Information – Page 24 – Auxiliary Memory

Safari Books Online

Safari Books Online is a subscription library for computer books and tech training videos, with some additional subjects that also appeal to computer book readers, like digital photography. They offer individual and corporate subscriptions, and many libraries are subscribers too, so you might check your library first. Safari Books Online has a 10-day free trial if you just want to get the feel of how it works. Right now they are offering a 5-Slot Bookshelf for $9.99/month, a 10-Slot Bookshelf for $22.99/month and the unlimited Safari Library for $42.99/month. You only have access to Video Training and the Rough Cuts (prerelease books) titles with the Safari Library.

I got an offer for the 5-Slot Bookshelf when I registered one of my O’Reilly books to get a 45 day free access to the online edition. For $10, I figured I’d try it out. It’s a bit confusing how they work things. With the 5 and 10 Slot Bookshelves, you can only read the full text of 5 or 10 books at a time, and you must keep your picks on your Bookshelf for at least 30 days. You can preview all the books, but they only show the top third of each page.

At first I was cautious about filling up my 5 slots, but as I spent time actually studying books, time passed quickly and I usually seem to have 1-2 books ready to be checked back in so I could pick new ones. I felt for $10 a month, this was a real bargain, but I was disappointed I couldn’t see the Video Training and Rough Cut titles. Then one day Safari sent me an email offering a 20% discount to the Safari Library subscription, or just $34.99 a month for up to 12 months. I figured, what the hell, and switched. I can go back any time to my 5-Slot sub if I want to.

What a Bargain!

One reason Safari Books Online appealed to me was because I was having to switch my entire programming paradigm at work form ASP to PHP and I was about to go out and buy a bunch of new computer books for PHP, jQuery, CSS 2, XHTML 1.1, CodeIgniter and Eclipse. I tend to buy computer books, use them for awhile, let them sit on the shelf for five years, and then put them out on the free book table at work. Spending $120 a year and having access up to 60 titles seemed like a real deal. More than likely I’d probably only read 10-20 books for real, but even that is a huge bargain over buying the books.

Reading Online

Most people don’t like reading books at their computer screen, but if you’re reading computer programming books while programming, ebooks work out great. At work I have a dual monitor setup and I even turned my left monitor to portrait mode so I can enlarge a full page of a Safari book so I see the entire page at once with about a 50% magnification. Of course this now makes me want to have a triple monitor setup, with Safari book on left, Eclipse IDE in the middle, and browsers on the right. But don’t get me wrong. reading a Safari book on the same screen as the editor isn’t bad either.

Books can be viewed in two modes: page mode and HTML. I prefer looking at the page mode because it’s just like the printed book, but cutting and pasting is easier from the HTML mode. However, reading is less pleasant from the HTML model unless I up the browser magnification and narrow the window so the scan line width is reasonable. In page mode you have nice big margins and the print and fonts are the same as the printed book. If the original book was hard to read, then page mode is also hard to read.

Slowly I’m learning that hanging on to page mode is limiting. Once books are freed from the confines of pages, content can be presented in new ways. I expect Safari to discover this in the future and invent new ways of looking at the material. Books like the Head First series beg for this kind of treatment. I also expect in the future there won’t be a division between printed books and video training titles. If authors start writing titles specifically for Safari Online Books they could teach in new ways.

Selection

As of today, I can select from 9,902 books and 631 videos. Plus lots of great computer book publishers are a part of Safari Online Books:

O’Reilly (Head First, Missing Manual)
Sams (Teach Yourself)
Packt Publishing
Addison-Wesley Professional
New Riders
Microsoft Press
Peachpit Press
Manning Publications
Adobe
Que
Apress
Sitepoint
Sybex
John Wiley & Sons
Prentice Hall

Most of the titles relate to computers in some way, but there’s lots of books on photography, and occasionally there’s a book that relates to investment or retiring. I have 80 books flagged that I want to read.

The Future of Books

For special purposes, like these technical books, a subscription library really makes sense, and I’m perfectly happy to do without the printed edition. I expect publishers to even do away with the page mode and eventually optimize everything for HTML mode which also works with mobile devices and ebook readers. I would even buy a subscription to a science and history book library if I owned something like an iPad. For fiction I prefer audio books or a device like a Kindle. I wonder if subscription libraries for other subjects will catch on.

