social bookmarking for ebooks

sic · 06-26-2007, 04:23 PM

What's the next step after you've found the book you like on the Internet?
Of course you'll download it and convert it if you have to to try to get it onto the reading device you're using.
And... ?

Why not bookmarking the location where you've found the book?
Bookmarking has lot of advantage as I'll show you later in this article, but for now the main reason is that you don't have to worry about archiving and maintaining your ebook collection. The website where you found it is doing that already! Just keep your ebook collection where you keep your bookmarks.

For bookmarking you should use del.icio.us. If you're not already doing so you should. Period.
del.icio.us was sold for 15M dollars to Yahoo! ... so they must be doing something right

When you bookmark something on del.icio.us you assign it some tags. This is one of the cool things about del.icio.us because it gives you more freedom than the tree-like hierarchy you can find in your browser. Since the link can have as many tags as you want... it's easier to find it later. Plus it's on the web so you can access your bookmarks later from another computer e.g. when you go home from work; plus it has great browser integration, Firefox users can completely replace the browser's built in bookmarking.

So how would you add a bookmark to the ebook you found?
You would tag it with something like topic... and maybe add the author or title. If you want to distinguish it from other links you would also tag it with something like ebook.

On a side note I'd like to emphasize that tagging creates collections of books and how important they are. Search will only help you if you know what you are looking for. The author, the title or the topic. It won't help you discover works; only collections will. This is why we have librarians.

Let's take an example.
The Real Mother Goose - Project Gutenberg
and tag it as ebook children mother_goose
The problem is that if you follow the children tag you get any kind of results
can be children's cloths, family fun for a rainy weekend, baby food... far more than books.
If you're a power user you can try ebook+children which will give you better results, but it's kind of cumbersome to enter it, you cannot just browse.

Furthermore if you go to del.icio.us your collection will be a mess.
You can group all the author tags into what they call a bundle, same for collections and titles.
If this seems complicated - I think you are right! It is!

The good news is that it can be automated.
del.icio.us gives programmatic access to their services, by using that someone can create a browser button - say "post ebook to del.icio.us" - that will do all these steps for you.
Well... that's exactly what I've done. I call it eBookMark. That is eBook + Bookmark.
If you visit DigitalReading.net you can download a so called bookmarklet, which practically is a button that you add to your browser... if you click it, it will pop up the posting form.
Now you can find ebooks by author, by title, by collections or see what's popular.
To make like easier, the DigitalReading frontpage generates the del.icio.us links for you if you enter a keyword.

For example, if you want to find more Tarzan books, enter Tarzan and you'll get:

Find more on del.icio.us
All eBookMarks
Popular eBookMarks
eBookMarks tagged tarzan
eBookMarks by the author tarzan
eBookMarks with the title tarzan
eBookMarks in the tarzan collection

These links will take you to the right place on the del.icio.us website and this is where the fun begins because this is where the "social" aspect of bookmarking comes into play.

You can see what's popular, what tags did others put to the same book. If you follow along the links you can

find other books tagged with the same keyword
find people with similar interest
add people to your network and browse their collections
have your friends send links to you
discover new books added to the collection.
subscribe to RSS feeds so you get notified when a new ebook is added
display a list of your ebooks, or just the names of your collections on your blog

For example when I bookmarked Alice in Wonderland I stumbled upon a scan of the original and the British Library.

JSWolf · 06-26-2007, 06:28 PM

Now what happens if you download the ebook, convert it for your reader, delete the source file and sometime later you want the source, but you find the website is no longer there? You are well and truly screwed. Yes it's ok to make bookmarks to find it again if it is still there. But the best way to handle it is to keep the source on your computer and at some point backup all your ebooks and source files onto DVD. You cannot rely on a website to be there forever.

sic · 06-26-2007, 06:55 PM

good point!
I oversimplified it a little bit...

if you had to do format conversion then "archiving by bookmarking" won't work

also... I think it depends on the website and how reliable you think it is vs the inconvenience of going through the archiving process

either case I think it still makes sense to have a bookmark to the source...
perhaps I should rephrase the article

do you still think it's a useful service though?

