Author: Andrew Huey

books about Paris

A friend’s niece is going on a class trip to Paris soon. That made me think of my trip to Paris back in high school. I’m not going to write a long post reminiscing about that, but I thought I’d just post links to a couple of books on Amazon about Paris, mostly just because I wanted to play around with the function that allows you to do that from the Amazon Media Library.

The two books above were reviewed in The Economist a few years back, and I got interested in them based on that review. I had meant to buy them for myself at some point, but someone bought them for me as a gift before I’d gotten around to doing that.

(Edit, 02/14/2021: The Amazon iframe thing above stopped working at some point, so here are plain links to the books:
Paris: The Biography of a City
Paris Tales
More than ten years after I posted this, and I still haven’t finished reading the first one, or started reading the second. Sigh.)

San Diego – Air

I made my travel arrangements for San Diego today. I had almost enough frequent flyer points for the trip. I transferred a few thousand Membership Rewards points from my AmEx cards, and that gave me enough. So, for this year, I’m flying to San Diego for free. Cool.

Cataloging Books

I just entered a bunch of books into Delicious Library on my Mac. I hadn’t bothered entering anything into there since I got my new MacBook. Since the new MacBook has an iSight camera built in, I was kind of curious to see how the scanning function would work. Well, it scanned the bar codes OK, and came up with the correct UPCs, but it didn’t once pull the correct item for the UPC. I tried it on about ten books, and it didn’t work on any of them. I gave up, and went back to just typing in the ISBNs.

I then tried exporting from DL and importing to Amazon’s Media Library. I cut the ISBNs from DL’s export file, and pasted them into a separate text file, since Amazon seems to just want one ISBN per line, and nothing else. Amazon read in the file, and recognized about 20 items out of 80. Not a great success rate. I didn’t really try to troubleshoot that import at all, though, so maybe I messed something up. Amazon also has a scanning function similar to DL’s. I gave that a try, but I couldn’t get it to recognize my bar codes at all.

The thing that got me started on this was an attempt to figure out exactly which William Marshall books I own. Last night, I noticed one on Amazon (The Far Away Man) that didn’t sound familiar, so I ordered it. I guess there are a few others I haven’t read yet either, based on the list at Overbooked.

HD-DVD stuff

When I bought my HD-DVD player back in November, there was a mail-in offer for 5 free discs. I’d mostly forgotten about it, but when I came home from work today, there was a bag outside my door with five HD-DVDs in it. The list of discs that you could pick from wasn’t great, but I did wind up with a few decent titles, and a couple of OK ones: Full Metal Jacket, The Thing, Darkman, The Frighteners, and The Italian Job. I don’t know if I’ll bother buying many more (or *any* more) HD-DVDs, since the format seems to be getting deader every day. Maybe if I find all the Harry Potter movies on sale at some point, I’ll pick those up, just to have a compete set.

Amazon – used books

Just for yuks, I put a couple of old books up for sale on Amazon today. Apparently, this is my storefront. (Impressive, huh?)

Looking at the way they handle used book sales, and looking at all the folks selling their books for a penny, there’s really no way for an individual small-time seller to make any money selling readily-available books.

I put my books up at $1. Amazon apparently takes a minimum $2.50 commission, but they credit you $4 for shipping. So, the end result is that I would get $2.50 total, which would have to cover my shipping costs. It looks like a one-pound media mail shipment costs $2.13 now, so that doesn’t leave much room for profit. Since they don’t charge for listing stuff, though, I guess it doesn’t hurt to list some stuff and see if anybody bites.

Steve Gerber

I just came across the news of Steve Gerber’s death. Mark Evanier has written a very good blog post about Mr. Gerber. I have very fond memories of reading his Howard the Duck comics when I was a kid. At the time, Howard was pretty much the strangest thing to come out of mainstream comics (e.g. Marvel and DC). And I loved Destroyer Duck too. The first Destroyer Duck comic would have been one of the first independent (e.g. NOT Marvel or DC) books I’d ever picked up.

