Let’s talk about books.
If you read blogs probably you enjoy reading books. During our lives we accumulate a ton of books and magazines. Well magazines we can bin (some of us) but books we keep.
Now with ebooks this is changing. There are still a lot of people who still things that all this kindle, iPad, Sony book reader are not the same, that they prefer to have a book in your hands. The smell of the book, the pages, the fact that there are no issues with direct light or if you take it to the beach… but if you think like this is probably because you are over 30.
Ebook readers have room for all the books you can have in a life time.
The parallelism would be CDs and MP3. Are you still buying CD’s? If you do, then traditional books are still for you.
Well what I wanted to discuss here is how do you organize your books. The ones you have on paper and the ones you have in your ebook reader and the ones you have in audio (this is my favorite now…).
For the paper ones, I take photos of each of them and I upload them to evernote. I have talked a million times about evernote, but briefly is a software that makes your photos indexable, so the text in it is searchable. I tag them and I put them all in a notebook called books.
Now every book has a note, so you can even add if you have lend it or tag it so.
True you have similar more dedicated software, but for me evernote works like charm. Same for the wine 😉
If you want to have them in the cloud, so you can share, review, publish in facebook and so, there are 3 very good tools you should look at:
Visual Bookshelf from Live Social: This is a free software that it is fully integrated with facebook (and also they have a stand alone website), which is great for the following reasons:
You can have your full collection of books, those you have read, those you want to read and those you are reading.
You can publish at anytime in your wall that you are reading it. When you finish you are offered to give a rating and to write a review and then to publish it in your wall.
You can see what your friends are reading, which is the future of advertising. Direct recommendations from friends, who you trust in taste.
I started using this because my friend did.
Then I found:
Goodreads: They also have a dedicated site for this, also fully integrated into facebook. I also used it. I first exported all my books from Visual Shelf and imported them here. I prefer this site, but unfortunately none of my friends use it, and the fact I use and recommend this sort of sites is for the social aspect.
Finally:
Google Books: As a google fan boy I had to try this one. I don’t think they have an facebook extension, but I imported the book list too. It is ok because is google, but zero social
Conclusion:
For me Visual Shelf is the one that most of my friends use, so I use it, but I keep the three of them updated. Be aware you can import and export from all of them. Sometimes is not trivial though.
1 comment
Comment by Industrial Photographer
Industrial Photographer January 30, 2012 at 10:58 am
It is a thought provoking article. Depending on the available space and budget limitations.