JSWolf · 06-26-2007, 11:27 PM

I don't mind seeing bookmarks to free ebooks on the net that can be converted to other formats if they are notin the format you want. It helps people who have readers (or don't mind computer reading) have more books available ot possibly read. It sounds like a good idea.

sic · 06-27-2007, 02:36 AM

once you bookmark the book on del.icio.us there's plenty of cool things you can do with your list of books.
e.g. you can create a google custom search that searches inside the books

if there will be enough interest i may look into this

another use case is when you bookmark stuff for later reading

personally, i stopped downloading ebooks in large quantities (aka DVD)...
what's the point? i'm never going to read them...
just get what I may actually open and bookmark what I like or fnd interesting

JSWolf · 06-27-2007, 09:43 AM

You never know what you might decide you want to read. My reading has changed. Things I am thinking of reading now, I would not have concidered in the past. One of the books I am reading I downloaded from MobileRead and while it's not a normal read for me, it's still a good read.

Hadrien · 06-27-2007, 09:50 AM

We have a built-in support for many social bookmarking services on Feedbooks (check the screenshot).

We're currently working on a few different features for social bookmarking that will be really nice (the "add to favorite" button's is going to be useful).

sic · 06-27-2007, 12:42 PM

no offence but what's the point in having all these social sites listed? I think these "add to this, add to that..." links are missing the point. these sites should be integrated into the users browser... not the website; the reason being that there's no way for the website to know the full list and which one the user prefers.

besides... IMO... del.icio.us is far better than the clones

digg is a good idea, but for books we can do better once the shared annotations from within a book will work.

Hadrien · 06-27-2007, 01:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sic

no offence but what's the point in having all these social sites listed? I think these "add to this, add to that..." links are missing the point. these sites should be integrated into the users browser... not the website; the reason being that there's no way for the website to know the full list and which one the user prefers.

besides... IMO... del.icio.us is far better than the clones

digg is a good idea, but for books we can do better once the shared annotations from within a book will work.

Well not all these websites have plugins. And eventhough you don't use all of these, most of them have thousands of users.
We don't display the full list on every page, just a few one: digg (very popular), yahoo (the most used ajax homepage), librarything (most popular social network for books) and del.icio.us (the most popular social bookmarking service). But there's much more listed if you press on "More...".

Annotations will be nice once we'll have a widely used format for it: not the case yet.

In the meantime, I'll be working on much closer integration of Feedbooks in a few social networks: even without annotations, there's already a few pretty cool things we can provide.

paulckennedy · 01-24-2010, 01:45 PM

Has anyone come up with an annotation sharing method which is being adopted by the various device manufacturers of the new eReaders?

I used to be a teacher. I remember the hassle and cumbersome nature of distributing the multitudes of materials that I had assembled.

I see a situation like the following.

I teach a science class. Before the school year starts, I review a selection of Textbooks that I want to use for the class. As I set-up for the class, I annotate the textbook with videos I find to demonstrate the concepts that are in each lesson. I also add links to flash applications which allow them to do electronic labs. I create Word and Excel documents for the various activities, labs, quizzes, and tests. I link them at the appropriate points in the textbook too. After I have accumulated my preparations for the year, I gather all of the links and annotations that I have made and separate them into units. I take the separate units and create annotation sets. On my class web site, I have a forum which I use throughout the instruction. As I introduce new units, I publish a link to the unit annotation set for the period of time. Students can download the set and attach it to the electronic textbook that they purchased at the start of the year. The forum also allows them to upload their own notes and annotations for sharing with the class. Each student has concurrent access to both my notes as well as the other shared notes during the class.

With the Entourage Edge, I can already see the beginnings of such a teaching system becoming available. If the annotation sets are viewable separately from the electronic textbook, then I can see being able to provide multiple ways for students to have access to the material.

fugazied · 01-24-2010, 04:08 PM

It's an interesting idea, people contributing the ebooks they find, free and independent books as well as Gutenberg..

Additional functionality would really kick it off though, as mentioned, the ability to convert and choose format on the fly. Also the ability to rate and share the books you find (I guess delicious does that too). Could be a great idea!

06-26-2007, 04:23 PM	#1
sic Addict Posts: 202 Karma: 692 Join Date: Oct 2006 Device: SONY reader	social bookmarking for ebooks What's the next step after you've found the book you like on the Internet? Of course you'll download it and convert it if you have to to try to get it onto the reading device you're using. And... ? Why not bookmarking the location where you've found the book? Bookmarking has lot of advantage as I'll show you later in this article, but for now the main reason is that you don't have to worry about archiving and maintaining your ebook collection. The website where you found it is doing that already! Just keep your ebook collection where you keep your bookmarks. For bookmarking you should use del.icio.us. If you're not already doing so you should. Period. del.icio.us was sold for 15M dollars to Yahoo! ... so they must be doing something right When you bookmark something on del.icio.us you assign it some tags. This is one of the cool things about del.icio.us because it gives you more freedom than the tree-like hierarchy you can find in your browser. Since the link can have as many tags as you want... it's easier to find it later. Plus it's on the web so you can access your bookmarks later from another computer e.g. when you go home from work; plus it has great browser integration, Firefox users can completely replace the browser's built in bookmarking. So how would you add a bookmark to the ebook you found? You would tag it with something like topic... and maybe add the author or title. If you want to distinguish it from other links you would also tag it with something like ebook. On a side note I'd like to emphasize that tagging creates collections of books and how important they are. Search will only help you if you know what you are looking for. The author, the title or the topic. It won't help you discover works; only collections will. This is why we have librarians. Let's take an example. The Real Mother Goose - Project Gutenberg and tag it as ebook children mother_goose The problem is that if you follow the children tag you get any kind of results can be children's cloths, family fun for a rainy weekend, baby food... far more than books. If you're a power user you can try ebook+children which will give you better results, but it's kind of cumbersome to enter it, you cannot just browse. Furthermore if you go to del.icio.us your collection will be a mess. You can group all the author tags into what they call a bundle, same for collections and titles. If this seems complicated - I think you are right! It is! The good news is that it can be automated. del.icio.us gives programmatic access to their services, by using that someone can create a browser button - say "post ebook to del.icio.us" - that will do all these steps for you. Well... that's exactly what I've done. I call it eBookMark. That is eBook + Bookmark. If you visit DigitalReading.net you can download a so called bookmarklet, which practically is a button that you add to your browser... if you click it, it will pop up the posting form. Now you can find ebooks by author, by title, by collections or see what's popular. To make like easier, the DigitalReading frontpage generates the del.icio.us links for you if you enter a keyword. For example, if you want to find more Tarzan books, enter Tarzan and you'll get: Find more on del.icio.us All eBookMarks Popular eBookMarks eBookMarks tagged tarzan eBookMarks by the author tarzan eBookMarks with the title tarzan eBookMarks in the tarzan collection These links will take you to the right place on the del.icio.us website and this is where the fun begins because this is where the "social" aspect of bookmarking comes into play. You can see what's popular, what tags did others put to the same book. If you follow along the links you can find other books tagged with the same keyword find people with similar interest add people to your network and browse their collections have your friends send links to you discover new books added to the collection. subscribe to RSS feeds so you get notified when a new ebook is added display a list of your ebooks, or just the names of your collections on your blog For example when I bookmarked Alice in Wonderland I stumbled upon a scan of the original and the British Library. Last edited by sic; 06-26-2007 at 04:36 PM. Reason: added screenshot

06-27-2007, 09:50 AM	#7
Hadrien Feedbooks.com Co-Founder Posts: 2,263 Karma: 145123 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Paris, France Device: Sony PRS-t-1/350/300/500/505/600/700, Nexus S, iPad	We have a built-in support for many social bookmarking services on Feedbooks (check the screenshot). We're currently working on a few different features for social bookmarking that will be really nice (the "add to favorite" button's is going to be useful). Attached Thumbnails

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06-26-2007, 06:28 PM	#2
JSWolf Resident Curmudgeon Posts: 73,998 Karma: 128903378 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Roslindale, Massachusetts Device: Kobo Libra 2, Kobo Aura H2O, PRS-650, PRS-T1, nook STR, PW3	Now what happens if you download the ebook, convert it for your reader, delete the source file and sometime later you want the source, but you find the website is no longer there? You are well and truly screwed. Yes it's ok to make bookmarks to find it again if it is still there. But the best way to handle it is to keep the source on your computer and at some point backup all your ebooks and source files onto DVD. You cannot rely on a website to be there forever.