I think the future of books is paperless publishing, and Safari Online Books even hints that rental libraries might become an alternative to owning books. However, rental libraries are rather specialized. I’d be interested in a science and history rental library if its selection was as broad as the Safari Books Online is for computer books. Also, I imagine that a rental library for school textbooks would be appealing to kids if durable iPad like devices caught on.

In my quest to give up paper, I’ve stopped getting magazines and newspapers, and now I have an alternative for technical books. For fiction I prefer audiobooks. Before now, I would have said art/photography books could never be replaced by ebooks, but while my second monitor was in portrait mode, my desktop background cycled through some art pieces, and they were very impressive magnified that way. Freed of the confines of the printed page, art might do very well in ebook editions. I saw a comic book on the iPad which had a mode of showing the page panel by panel and it was obvious the iPad is now the best way to look at a comic.

JWH – 4/25/10

Can You Call Yourself an Expert in Any Subject?

I would think most people could call themselves master in the subject of themselves. But do you have any topics that you feel you are an expert? Think small when considering this unless you’re really the leading authority in a bigger subject. For example, I might be an authority on Lady Dorothy Mills, a forgotten writer from the 1920s.

I’ve kept a web site about Lady Mills for years trying to find anyone still interested in her work. About once a year I get an email from someone who has run across her name and wants to know more, or has a tidbit of information for me. I recently learned that Lady Mills has a sister in her 90s living in New Zealand, so I’m going to consider her the Master of the Topic.

Also, I’ve maintain a web site on the classics of science fiction – but there are many people interested in this topic, so maybe I’m only a scholar. Topics are relative. Some topics are too big to rank their specialists, like astronomy, but it might be possible to rank astronomers on a narrower topic, like studying cosmic background radiation.

From reading this essay I hope the next time you meet a person that asks you what you’re in to you can be a bit more specific than “I like music and movies.” Think about what you like to read. What topics perk up your ears when the television is on. What do you like to argue about at parties. Maybe once you think about this idea of ranking specialists you might like to specialize in a topic.

For the purposes of this essay I created a rough way to rank the levels knowledge on any topic.

Membership Levels in Knowledge of a Topic
Master	1
Authority	2 – 9
Expert	10 – 99
Scholar	100 – 999
Student	1,000 – 9,999
Amateur	10,000 – 100,000
Fan	100,001 – 1,000,000

For big academic subjects a person needs to have a Ph.D. and written widely on a particular subfield to call themselves an authority or expert. But it’s possible to narrow your focus, say pick a dead person, or work of art, and master the topic. For example, we might consider David McCullough the master of the topic of John Adams.

Or I would guess Bill Patterson is the master on the topic of the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, but he might have rivals. We have to wait and read Patterson’s first volume of Heinlein’s biography when comes out in August. In the tempest in a teapot world of Heinlein knowledge there’s a contentious society fighting to claim authority turf. If the going is tough at the top, it’s easier to claim a smaller peak, like Joseph T. Major did by mastering the topic of Heinlein’s juveniles with his book Heinlein’s Children.

At 58 I’m rather old to be thinking about what I want to be when I grow up, but I don’t think I’m too old to become ambitious about studying a specialized topic and trying to master it. After my last post, Xmind Mapping LibraryThing Tags, I’ve been inspired to discover what subjects I’m the most interested in and start systematically studying them. Hell, I could become a specialist in online library cataloging programs with not too much work.

Everyone should have twelve topics they love at the moment. These topics should be subjects that would thoroughly delight you to discuss at parties and around the water cooler at work. I’m actively studying all the topics I’m interest in and want to pick twelve to consciously pursue. The trouble is I need to narrow down my specialties. I can say I like to read books about artificial intelligence (AI) and robots, but that’s way to big a topic other than just being a general fan.

The other day I saw a video of a robot that solves a Rubik’s Cube in 12 seconds or less. I wonder if the guy who built this robot is the absolute master of the topic, or if there are other robots that can do the Rubik’s Cube. As a fantasy, I’d love to program a computer to read science fiction novels and write scholarly papers about any SF story I fed it, but that’s way too ambitious. I might could become a scholar of robot characters in science fiction, maybe even an expert.

