Google Books is a good thing. I came across a reference to an anthology of poetry in a newspaper article today, and I wanted to track down the book. It’s an old anthology, published in 1917 or thereabouts. It does look like I could get a used copy on Amazon, but it’s old enough that I can download it in PDF format from Google. Their copy seems to have come from Harvard’s library, and looks to be pretty well beat up, which is kind of cool. This book includes one of my favorite poems, “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”
Category: books
WSJ.com – Ghost Tales
There was a good little article on ghost stories in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Two of their recommendations — Ghost Stories by M. R. James and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, are available at manybooks.net in Kindle format. I think I’m going to read some ghost stories for Halloween!
WSJ.com – Opinion: The Digital Future of Books
Interesting article about the relationship between our devices and our attention spans. The author quotes Jeff Bezos, who hopes the “Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention.” I guess we shouldn’t expect a Twitter client to be built into the Kindle any time soon!
Flannery O’Connor
I’ve gotten a good number of books through Bookmooch since I joined up a couple of weeks ago. I just got a Flannery O’Connor short story collection in the mail today. I’ve only read a few of her stories, so I’m looking forward to reading more.
And I also just got approved for a free account on britannica.com, through their WebShare program, so I guess I’m a bona fide “web publisher” now. Either that, or they just rubber-stamped all the applications for this program. Either way, the Flannery O’Connor link above is to a Britannica article. The Britannica site is OK, but some of the bells & whistles they’ve got on it make it a little difficult to actually read the article, at least through Firefox.
Wikipedia has a reasonable article on her too, of course.
Last Lecture
I bought The Last Lecture in Kindle format a few days ago. I’m almost done reading it. It’s a pretty good read. Lots of short chapters, mostly random anecdotes from Randy Pausch’s life. There’s nothing in the book that’s likely to change my life, I think, but just a lot of interesting little insights, and some fun stories.
This is also the first book I’m reading, in its entirety, on the Kindle. It’s been a pretty smooth reading experience. Certainly no worse than reading an old-fashioned paper book, but not necessarily any better. Of course, there are some photos in the book, and they really don’t look at all good on the Kindle, so that’s a concern. In the future, I’ll probably avoid buying any book for the Kindle if I know it’s heavy with photos or other graphics.
more on BookMooch
After my post about BookMooch last night, I wound up listing some more books, about 30 in total. And, this morning, I had requests for a number of them. I’ve now got eight packages ready to bring over to the post office tomorrow morning. I’m sending most of them media mail, so it shouldn’t be too expensive. One’s going to Canada, though, so I think I’ll send that one in a flat-rate Priority Mail envelope. It’ll cost me a few bucks, but BookMooch gives you three points for shipping internationally, so I should get three books out of this one trade.
On the receiving side, I’ve got three books coming to me. I’ve added most of the books on my Amazon wish list to my BookMooch wish list. Aside from the three that are coming, I don’t think any of the others are out there in the BookMooch system anywhere right now. I’ll have to look around and see if anyone’s got anything I’m interested in, so I can use up some of the points I’m getting from sending out so much stuff.
Bookmooch
There was an article on CNET today about Bookmooch. This is a book-trading site, basically, similar to LaLa or Peerflix, only for books. The setup is pretty simple. You get a point for every book you send out; every book you “mooch” from someone else costs a point. You get a tenth of a point just for listing a book in your inventory. So I got one point by listing ten books, and now I’ve got a William Gibson novel on its way to me. And I’m sending out a Star Wars novel, so that gets me another point. I don’t know if this will result in overall fewer books in my apartment, or more books, but if nothing else, I’m at least moving some stuff around.
WSJ – You Can Enjoy a Book On a Mere Cellphone
Here’s an interesting little article on the idea of reading e-books on a cellphone, in this case, a BlackBerry. The newer BlackBerries have pretty decent screens, but I still don’t think I’d want to read a book on one. I’ll stick with the Kindle!
Randy Pausch
I blogged about Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture back in September. (Well, I just linked to the video. I didn’t really say anything about it.) He’s now got a book available, based on that lecture. It’s available from Amazon, in hardcover, Kindle, and audio CD versions. And the audiobook is also available from iTunes. There’s also a page up at the Carnegie Mellon site, with links to various versions of the original lecture (DVD, PDF transcript, etc) and other related links. I guess this all took off after ABC aired a special on him about a week ago.
The whole “inspirational” thing makes me kind of queasy, especially when people like Oprah and Diane Sawyer get involved. But, hey, Randy’s a computer science guy, so it’s OK for me to be interested, right? I’ll probably read a sample of the book on my Kindle, and if it doesn’t look like it’s just the lecture, padded out to fill a book, then I’ll shell out the $10 and read the whole thing. Or maybe I should buy the hardcover through the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network site, so they get a few bucks from it.
free Doctor Who ebooks
The BBC has a bunch of Doctor Who ebooks available for free download. So that’s another three or four free books I’ve got loaded onto my Kindle now. I don’t know if any of them are any good, but they didn’t cost me anything, and they aren’t taking up much disk space, so no big problem there, right?