It would be nice if the "Go Book of Peach Blossom Spring" was available in digital form - preferably PDF or in SmartGo Books.

Do you have any plans for a digital edition?

Marcel

Thank you for your suggestion! Since I am using Amazon's CreateSpace, there is indeed an option to publish on Kindle. However, I do not plan to publish a digital version for the time being for two reasons. 1. The formatting cannot be preserved. In Go Book of Peach Blossom Spring and Three-Stone Games, for instance, each diagram (with multiple variations and their comments) fits nicely on a single page. In the case of Four-Stone Games, the text is significantly longer so it may be very inconvenient to scroll back and forth between diagram and text. (I am aware that you only asked for Go Book of Peach Blossom Spring, but if I make a digital version for that I would need to consider the other books as well.) 2. Although CreateSpace is non-exclusive, if I choose another publisher for the digital format I believe there are some subtle issues that I need to look into. I will consider that if there is great demand.

If I could get it for kindle, I'd (90% sure) purchase one or both. Having to purchase from Amazon/CS I'd need to add shipping (luckily being CS I can purchase in my "local" Amazon and pay reduced fees) but it adds to the "mental price tag."

I just checked that PDFs are not recommended for conversion to Kindle and that I will need to prepare a separate interior file preferably in doc format. This will be too much effort for me since my original files are all typeset in LaTeX.

I can understand your "mental price tag," but notice that there is a 10% discount on Amazon and the books are prime eligible. Perhaps you can save them for later when you have other stuff to buy there. (The books are print on demand, so they should not go out of print as long as CreateSpace remains in business!)

Sorry that a digital version will not be available in the foreseeable future, but thanks for your interest!

I've picked up go kindle books from Japan which are just duplicates of the physical books. They can't do reflow text, but they are still very good to read.

Interesting! Out of curiosity, I've gone ahead and ordered both. I can try to post a review once I get them.

Hi sun ruoshi,

I just got yi miao book and after few secondes i already like this book. The quality seems good and i can see you like the game of go. In few days i will write something about the games.
Thank you for share this kind of book , i hope more books like this .

Frédéric

Forgive my ignorance as a relative newcomer, but how do these Chinese saints compare to their contemporary Japanese peers? My understanding is that Japan was leagues ahead of the Chinese in Go theory during this era.

Forgive my ignorance as a relative newcomer, but how do these Chinese saints compare to their contemporary Japanese peers? My understanding is that Japan was leagues ahead of the Chinese in Go theory during this era.

While josekis may evolve and fusekis may go out of fashion, the beauty and the underlying principles of go are eternal. I hope you will discover the marvels in [these books] and apply them to your own games.

That's just Japanese PR. Go Seigen, who knows a little about go sanctity himself, ranked Huang Longshi with Honinbo Dosaku. Others have called Zhou Xiaosong the Japanese Shuwa, for example. Add to these the likes of Guo Bailing (probably superior to Sansa), Xu Xingyou, Fan Xiping and Shi Dingan and you have a team that would match anything the Japanese could put out at any era.

In defence of the Japanese attitude, during most of the Edo period the country was officially closed and so very few go players had access to Chinese go. One rare example who did, because he had a father-in-law who was a scholar of Chinese, was Hayashi Genbi. Himself close to Meijin standard, he gushed about the Chinese players and printed several in his Rankado Kiwa.

When Japanese people were eventually able to get to China easily, in the early 20th century, China was in an economic and political mess, which naturally impacted severely on professional go. What the Japanese saw, therefore, was go at that time of rather poor standard, and they, not unnaturally, inferred that previous Chinese go had been inferior, too.

However, the Japanese did make an important change by dropping the starting stones, and so there is a strong case to be made that Japanese go was richer in interest.

Conversely, note that there are achievements in China that the Japanese did not match for a very long time, most notably the standard of commentaries. Xu Xingyou's masterpieces are nearly three centuries of Japanese commentaries, and they themselves show how rich was the understanding of go in Huang Longshi's time (Go attributes the discovery of amashi to him), so we don't actually need to rely on Go Seigen's opinion.