Electronic libaries are hard to browse

[Bob Russell]

If you have a large collection of e-books, mp3s, photos or video files then you probably know what I'm talking about.

In physical bookshelves, it's a lot easier to browse through the books and find what you are interested in. Granted, if you know the author or title, maybe it's not so bad in an electronic library. But if you just want to look through the books and find one that appeals to you in your current mood, a list of directories and filenames is often a turn off. Especially for a non-tech person!

Martin Geddes writes writes that there's a "problem with the all-digital future. Those physical artifacts are how we organise our data. The shoeboxes full of old pictures determine some kind of chronological order and grouping. Even the different sets of photo print delivery covers tell you something — that holiday is in the Boots photo processing jacket, this one in the mail-in Fujifilm one.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty in throwing out the artifacts along with the data stored upon them? A stack of CD cases gives us opportunity to browse, and doesn’t need yet-another giant-screen remote to operate. Yes, the artifacts could maybe do with a little shrinkage in size. But I don’t see her manipulating the 10,000 song MP3 jukebox when she can’t read yet."

I agree wholeheartedly, but I don't think the problem is (for the most part) the difference between physical storage and electronic file storage. I think the problem is that the standard electronic interface for content right now is missing. It has defaulted to directories and filenames because there are no standards for doing this.

This situation is probably one of the motivations behind a physical device I saw that emulates digitally the bookshelf browsing experience. Not sure where I saw it, but it seemed a bit silly at the time. Now I'm starting to think this may be the reason for it. A way to make the browsing experience more meaningful and rich once again, because with digital media it has been lost.

Update:BibiloRoll is the device that I was thinking of. It is a bit mysterious, but somehow helps you when reading multiple books and doing comparisons. Strange. But may not be quite a virtual bookshelf despite the picture. And there seem to be other devices. Thanks to David Rothman at TeleRead for helping me find this info!

But I don't think it will be long before we see some more effective ways to store and access various libraries of e-books and other types of content in some standard format with a simple and pleasant interface. At least I hope not.

[CommanderROR]

I understand the problem, but I don't think a solution is too hard to find.

Take the library.

You usually either go to the library looking for a certain book, or you go there looking fr something that fits your mood.
Libraries usually make me angry and confused in a few minutes, because I have to ask three times before I even get close to the section I'm looking for...and most of the time I don't find what I want anyway. So I use the newly installed electronic inventory (not so new anymore these days...) and search there.

Now comes the Problem:
These catalogues usually don't offer you the right choices. If you could browse by category, searchword, genre and several others I wouldn't complain. The trouble is that you can either enter the exact title and author of a book (beware of typos) or you can go to the shelves and try your luck there...:-)

Let's say I'm looking for something amusing, in english and with a fantasy-sort-of style.
If an online catalogue offers me these facts and a short summary (like you find on the back of most books) and the chance to read a page or two I'll be happy.

Add some "Random" features and the possibility to browse by cover-design and You're done!
Amazon does some of these things already, so libraries should be able to get it going in no time at all...if they are willing to invest the time to catalogue all their books properly...this is where I see the problem...

It's the same with iTunes...it doesn't give you the right kind of choices for your search. I often have to try various searches to find a certain piece of music, even If I have all the details including a full biography of the composer...
Here work is still to be done.

And please...all you companies and non-profit organizations out there...don't even try to revive the "virtual browsing in 3D" stuff again...it just loads the digital down with the inconvenience of the analog (RealLife) without it's added benefits!!!

[Snappy!]

I'm with ROR on the virtual browsing in 3D thingie ... nice in theory, but does not really help. Simply eye-candy in most cases.

Maybe a mind-map could be good?

Having the binder-art or cover art would be a good thing as well. Dunno about others, but sometimes I find myself choosing a book just for the cover that draws me. At least for fiction anyway. For non-fiction, I usually know what I want and just zoom straight to the shelf for it. Otherwise, I would read the sypnosis to get an idea.

[DaNDeE]

Yeah right. Amazon is on the right way of presenting the content, so does Apple as well. In my opinion most people miss is the haptic experience. While grabbing a real book, where you can feel the paper, see flaws and crumples in cirtain pages (even have pages at all!) and even smell it, the digital form doesn't provide these experiences. Call me nostalgic: I believe that maybe those who grow up right now will find no difference between a MP3 folder and case full of CDs, but I do for sure but somehow the spirit gets lost. Maybe I spent too much time in IKEA and cling to the idea that the materia is alive and deservse a name

I bet you all know where you put your car keys but who knows where the password to you system is stored? There has to be a lot more than amazon to get the "feeling" and that's what's missing by browsing pure filenames. The industrie will have to come up with something similair or perhaps wait till all have adoped the "feeling" to the new media (remember how strange working with Windows / MacOS / Workbench, etc. felt for the first time? This was supposed to be a desktop! Nowadays everyone is used to it.... so future will have to show, if we need to adopt to new media, or the industrie shows us a sparkling new way of browsing. Heared rumours about apple working on a new desktop. Let's see...

[sammykrupa]

We really need something like http://www.steelskies.com/coverflow/CoverFlow.html

for books!

I preferably a Mac version (-:

Hi,

Once again, my name is Branko Collin, not David Rothman. :-)

I wrote other articles about this topic, for instance Qualities of Paper (http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=3752) at Teleread, and the far too fuzzy E-mail Usability (http://www.tekstadventure.nl/branko/...mail-usability) at my personal blog, in which the argument I am trying to make is that people use the metadata that the interface of their e-mail client provides them with to organize their documents. Sure, better interfaces may be imaginable, but as long as no-one introduces them, they will never catch on; and in the end, it may turn out that the filesystem is the best shoebox after all.

OK, so a poor-man's horizontal ellips is off-limits. So obscure a bug that I am amazed I even uncovered it. Anyway, the rest of my response:

(I think Shoebox was the name of a database for storing linguistic knowledge--celebrating the organizational capacities of a device that wasn't even invented for the purpose. Be made an OS imaginatively called BeOS that stored all kinds of meta-data in its filesystem that literally was set-up as a database. Perhaps it was the better filesystem, but BeOS withered despite its qualities.)

P.S. Search has become an important instrument in my electronic library, and is all but absent in my non-electronic one.

[Bob Russell]

Hi Branko,

Actually I was thanking David for helping me do the search today, but I think you're right that somehow we accidentally short-shrift you on the credit sometimes and don't always think of your name when we think of TeleRead articles. But you've got some really great stuff, and are deserving of all the credit you can get!

I think you might be right about file systems being the ultimate solution, and especially enhanced file systems, so the metadata fits media better, and when std file browsers present it well. I like that perspective a lot, but even that will take a while. And we still have the issue of what metadata and how to store it and how to populate it. Once that's standard, I think it will be slick, and could even include links to web info on the book like reviews and some scanned pages or cover info.

[ElaHuguet]

Actually, I recently downloaded a program, due to this post, which is visually very good for browsing, downloading the cover and quite a bit of info from Amazon, I found it very nice, since I AM fond of browsing among the shelves for something to hit my fancy.

[Bob Russell]

Thanks Ela. I guess you are referring to eLibPro. BTW, it appears you can use https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...t=6424&p=28042 to get to Tad's post #22 directly, in FireFox anyway.

I wonder how many other people are using that software for browsing books, or if it's an undiscovered "secret"?

[ElaHuguet]

That's right... and thanks for the link info, I tried to "manhandle" it several ways to point to it directly, but couldn't!