Comments on: My personal journey into ebooks

By: Update: My personal journey into ebooks

Update: My personal journey into ebooks — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:11:14 +0000

[...] in March I wrote a longish post about “My personal journey into ebooks.” Things have since changed so I feel that I ought to add some commentary to those [...]

By: My Love Affair with Paper « Epist

My Love Affair with Paper « Epist — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:08:15 +0000

[...] April 12, 2009 6:08 pm in Books, Librarians, Thinking too much, Writing, music, reading, social tech | Tags: Books, digital media, e-books, music, paper This post has been in draft mode for a long, long time and resurfaced in my memory thanks to various conversations including this one at FriendFeed and this post on e-book reading. [...]

By: Rick

Rick — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:03:05 +0000

I haven’t seen ebooks cited much differently from regular books. The closest thing I can think of is how Wikipedia (and others) denote the format if they directly link to. However, this information can probably be gleaned by the file extension & I haven’t seen any printed styles that do this.

If you just want to store the filetypes for your personal record, it would seem that Zotero tags or similar would be appropriate.

Jodi: I also wish publishers adopted machine-readable data standards. Many of the standards that Zotero is able to read aren’t that difficult to implement & more tools than Zotero would benefit immensely from having them.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:53:54 +0000

Hey there, Jodi. I will give that a look.

I have read several more books in Stanza now. I even got another book in .epub format from Ravenous Romance and it works great. Something about the file of my 1st must have been corrupted.

Been meaning to try Annotater with pdfs but I guess I haven’t loaded any pdf that I really want to read yet.

Yes, some (quality) standardization would be wonderful.

By: Jodi Schneider

Jodi Schneider — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:57:57 +0000

I've been reading lots of ebooks recently, mostly with Stanza. You may be interested in Liza Daly's bookworm http://bookworm.oreilly.com/ which is a great tool for epubs. I wish that machine-readable data (e.g. for Zotero) were standard.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:22:07 +0000

J, I think I agree. I mean, it isn’t “ebooks” fault as the format(s) can clearly contain the metadata as text (as I meant) and quite probably as machine-extractable data. Certainly in theory they could.

And I mostly am reading free books so in one sense I get what I pay for. That is a somewhat legit critique of my position (not saying you were making it) and I accept it. But free or not, I feel that these “objects” need to be fully identifiable in a bibliographic sense.

And I accept that, say, “the 2008 Munsey.com text of The Iliad from the 1918 Blah Blah Press edition” may be it. But I don’t really fully know that I have that much even in some cases.

And since I do not know what has gone wrong, I am not blaming LibraryThing. But really! Rossetti’s Poems is NOT The Complete works of Shakespeare and Lawrence is NOT Like Water for Chocolate.

I have no doubt that much of this will improve with time. I believe that much of it will. I’m just adding my little voice to point out what I see as some of the problems that currently exist. Other people will see other problems due to what they read and the uses they put their devices to.

And new “formats” always precede good ways to cite them in the citation style sense. Web citation with linking is still very young, too. But it can be better.

By: jenny

jenny — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:05:30 +0000

i love stanza too! and for the books I have bought all the cataloging metadata was on the last page. I think some of your issues might be non-major publisher issues more than ebooks’ fault, because all of the major publisher books i have read on it have worked perfectly.