Right now I’m just having fun contemplating this idea and what topics I want to pursue. I hope to come up with a list soon.

JWH – 2/22/10

Xmind Mapping LibraryThing Tags

I’ve finished entering in all my books into LibraryThing and I’m now working on organizing my collection by tags. Tags are like a simplified Dewey Decimal system, but you can also think of them as virtual bookshelves. Tagging lets me see how my library reflects lifelong interests. But tagging, like all book classification systems, is a tricky business. I currently have 705 books, all with tags, but unfortunately, I’m not sure I like my present tagging system, and that means going through all 705 books and altering the tags once again. Luckily, I had light bulb switch on in my brain this morning while showering. Why not mind map the problem with Xmind? Here’s the way things are now:

By creating tags Nonfiction and Fiction I can get quick counts of each, currently 584 to 121 in favor of Nonfiction. The above mind map uses the largest of my actual Tags:

I’ve already decided I have too many tags. Since I’m planning on re-shelving my books in tag groupings to make them easier to find, I would put the one book about telescopes with all the astronomy books. I’d probably also shelve the six books on robots with the eleven books on AI, and eliminate humor and poetry as tags because I just don’t have enough books on those topics to justify a tag. I could convert Humor to Memoir and start beefing up that category. See, there’s lots to think about when playing home librarian. If all I had was science fiction, I’d just alphabetize my shelves by author.

The fun thing about this work is realizing the reality behind it. I have 705 physical books on four bookshelves at home and one at work. Then I have all those books vaguely shelved in my mind. To be honest, I can only remember a small fraction of my books at any one time. And when I do remember a book I want, it’s very hard to find the physical copy. I’m using LibraryThing to aid my brain in understanding my library of 705 books – to help remember all my titles, and hopefully create a system to quickly find the physical volume.

In other words, I have books, a brain and a database. The LibraryThing is only a list making tool. By adding Xmind, I’m adding a visual modeling tool into the mix. Science shows us that our brains can only handle so many objects in our conscious minds at once. Seven things is where we max out, and even holding seven things in the mind is hard. Xmind allows me to go beyond the seven limit and visually map out more items on my computer screen, but even mind mapping has limits. I can’t mind map a 1,000 objects. I haven’t learned it’s limit, but I’d guess it’s less than 100 items, and maybe less than 50.

Think of it this way: How many aspects of reality do you specialize in studying? I have 35 books on space exploration. I’m no expert, far from it. But it’s a topic I like. I have 47 books on programming, most of which are on languages I’m forgetting because I’m switching to new ones. I am a ASP programmer. I’m becoming a PHP programmer. The better I get at PHP the more I will forget ASP.

We can only keep up with a limited number of topics in life, and the books I’ve bought reflect those topics. I plan to use LibraryThing and Xmind to refine my focus and help me zero in on the topics I want to study the most. I already spotted topics in my collection that I’m considering abandoning, like Kerouac and Wyatt Earp, and new topics I want to pursue, like cosmology and mapping the universe.

Under the new system I’ll tag topics I want to pursue. (And it’s logical that I’d shelve books on each of those topics together.) I created a new mind map based just on topics, and not levels of organization like nonfiction, science, astronomy, cosmology. I still have too many topics to pursue, but things become clearer.

Under my old system I tagged any book, fiction or nonfiction related to science fiction with a tag for SciFi, and since I have a whole lot of books by and about Robert A. Heinlein, I had a tag for Heinlein too. So one of his novels could get tagged: Fiction, Novel, SciFi, Heinlein. With such tagging I could create lists of all my fictional books, all my novels, all fiction and nonfiction books related to science fiction and any book with a Heinlein connection.

Under the simplified system this won’t work anymore. A tag of Heinlein would mean any book about Heinlein. If I wanted a list of books by Heinlein I could search by author. A SciFi tag means books about science fiction. I’d have no way of listing all my science fiction novels and short story collections separate from general fiction – that is just by using the Tag concept in LibraryThing. However, LibraryThing also has the Collection object.

I could create Fiction and Nonfiction collections, and then my tags would only apply to those books. Under the Fiction collection, I could have novels about cosmology and AI. This offers a lot of flexibility and new insights on how to organize my books both physically and mentally. But how do I model this in Xmind? And are the distinctions Fiction and Nonfiction really important?

