Tag: books

Favorited The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book by Wouter Groeneveld

On occasion I’ve mentioned here that one way of ensuring longevity of this blog is to publish it as one or more books with a proper ISBN, and have the national library store their two obligated copies. We did this in my student association with our monthly magazine (with an ISSN not ISBN) and year books too.
My website is part of the national library’s web archive, but Wouter description is still of interest to me. He did some curation, do not much, and no editing. The paper version is likely more browsable than the website, even if a web viewer is called a browser. Sadly enough he had it made through Amazon, so should I go down this route still, finding a way of doing it with local (i.e. EU) partners only is step one.

This was a lovely month project that rewarded me with a physical artefact of an ever-evolving digital medium, solidifying words, sentences, and paragraphs in a way that perhaps might even envy The Internet Archive. As a hopeless sentimental person, flipping through the book, looking at the figures and reading the text makes me happy. And also embarrassed as there are plenty of contextual and grammatical mistakes in solidified as well.

Wouter Groeneveld

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I am trying out the Books Search plugin for Obsidian. I keep notes on all books I’ve read, own or have come across. I add meta data to those notes manually. The Books Search plugin helps make that easier by picking up that meta data from Google Books through their API. You install the plugin through the Community Plugin list, and can then add an API key. Without that key, after a few tries you will get an error message.

The plugin documentation does however not state how to connect the plugin to that Google API.

These are the steps I took after a bit of searching:

  • In the Google cloud console first create a project. (A Google account is needed)
  • In the same console, under credentials, click create credentials and create an API key. Copy that key and save it in the settings of the Obsidian Books Search plugin.
  • In the same console, under Enable APIs & Services, enable the Google Books API.
  • Go back to Credentials, edit your API key, select Restrict Key under API restrictions, and select from drop down list the Google Books API you’ve just enabled. (If it doesn’t show any APIs to choose, you have not enabled any APIs yet.) Now the key works only for the Google Books API.
  • Ignore the warning in the console about OAuth consent, as this is not needed (the books API is accessible without authorisation, and you’re also not building an app for others to use.)

Using the Book Search plugin I notice it is by default restricted to English books, not finding titles in other languages that Google Books does have in its lists. The locale settings in the plugin allow me to switch language before a search in the search form through a very long drop down menu, but doing that (or doing the same search for each of three or four languages) quickly negates the effectivity gain the plugin provides.

It is unclear from the Google API documentation if locale can be set to multiple languages.

Probably not, given Google’s long history of interpreting multilingual as serial monolingual (see this 2007 presentation at Google by Stephanie Booth pointing this same stuff out), ignoring that multilingual people tend to change languages throughout their activities even for just a single word or short phrase. (I don’t have Dutch, English or German days or topics, in the case of books I may want to find the German original of an English translation, or want to search for a specific thing in French because I know it exists, while also interested in any Dutch translation that might be available or the Italian original. My notes are always in multiple languages.)

Bookmarked Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups by Maggie Appleton

I somehow missed Maggie Appleton’s blogpost (bookmarked above) about the IndieWeb pop-up session on personal libraries of a few weeks ago. During the session I found her suggestion for ad-hoc reading clubs very interesting, as an application of having book lists on your site. I first and foremost think about discovery in the context of publishing book lists: if I enjoy your blog, or know you and you share book lists those may contain good suggestions to read. Discovery is also why in my ‘data format‘ for such lists I allow for sharing the URLs of lists of others, as well as share the URL of where I found the recommendation for a specific book. What Maggie Appleton suggests is something else and interesting: what if you could see when several others in your network are also currently reading the same book you are reading, allowing an ad-hoc book reading club for that book. It would require a way to compare lists you follow. My sharing of lists I follow is a useful start for it I think, but you’d add a match detection layer on top of it. Whether that matching needs to take place in my site, I don’t know. To me it feels like a personal tool perhaps, alerting me to other readers, and allowing me to privately think about whether I’d want to form an ad-hoc book club with them at that time.

An idea I brought to the event and ended up hosting a session on was ad hoc reading groups – discussions and meetups facilitated by our public bookshelves.

Maggie Appleton

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Came across this in a The Hague bookshop. Books wrapped in brown paper with a few key words written on them. Customers are invited to buy them wihthout judging a book by its cover. I wonder how often people do that. There were a few who were trying to guess the book based on the key words provided.

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I find that I feel writing a non-fiction subject oriented book is nonsense for non-academics. I feel a strong aversion to the idea of writing a non-fiction book, as people have suggested to me occasionally since university.

