Comments on: Sarah’s Gadget Showcase, Part 3 (Reading Gadgets)

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:53:26 +0000

I’m comment happy!

I got into the library world wanting to be a rare books librarian as well! Funny coincidence. I had been working at a public library back in 2001, and I read an interview with a band I like called Unto Ashes, and the singer is a rare books librarian. I had no idea at that point that a career could be made out of being a librarian.

And now I’m a technology librarian. Strange how things turned out.

Glad to know I’m not the only one who followed that quirky path

By: Mary

Mary — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 19:42:11 +0000

You mentioned an Android Phone, Did you know that LibraryThing has a barcode scanner app? You scan the barcode of a book you are interested in and add it to your want to read list or list of books you have already read. Makes updates faster and easier.

By: Carla

Carla — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:55:30 +0000

Thanks so much for this post, Sarah. I’ve been wanting to buy a kindle for ages, but was put off by Amazon’s stupid DRM restrictions. Being restricted to buying from only one ‘book shop’ is just ridiculous. Now, thanks to your post, I’ve gone and bought a kindle, which hopefully will arrive here in Australia next week. Am obsessively checking the DHL website to see where it is – currently it’s in Hong Kong. I do love gadgets

By: Alison

Alison — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:49:55 +0000

“As you may know, the Kindle is a closed ecosystem and you only “license” books from Amazon–you don’t own them as you would with a printed book (same w/ other eBook vendors too). ”
I don’t know if you are aware of this, but you can buy books from some publishers (like Baen) that are DRM free and will work on the Kindle. And I feel that you “own” these books because you can save a copy for backup!

By: Kid Computers

Kid Computers — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:20:55 +0000

Sarah, great article! I am actually trying to get word out of a special library computer that I’m creating, you could call it a “gadget”. I would love for you to possibly review it!

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:00:14 +0000

“But it was, and is, all about the information not the technology that carries it.”

Profound.

I could rant for hours about digital rights, and end user agreements that we all agree to, but for now, that shall suffice.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:11:26 +0000

The Kindle app should be saving your place. Let me see your Kindle the next time we see each other and I’ll see what’s what. I think there’s a sync setting that might be off.

By: Renaldo

Renaldo — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:45:46 +0000

I personally have no problem with Kindle’s or iTunes “closed” ecosystems, for me it would be like complaining about the “closed” nature of the Milky Way: yes, they’re all closed, or circumscribed, but they’re plenty big enough for my mortal tastes, and I do appreciate the relatively calm law and order that exists in them (as opposed to, say, the hackneyed world of Windows or Android). My iTunes account is almost ten years old, and it has done good service in providing access to a universe of music, video, and bibliographic works, and in allowing me to manage them in a powerfully elegant way.

The key criteria, in making a decision regarding any platform, is whether there’s elegance in design and quality in content, and this includes libraries in general. As a prominent scholar wrote at the beginning of the digital library era, ‘I want libraries to filter, weed, and identify the best literature in my field, and not to deluge me with *everything*. The same is true with Kindle and iTunes. I purchased my first ebook over ten years ago; I still have it, along with countless hundreds of others (perhaps, now, 1000s, I haven’t counted for a while). I can’t use the same ereader app for all of them, but they are all on my iPad, accessible with a couple of button clicks. My only serious complaint is that the Kindle software is still primitive as a bibliographic management tool.

By: Black net | Dkroofingsidin

Black net | Dkroofingsidin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 05:54:29 +0000

[...] Sarah's Gadget … – Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton-Jan [...]

By: Librarian in Black | short stacks

Librarian in Black | short stacks — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 04:42:01 +0000

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