BookFinder.com Journal

When a book is not a book

When it's a BookBook.  Hide your laptop inside this bookish carrying case.  Be the envy of the next book fair.

They look REALLY cool, but they're not cheap.  I'm betting you could make one of these out of an old tattered hardback without too much trouble, which would also be good if you have a PC laptop.

Intel Reader for visually impaired

Again from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.  Intel has proposed a reader designed for the visually impaired.  With this devise you can take a photo of any text (menus, letters, magazines) and have the gadget read the text aloud to you or change the font size digitally.  Users can also download e-books to be read or listened to.

From the Guardian

Tracy Counts, the Intel Reader’s marketing manager, told the Guardian that the product’s developer is dyslexic and knows how hard it is “to get printed text in a format he could listen to and understand. He went to the general manager of our group and pitched the idea, and Intel Health got behind it because it fits with the whole idea of digital health, which is helping people to be independent.”

The $1,500 price tag is a deterrent, but the Guardian suggests that schools and libraries might find it a worthwhile tool. Over at Engadget, there is an informative video explaining all of the Intel Reader’s functions.

It will also be interesting to see if Intel runs into any legal flak, as Amazon did when it was forced to remove the text-to-speech feature on a number of Kindle titles after several publishers cried foul over claims of audio book rights not being respected.  I hope they don't as this could be a great tool for the visually impaired, and even those with gradually worsening eyesight.

Samsung e-reader debuted at Consumer Electronics Show

Samsung enters the e-reader battle royal... although it's not yet available commercially the "Papyrus" has the standard e-ink screen but with the added bonus that allows the user to write on the ebook (underline, add notes, etc) with a stylus.  This new feature addresses one of the main complaints ebooks, but if you take a look at the video that Galley Cat posted with their review the Papyrus the device's refresh rate still falls short of the mark (at least for me).

When it does become available though rumours are it will be "only" $300 (cheaper than Sony Reader and Kindle).

[Now Reading: Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut]

History of the Book

I had someone point me towards this on the Fast Company blog today...

The Limricktionary

Well I am taking holidays off blogging and won't be posting here again until the new year.  So for your amusement over the holidays feel free to play around with The Limricktionary - a must for word nerds everywhere.

Just pick the word you want defined and you shall be returned with a definition in limerick form.

The word Christmas is over-defined,
So I hope, my dear friends, you won't mind
If I state, without fear,
That its true meaning's clear:
Peace on Earth and goodwill to mankind!

The boys at St. Luke's made a fuss
As Abraham boarded the bus.
"He gets Chanukah fun
For eight nights from night one.
What a shame there's no presents for us!"

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

Steven Covey signs exclusive e-rights deal

I caught this article in The Bookseller this morning.  Stephen Covey has just signed a digital rights deal guaranteeing Amazon exclusivity to his two bestselling titles,  The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Principle-Centered Leadership, in ebook form.

Covey has moved e-book rights to two of his bestselling books from his print publisher, Simon & Schuster Inc, to digital publisher RosettaBooks, which will sell the e-books via Amazon.com for one year.

According to the New York Times, this gives Amazon exclusive rights to sell electronic editions of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Principle-Centered Leadership. Covey is expected to gradually make other e-books available exclusively to Amazon, which will promote them on its web site.

The NYT said the move would "raise the already high anxiety level among publishers about the economics of digital publishing and could offer authors a way to earn more profits from their works than they do under the traditional system".

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  These two titles are are both readily available as cheap used copies and therefore the exclusivity deal is only mildly interesting, but should Covey extend this agreement to his freshly written works courting mega selling authors could be a game influencing strategy in the e-reader war.

Who will be the Betamax of e-readers? I think the technology is still young and it's still too early in the game to to call (plus I haven't actually seen a Nook yet) but I would love to hear your thoughts.

[Now Reading: Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay]

BookFinder.com, same great search, now 60% faster!

It may not always be obvious from the outside but we are constantly improving BookFinder.com to make it a better service for students, bibliophiles, collectors, and booksellers.  Over the past several weeks one of our programmers, Bryan, has been working on a project trying to see if he could improve the speed of our book search.

If you know a little about databases, and little is a word I would use to describe my knowledge of database searching, one of the more classic search problems is that as the amount of data you are looking at gets larger it takes proportionately longer to search though all the information.  So as you can guess this makes a quick search of millions upon millions of books from dozens of different websites all over the world a bit of a problem.

The fast solution would be to just limit our search time but we also know that you, our loyal users, come to BookFinder.com for our price comparisons of new and used books as well as for searching far and wide looking for rare, out-of-print, and downright hard to find books.  So we obviously we could never sacrifice breadth of search for speed or you might not find that 18th century periodical on gardening practices in West Suffolk which you were looking for.

So when Bryan announced at our weekly meeting that, after some intensive investigation followed by a couple weeks of hacking away at our search algorithms, he had managed to shave several seconds off our average search time I felt it was worth a bit of a brag. 

So enjoy our latest BookFinder.com improvement.  Same great BookFinder.com search, now 60% faster.

Brilliant Bookshelves

I just stumbled over this cool blog posting which features some amazing bookshelves, here are a few of my favorites.

The Platzhalter Expanding Bookshelf... because a real bibliophile never has enough space

The Inverted Bookshelf                                                      The Bookmarkshelf

                       

and my personal favorite which brings a whole new meaning to bedtime reading

How Swine Flu showed publishing the way

Score one for eBooks as a learning tool.  Jason Boog over at the GalleyCat blog made mention of what I consider to be a major advantage for students in cutting edge fields like Medicine.  Instantly updated learning material.

When the publisher Little Brown issued an eBook only update about the H1N1 virus to their title "The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child" they explicitly showed that the publishers now have a way to combat the lag times of traditional publishing, they don't even have to abandon print editions. 

By simply giving purchasers access to a continuously updated electronic edition a publisher can ensure a textbook buyer that they will have completely up to date and relevant information about their subject despite any advances that may occur.  They could package the text like software giving you the base text and two years worth of updates with the first purchase.  After the term the student/teacher/professional could opt for further updates for an aditional licence fee, keep the product as is, or buy the next edition.

This could also help reduce the number of new editions that publishers need to produce allowing them to move towards something more resonable like a 5 year publishing cycle for textbooks.  The publisher is rewarded financially for keeping their text up to date, professionals no longer have to cross reference between texts and monthly journals, and students could be less crippled by debt.

Obviously this is less of a concern for some fields (I am constantly aggravated by the parade of new Calculus editions being produced despite the fundamentals remaining unchanged for centuries... but I digress), but for fast changing sciences like Medicine this is a huge development.  Now we just have to see how it will be used.

LibraryThing price comparison powered by BookFinder.com

Recently we've been working with our friends over at LibraryThing.com on a project to help their users more easily find the books that they need. 

Now when you find a cool book on someones LibraryThing shelf, you only have to click "Get this book" from the side bar and BookFinder.com will find new, used, and rare copies from our bookstores.  It looks kind of like this...

 

LT's Tim Spalding details the full depth of their project in an extensive post on LibraryThing's blog.  We're just excited to help!

The Recently Reprinted Girl

I was reminded by the Paper Cuts blog that one of the stars of our 2009 BookFinder.com Report, The Recently Deflowered Girl by Edward Gorey has just made the jump back into print!  Finding a copy of the original is still a pricey endeavor but reprints are now easily attainable.   

 

[Now Reading: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick]