Tag Archives: book

For those of us not at BEA

Yes, once again, it’s that time of year and BEA is in full swing up nawth in New York. And once again I’m down south… not at BEA. But the bourbon is cheaper here and I didn’t have to stress over what books to pack as my “trip books”, so I guess I have that going for me. Well that and BookTV, which has a great line up of live and delayed BEA coverage all weekend long. So check out the schedule to see what you can see. One note, I see that Pat Conroy was in the lineup on an author panel, but today had to pull-out due to his still recovering from surgery.

Allowing Comments to in-progress Manuscripts

O’Reilly Media’s Programming Scala won’t hit bookstore shelves for a long time. But the entire working manuscript has been posted to their site! Each and every paragraph, sidenote, chart and graph has a comment box underneath it. They are hoping that the community will contribute knowledgeble bits of information and ideas, which the author will vet and toss or incorporate. The idea is that this crowdsourcing filtered through their expert author will produce a more auhtoritative work.

Not too mention the marketing side of things. I guess one side could say “you’ll sell fewer books, because all of your hardcore readers have been reading while it’s been written”. Which might hold true for a few folks. But can you imagine the buzz this would build within the programming community? Or how much of a boost the book might get from folks talking about/buying a book that they were involved in producing? The system has a sign-in for commenters so that they can be credited in the final book, if their contribution is used. O’Reilly also provides RSS feeds for the various sections so that a commenter can keep up with that specific section of the text.

Obviously, this idea wouldn’t work for every type of book and the progamming community is a good place to start. It’s not the first book to be published from crwodsourced information, but it’s the first time, I’m aware of, a major publisher has added a crowdsourced component to the traditional publishing workflow. Which means that it gets checked and balanced by author and editor, which may be enough to sway a few naysayers.

I wonder what Andrew Keen would think of this community/professional mashup? Ha!

Books, Beans and Candles MS

Books, Beans and Candles MS is in an old Birmingham house going up 20th on your way to Vulcan. It’s on the righthand side, just after you pass the “Y-split”. Owners Mitchell and Darby Hagood have been at this location since August 2008, though they’ve been in business for two and a half years. Ever since seeing the sign out front (it starts with the word books!) I’d been trying to find time to stop in and see what it’s all about and finally was able to make it in and get some photos.

The view from the street.
The view from the street.

Mitchell Hagood sums up the shop with one word… “metaphysical”. (photos after the jump)

Continue reading Books, Beans and Candles MS

Poor Kindle-Laden Students

I read this post this morning and thought about students being forced to use Amazon’s new Kindle DX. While I don’t shy away from eBooks and think the Kindle DX is a step in the right direction for textbooks and newspapers, I really think this is a bad move, for one major reason. That is usability.

It’s true that the screen is bigger and as a dedicated reading device the Kindle is pretty good. But reading texts for school is a TOTALLY different type of reading and the Kindle is only going to slow students down and tick them off.

I mean have you ever tried to cross reference something between two separate works on a Kindle? It’s the worst. The device is just not made for easy navigation. Even if you have the forsite to use the bookmark feature and know exactly where the info you need is (remember no page numbers) and you are only using two books for your work, it could take you almost a full minute to close a book, navigate to the other book, find reference, make a note and navigate back and load original text. Killer!

That little flip-flop between titles would take seconds with two books open side-by-side on a desk. The Kindle is just not built with usability in mind. It’s built to deliver books and ease eye-strain. So until they fix the navigation and allow multiple texts to be loaded into the RAM all at once, I’m afraid it’s going to be slow going.

I’m all for saving the environment and spreading the eBook love, but not at the expense of time and productivity.