Shifting to a Digital Library
June 12th, 2009 by cbaxter | Comments | Filed in UncategorizedWell, it appears I’ll be moving in a few weeks as school is officially almost done. As a first step, I’m unloading some furniture on Craigslist, which is always a fun experience for me. Selling stuff online is a sure way to meet some interesting folk in the area. The first to go was my bookshelf, which was apparently a big hit on the classifieds scene, as the local IKEA outfit has been stocked out of the item for a few months now…but this is on tangent to the topic at hand.
Pulling back, in order to prepare for the eager buyer (who was very excited for his upcoming holiday to Cyprus), I took down all my books and various other items (RC helicopter, RC tank, Tickle-Me-Elmo, etc.) to get ready for the big dis-assembly. Looking at the piles of books on the floor, I decided that a shelf probably wasn’t the best place to keep these old friends – there are many that I’ve reread, but I’m getting more attached to the world of Kindle and the ever-lighter ebook.
This time around, instead of stuffing them directly into the land of cardboard houses filled with snowy peanuts, I first took the ISDNs and dropped them into Google’s My Library. I’ve now indexed just over 90 books (some with free content, others with no content) into the system and feel more comfortable keeping these “old media” buddies in the box a bit longer than usual.
The logical next step was to port this into Amazon, where I’ll be able to rate / comment on the books, giving them the content they need to make recommendations on future reads. Also, I assume they will have no problem with selling me digital versions of the books along with the proprietary Kindle (just like Apple did with my songs and the iPod), although I’m still not a fan of their hardware just yet.
I’m excited for the possibilities of digitized libraries, social highlighting / note taking, and the ability to rapidly access and share this information in the future. To borrow words from Ray and Fahrenheit 451, “Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and the keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.”

I’m pretty impressed with the results. On arrival, the community widget offers users the option to login via Facebook (or another method). If they login, it registers them to the community and ties into their Facebook account, with permission. From there, users can invite people to the community, easily share content back and enable the option to post comments back. I haven’t enabled the comment system because I’m still using 
Tonight I logged into my CafePress store, called 