Along with a few other guys, like Don McGregor, Steve Englehart, and Jim Starlin, Gerber redefined mainstream comics in the 70s and early 80s. I never got a chance to meet him or hear him speak at a con, but I loved his work, and it sounds like he was a nice guy. RIP.

more Kindle thoughts

I’ve been thinking about the Kindle again. I still haven’t quite decided to buy one, but I’m getting closer.

Here’s a scenario that’s got me thinking:
(It’s kind of a long story, so bear with me.)
I bought the audiobook version of Brad Meltzer’s “Zero Game” from iTunes awhile ago. I’ve been listening to it in the car, and enjoying it quite a bit. I hit a point, though, where the audio just cut out and skipped ahead about five chapters. I went back and forth with Apple about it, and eventually got a refund. (They tell me that they’ve now posted a corrected version, so if you’re interested in the book, don’t let this glitch stop you from buying it!)

While I was going back and forth with support, though, I really wanted to just continue reading the book. If I’d had a Kindle, I could have just bought it from Amazon, and picked up reading the missing parts the same day I hit the glitch.

I did wind up buying a used hardcover copy of the book from Amazon so I could read the missing part. Now, while that obviously took longer to get to me than the Kindle version would have, it was a bit cheaper, and I can (theoretically) resell it, or just give it away, when I’m done reading it.

However, I’m sitting here right now looking at the book, and thinking that I’m probably going to just toss it on the floor in a pile of other old books when I’m done with it. The used book system on Amazon is great for buyers, but they’ve driven down prices on used books so much that there’s not much point trying to sell it after I’m done with it. And I don’t know anybody who’d really be interested in reading it who I could hand it off to. And I know I’ll never talk myself into just throwing it out.

I’ve got a whole bunch of books that fall into this category. Basically, books that I’m probably never going to want to re-read, and have almost no resale value, but I can’t bring myself to throw them out.

In some ways, the economics of this seem almost perverse, but I think I might be willing to pay a little extra to buy a book that doesn’t leave any physical footprint in my tiny little apartment. Something I can keep on a device, or my computer’s hard drive, or wherever, for however long I want. It’s annoying that the DRM scheme on any e-book reader (Sony or Amazon) will prevent me from loaning or giving away my old “books.” And it’s a little galling that the e-books generally cost more than a used copy in hardcover or paperback. But I’m looking at this apartment full of old books, and thinking that I could really reclaim a lot of space if I could just get rid of some of them!

Having said that, though, there are certainly still a lot of books I’d like to keep in hard copy form. Jasper Fforde’s books, for instance, wouldn’t work well on a Kindle, since he plays with fonts, footnotes, and other odd stuff that wouldn’t translate well into the single-typeface Kindle. In fact, Fforde’s concept of the “UltraWord” system, introduced in “Well of Lost Plots”, is, in some ways, a parody of DRM’d e-book systems. One of the characteristics of UltraWord was that you could only read any given book three times, then it would just refuse to open.

I’m aware that buying DRM’d e-books right now, for any platform, will probably leave me with books that I won’t be able to read again past, say, five or ten years, since whatever platform I buy now will probably be gone by then. I bought Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy in Microsoft Reader format several years back, and read them on my old Toshiba Pocket PC. While I still have those files around somewhere, I don’t have the Pocket PC anymore. If I want to read those books again on the Kindle, I’d have to repurchase them. (And, hey, I see that I can get them for the Kindle, for $3.19 each. That’s actually not a bad price. Cheaper than the average used copy, even.)

GTD after a move

I haven’t posted anything about GTD in a while. I fell behind in my general filing & organizational stuff back in November, when we were preparing for our big move at work. I’ve gradually gotten things back into some kind of order now, but I’m still behind in some ways. I’ve got about 80 messages in my inbox, for instance, that I haven’t gone through and filed. And I haven’t done a proper weekly review yet in 2008, really. But my desk (and general work area) is pretty well organized now. I know where all the important stuff is. My files are alphabetized and in my drawers. All the books are on the bookshelves. The whiteboard is up on the wall. I have a fair number of random papers on my desk, but not in a big undifferentiated pile, or anything like that.

I just spent some time thinking about GTD Connect, and whether or not I should drop out of it. I’ve decided to keep up with in for a few more months, at least. The forums, podcasts, e-mails, etc, do seem to be helping out a bit.