On Dec 31, 2013, at 11:24 AM, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote: >> So I got myself a Kindle. And whether it is the novelty or the >> device-specific aspects (doesn't need ambient light, sufficiently >> booklike that one can read sprawled in bed, etc) - I have consumed 3 >> books in 3 days, more than in the preceding 3 months. > > The availability of the Kindle app and my (converted to) mobi > collection has indeed contributed to being able to read more. > my book reading has gone down, but the size of the books-i-should-read (someday) list has grown dramatically. now all i have to do is find time to read them. when i visited my friend tom demarco (who lives in camden, a nice medium-sized town in maine about 2 hours north of boston) he told me proudly about their carnegie library, which had just redone their readng room, and had 40000 books. (andrew carnegie, to atone for his other sins involving coke mining and steel, donated money to build almost half of the 3500 libraries in the US by 1919 and almost 800 outside the US). my collection of e-items (mostly ebooks but also a large number of magazines, scores, papers, tech reports, etc) is now 10% larger than that. managing that collection seems to be at the boundary of both the software i have tried and the time i have to spend doing curation. maybe some of you with big libraries can make suggestions about the software you’ve been using (i use macs, and have recently been using calibre, which has a UI that drives me crazy, but a few nice features, including having a very active developer, a bunch of useful plugins (including access to external bibliography, notes and ratings), converting on-demand when you want to download a work to a reading device that doesn’t support the work’s current format, support of a wide variety of reading devices (typically i use a small or large kindle, but also have an ipad which i use mostly for piano music). it’s also way too easy to escape into browsing in the e-library, rather than doing what i ought to be doing. maybe that’s a good thing at this point in my life.
