books, but there are many occasions when a digital version makes life so 
much easier.  I imagine that many of the contributors here take their 
laptops with them if they need to travel afar to conferences etc, but even 
more mundanely, I for one do quite a lot of productive textual work in bed 
at night . . .    Having worked with Buddhist texts for more than forty 
years, I can assure you that the present availability of huge amounts of 
digital material has improved the quality of my research work beyond 
recognition.

I'll say no more on this.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge