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.