Take Jack Kerouac. He wrote novels. He was a character in many novels. And whole libraries have been written about his books, his life, and his characterizations, and the people around him and their characterizations. I could change my topic label from Kerouac to The Beats and be more accurate about my interests.

What about science fiction? Is it science or fiction? Actually my interest in science fiction can reflected in more specific tags: AI & Robots, Space Colonization, Homo Sapiens 2.0, Mars, The Moon and Intelligent Life. But how do I categorize the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs versus Kim Stanley Robinson versus NASA? Do I make categories: Real Mars and Fantasy Mars? They are two separate topics about reality, what we know about the real planet Mars, and what we know about all the fantasies about the imaginary planet Mars.

This opens up a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way to attack the problem, and more important than that, a whole new way of living. What are my core topics? Can I mind map them? Could you make a list of all the subjects you care about the most? Ones you could feel like a semi-expert in a discussion.

This project will take me awhile, so I can’t produce my final list for this post. But I think I’m on to something. Instead of flitting from one topic to the next and accidently collecting books, I need to decide what topics I want to specialize in studying, and build my library to support those interests.

JWH – 2/21/10

LibraryThing, Goodreads, Shelfari, Google Books, Anobii, WeRead

I’ve been a bookworm my whole life, and for as long as I can remember I’ve wished I had a list of all the books I own. I’d also love to have a list of all the books I’ve read. I think it would be impossible to create the second list, but the first list would only be a matter of typing. And now with the Internet and the ISBN book number, it’s even less typing than before. I could even buy a barcode reader that looks up information automatically online without typing at all. My first consideration was to buy a standalone computer program like Book Collector from Collectorz.com, or even design my own database or spreadsheet with Access and Excel, but I decided the fun solution is to use a Web 2.0 online book cataloging site.

The Internet has added an extra twist to this list making activity, called social cataloging. By entering your books into an online database it allows social network programs to compare your list to lists created by millions of other bookworms. The synergy of doing this offers endless social networking possibilities. The obvious one is to find other readers who have similar reading tastes to yours that will help you find great books to read that you’ve missed. For people trying to build big personal libraries, it’s fascinating to know the size of other collector’s collections. The largest on LibraryThing is 43,061 books. Also on LibraryThing, the most reviewed book is Twilight (1,386 reviews), the most owned book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (47,598 people out of 1,035,403 members), or that my favorite science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein has 72,427 books in those collections, as compared to my second favorite science fiction writer Philip K. Dick who has 46,991 books in LibraryThing user’s homes. That’s out of 48,365,418 total books catalogued.

The trouble is there are many wonderful book cataloging sites to choose from, each with their own plus and minuses. Luckily, all are free except LibraryThing, and it’s free for your first 200 books, so you can try them all. The sites I’ve found so far are (there may be more):

Each of the sites try to make it easy to enter books, but they all do it differently. They each have millions of books already catalogued, so the quickest way to add a book to your list is to find it first on their list by searching on the ISBN and then hitting the add button. This can be made even faster with a barcode reader, but I don’t have one. I’d say it’s taken me a couple hours to enter in 58 books at LibraryThing. This is slow because I like selecting the right cover photo to match the cover of the book I own, and I started with a shelf of old books without ISBN numbers. That means searching by author or title, or even entering in all the book info myself. I could probably do 60 books in 20 minutes if they were all recent and I only needed to use ISBN. Usually when you get a book with ISBN, the cover and all the other information is already there.

I’ve taken to LibraryThing, but when I finished building my list I could export my library to another site to see if I like their social networking features better. Or I’ve thought about using one site for listing books I own, and another for books I can remember reading. Or use another site for just my non-fiction science and history books to see if I can find readers with my exact interests. The different cataloging sites have discussion groups for books, or linking systems to Facebook and blogging sites, so if you like to discuss and review books, these systems connect you to other people who are looking to read reviews or talk about books too.

On one blog I read a post by a woman who said her family paid for three separate $25 lifetime subscriptions to LibraryThing, for herself, her husband and her kid, so I’m assuming there’s long term rewards for doing the work of entering a book collection into the system. I won’t know for awhile. I’ve got 18 more shelves of books to enter, and then I’ve got to try all the different features, but I’ll get back to you with more info.