06-26-2007, 06:55 PM	#3
sic Addict Posts: 202 Karma: 692 Join Date: Oct 2006 Device: SONY reader	good point! I oversimplified it a little bit... if you had to do format conversion then "archiving by bookmarking" won't work also... I think it depends on the website and how reliable you think it is vs the inconvenience of going through the archiving process either case I think it still makes sense to have a bookmark to the source... perhaps I should rephrase the article do you still think it's a useful service though?

06-26-2007, 11:27 PM	#4
JSWolf Resident Curmudgeon Posts: 73,998 Karma: 128903378 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Roslindale, Massachusetts Device: Kobo Libra 2, Kobo Aura H2O, PRS-650, PRS-T1, nook STR, PW3	I don't mind seeing bookmarks to free ebooks on the net that can be converted to other formats if they are notin the format you want. It helps people who have readers (or don't mind computer reading) have more books available ot possibly read. It sounds like a good idea.

06-27-2007, 02:36 AM	#5
sic Addict Posts: 202 Karma: 692 Join Date: Oct 2006 Device: SONY reader	once you bookmark the book on del.icio.us there's plenty of cool things you can do with your list of books. e.g. you can create a google custom search that searches inside the books if there will be enough interest i may look into this another use case is when you bookmark stuff for later reading personally, i stopped downloading ebooks in large quantities (aka DVD)... what's the point? i'm never going to read them... just get what I may actually open and bookmark what I like or fnd interesting

06-27-2007, 09:43 AM	#6
JSWolf Resident Curmudgeon Posts: 73,998 Karma: 128903378 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Roslindale, Massachusetts Device: Kobo Libra 2, Kobo Aura H2O, PRS-650, PRS-T1, nook STR, PW3	You never know what you might decide you want to read. My reading has changed. Things I am thinking of reading now, I would not have concidered in the past. One of the books I am reading I downloaded from MobileRead and while it's not a normal read for me, it's still a good read.

06-27-2007, 12:42 PM	#8
sic Addict Posts: 202 Karma: 692 Join Date: Oct 2006 Device: SONY reader	no offence but what's the point in having all these social sites listed? I think these "add to this, add to that..." links are missing the point. these sites should be integrated into the users browser... not the website; the reason being that there's no way for the website to know the full list and which one the user prefers. besides... IMO... del.icio.us is far better than the clones digg is a good idea, but for books we can do better once the shared annotations from within a book will work.

01-24-2010, 01:45 PM	#10
paulckennedy Addict Posts: 205 Karma: 824 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Carthage, Texas Device: Apple iPad	Has anyone come up with an annotation sharing method which is being adopted by the various device manufacturers of the new eReaders? I used to be a teacher. I remember the hassle and cumbersome nature of distributing the multitudes of materials that I had assembled. I see a situation like the following. I teach a science class. Before the school year starts, I review a selection of Textbooks that I want to use for the class. As I set-up for the class, I annotate the textbook with videos I find to demonstrate the concepts that are in each lesson. I also add links to flash applications which allow them to do electronic labs. I create Word and Excel documents for the various activities, labs, quizzes, and tests. I link them at the appropriate points in the textbook too. After I have accumulated my preparations for the year, I gather all of the links and annotations that I have made and separate them into units. I take the separate units and create annotation sets. On my class web site, I have a forum which I use throughout the instruction. As I introduce new units, I publish a link to the unit annotation set for the period of time. Students can download the set and attach it to the electronic textbook that they purchased at the start of the year. The forum also allows them to upload their own notes and annotations for sharing with the class. Each student has concurrent access to both my notes as well as the other shared notes during the class. With the Entourage Edge, I can already see the beginnings of such a teaching system becoming available. If the annotation sets are viewable separately from the electronic textbook, then I can see being able to provide multiple ways for students to have access to the material.

01-24-2010, 04:08 PM	#11
fugazied Wizard Posts: 1,305 Karma: 1958 Join Date: Jan 2009 Device: iPod Touch	It's an interesting idea, people contributing the ebooks they find, free and independent books as well as Gutenberg.. Additional functionality would really kick it off though, as mentioned, the ability to convert and choose format on the fly. Also the ability to rate and share the books you find (I guess delicious does that too). Could be a great idea!

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