Different elements are part of that aversion:

  • There’s a plethora of non-fiction books that to me seem 300 to 400 pages of anecdotal padding around a core idea that would fit on the backflap. Many such books lack tables of content and indexes, seemingly to better hide that one or few core ideas, so you need to go through all pages to find them.
  • The motivation for non-fiction writers to write a book I often find suspect. Aimed at marketing and PR, in support of selling themselves as consultant for instance. Written not to serve an audience, or even find one, but as a branding prop. That makes the actual content often even thinner. Such as taking something anecdotal like “I had this great project I enormously enjoyed doing” and anointing it as the new truth, “Organise all your projects like this, it’s a universal method!”
  • I equally find my own favourite topics suspect as material for writing a book. I don’t think any of the topics I work on, and have been working on, are deep enough or have enough solid foundation to stand on their own as a book. It could only become a range of anecdotes around ideas that themselves fit in a sentence or two. In my activities context and environment are key in working out how an idea can be made to work for a client, and that’s the work. That’s a good source of anecdotes, but not more. See the first bullet. A book about it would be a collection of opinions, and in my eyes would take a rather large amount of work to give those ideas a more solid footing.

In a conversation with E about this a few months ago, she said that’s a very arrogant stance towards authors (they have nothing to say), as well as belittling myself (I have nothing to say). I think those are both the same things, that most people, including me, don’t have enough to say to fill a book, to spend tens of thousands of words on. Many have enough to say on enough moments to at that time fill a great blogpost, article, a pamphlet (like the one about birthday unconferences shown in the right hand column), or an essay. But not a book, an artefact that seems such a heavyweight creation and production process in comparison. There are those who write a book by collating material that was previously written as blogposts, or as internal notes, and then somewhat rearranged. I see that as case in point more than counter argument.

As stated at the top, I make exceptions for academic books, explaining or introducing a field or actual research and their popular science counterparts, and for non-subject non-fiction, that e.g. describes a journey (geographically, or through life for instance, ‘true stories’, the history of a topic and how we ended up in the current situation, that sort of thing).
I also don’t mean fiction. Fiction’s role is very different, and any story that makes you read the next sentence and the next and the next is not what I mean here.
In that sense I very much appreciate the work of Cory Doctorow, who writes articles, essays, columns and blogposts about the topics he cares about, and writes fiction books to explore those same topics along different and novel routes.

Yet, our house holds many non-fiction books. A stack of books that keeps ever growing. So, why is that? Is it that there is more value in the whole, the collection of books read, and those unread, as opposed to the lack of value I perceive in any singular book in itself? Or maybe I don’t understand what writing a non-fiction book is, and what it is for. There are people reading my blog who have written non-fiction books. What were your motivations and aims? Why a book?

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Having created a working flow to generate OPML booklists directly from the individual book notes in my PKM system, I did the first actual run in production of those scripts today.

It took a few steps to get to using the scripts in production.

  • I have over 300 book note files in my Obsidian vault.
  • Of course most lacked the templated inline data fields that allow me to create lists. For the 67 fiction books I read in 2021 I already had a manual list with links to the individual files. Where needed I added the templated data fields.
  • Having added those inline fields where they were missing I can easily build lists in Obsidian with the Dataview plugin. Using this code


    results in

  • The same inline data fields are used by my scripts to read the individual files and build the same list in OPML
  • That gets automatically posted to my website where the file is both machine and human readable.

Doing this in production made me discover a small typo in the script that builds the OPML, now fixed (also in the GitHub repository). It also made me realise I want to add a way of ordering the OPML outline entries by month read.

Lists to take into production next are those for currently reading (done), non-fiction 2021, and the anti-library. That last one will be the most work, I have a very long list of books to potentially read. I will approach that not as a task of building the list, but as an ongoing effort of evaluating books I have and why they are potentially of interest to me. A way, in short, to extend my learning, with the list as a useful side effect. The one for currently reading is the least work, and from it the lists for fiction 2022 and non-fiction 2022 will automatically follow. The work is in the backlog, getting history to conform to the convention I came up with, not in moving forward from this point.

In parallel it is great to see that Tom Critchlow is also looking at creating such book lists, in JSON, and at digesting such lists from others. The latter would implement the ‘federated’ part of federated bookshelves. Right now I just point to other people’s list and rss feeds in my ‘list of lists‘. To me getting to federation doesn’t require a ‘standard’. Because JSON, OPML and e.g. schema.org have enough specificity and overlap between them to allow both publishers of lists and parsers or such lists enough freedom to use or discard data fields as they see fit. But there is definitely a discussion to be had on identifying that overlap and how to use it best. Chris Aldrich is planning an IndieWeb event on this and other personal libraries related topics next month. I look forward to participating in that, quite a number of interesting people have expressed interest, and I hope we’ll get to not just talk but also experiment with book lists.