Daily Thoughts 11/26/2010
I have been reading a little more of Writing Tools and trying out Get Glue. It is quite interesting. I learned it has some qualities that are not so great. Synching it with twitter will fill your twitter messages full of Get Glue which can appear spammy. It is very easy to create a very large list of books you have read.
I spent some time going through The Copia, http://www.thecopia.com It is a social network for books. I started out by downloading the seven free books which they are offering on their network. I first had to get a license from Adobe to do this and create an account with Adobe. I think they are mainly using the Adobe Epub format. Once I was logged on, I had the choice of either downloading an application for Mac or PC that would synch with the website. There was also an Ipad application. This was fairly easy to do.
Once I had the application downloaded, I decided to do a little free riding which is the nice word for looking for free things. I searched the catalog for free downloads and downloaded Walden or Life In The Woods by Henry David Thoreau, The Novels of Jane Austen, and An Account of Egypt. This left me with ten books. I then looked through the community list of books. Many were also downloading free items. Computer books from O'reilly publishing and public domain history texts were also downloaded. I downloaded Vikram and The Vampire by Sir Richard Burton which is another public domain classic. I now have eleven books to try out and read on the system. The downloads were fast and easy to do.
I also went through and looked at the groups and joined a few under my name to see how they worked as well as made a few comments to check on how that worked. It was an interesting experience.
I also updated my profile with a thumbnail for this blog. There was only one thing which did not work that well. I tried to search people for librarians, publishers, authors, writers, editors, and other book people. I was not able to find any in the people search.
There are supposed to be some features which are not available in other social networks for books. You should be able to annotate books with notes by the book, the page number, and highlighted text. This all should be shareable. I am looking forward to trying it out tomorrow. I like to spread out these kind of things over time.