I’ve added books with all of these systems and I find it easiest to add books to LibraryThing, especially when dealing with manual adds. LibraryThing was the only site to have any books by Lady Dorothy Mills, an author I collect. Her books are very rare, and they only had 3 of 15 I own. These systems are far from perfect, and the quality of the data is imperfect. It would be great if everyone catalog the precise edition they owned, but that doesn’t happen.

Anobii, Shelfari and WeRead are probably best for people with newer books and people looking for more social interaction since they have the largest number of members. They are slicker sites with more glitz than LibraryThing. GoodReads is in the middle. Google Books merely lets you tag books without any reporting features or social networking. It is good for links to the web, and if you’re a complete Google user in general.

One of the fun things about adding books to LibraryThing is it tells me how many other members own the book when I add it to my collection. For books by Lady Dorothy Mills, out of over a million users, I’m the only one that has any of her books. I really like it when I find just a few people who also own the same book, like the 2 other people that own In Search of Paradise a biography of Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, the guys who co-wrote Mutiny on the Bounty. Are those two people much like me?

JWH – 2/7/10

I finished my data entry and my library can be seen here. To me, the fun way to view is by cover art. Open your browser to fill the screen and then click the Covers button. I have 706 books. I learned a lot by creating this catalog. For one thing, I have too many books, and I plan to thin my collection when I get a chance. The largest portion of this collection is unread by me. My bookstore roaming eyes are far bigger than my reading stomach. I really wish I had more time to read.

JWH 2/16/10

Libraries in the Age of iPads

If everyone owned an iPad would we need libraries? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating the demolition of libraries, but with the advent of the internet and ebooks talk about the death of newspapers, magazines and books get more common every year. If we don’t need those physical objects anymore, why do we need a building and institution to maintain them? Think about it. If books, magazines and newspapers disappear from our houses and move into Kindles, Nooks, and iPads, why would we go to the library? Why would we go to bookstores, new or used?

Modern libraries are about more than books, patrons also check out movies, audiobooks, music, and periodicals. But all of those media types are now available on the iPad. I know older people who grew up with libraries will immediate protest, but remember, us older folk are a dying breed and the up and coming generations are gadget afflicted.

Libraries used to be storehouses of knowledge and librarians worked to collect and preserve the printed word. That’s still true of academic libraries, but public libraries have moved into an era of supplying what their patrons want, so as soon as a book is ignored for a specific period of time, it gets jettisoned from the collection. Most people think of libraries as free books, free movies, free music albums, and free magazines and newspapers. I think a lot of people think we should have libraries to provide a cultural outlet for the poor. But the internet provides more free stuff to read and watch.

The death of libraries is pretty much unthinkable now, but don’t be surprise when city bean counters start making suggestions about closing them. I grew up loving libraries, and even worked in public and academic libraries. They don’t seem as crowded with patrons as they used be. I hardly go to the library anymore myself, not since the internet. I saw the video of Steve Jobs presenting the iPad and showing off its ebook features and it struck me that devices like the iPad will be the library of the future. When I was growing up futurists would talk about having a handheld device with the Library of Congress in it. We’re getting spookily close, aren’t we?

The book is evolving too. When it escapes the limitation of the page, adding multimedia and hypertext the book will no longer fit on a library shelf. Printed books, newspapers and magazines might become extinct, but imagine what will replace them. There is no reason to make a distinction between newspapers and magazines anymore. That might become true for books and novels too. Newspapers used to be frequently published information printed on cheap paper. Magazines and journals had longer periods between publication and were printed on better paper, suitable for long term storage in libraries.

The electronic page is not limited by time, paper quality or cost of printing. Newspapers and magazines use to be text plus photographs. Electronic publication is text plus photographs, video, sound recording, animation and other multimedia. Go look at the iPad video and tell me if kids will even want to go to the library or read books and magazines. And what about you?

I like the name iPad, just one vowel different from the iPod, but many of my friends have expressed a dislike for the name, and some of my women friends tell me the name brings up bad connotations with them. I think Steve Jobs should have named it the iLibrary.

JWH – 1/28/10