Tag: calibre

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A great little book, published last May, that I came across in the Godert Walter bookstore in Groningen: Libraries of the Mind.

My mind was primed by E for this to stand out. Early August she pointed me to a posting about a man who had read 3600 books in 60 years, and had a list of them all which after his death was published online. Book lists online aren’t rare, and Swiss professor Beat Döbeli’s list of 8000 books and 30k texts is sort of the pinnacle of lists I know about. But the article E pointed me to got me thinking about lists. We have about 1.000 physical books in our house, I have a list of about 1.300 books I have notes about, and an e-book library of some 1.200 titles.

The physical books and e-books form an actual library, but my list of books I have notes about contains books I do not own, and books I have not read. They’re books I have notes about why I might read them sometime in the future. In Umberto Eco’s ‘anti-library’ fashion, they’re a reservoir of curated titles I can choose from in future.
All of those books together do comprise my mental image of ‘my library’.

Another 2.500 books or so, that I used to own, but did away with in 2012 and 2016, and of which there must be a list somewhere on one of my old laptops though I can’t find it, also make up part of that mental image of ‘my library’. So my mental library is perhaps over 4000 books?

Such mental libraries, is what the book ‘Libraries of the Mind’ is about, and when I came across it a few weeks after reading that link E shared with me, and having mused about the number of books that passed through this household over the years, I was primed to notice it.

A fun read. Libraries of the mind, our collection of impressions of books, are always bigger than the physical book collections themselves they are connected to. The book also goes into the dark matter of literature, all those books that were lost, written but never published, or tales told but never written down in the first place. The many works we can’t ever access due to language differences, and where translation itself moves the untranslated from view even more. I think from now on I need to start looking at other language online book stores to see what might be there. E.g. what has recently been published in e.g. Polish non-fiction that is of interest, and can I add an impression of that book to the library of my mind, even if I never will learn to read Polish?

But above all the book is about the joy of reading, the worlds and thoughts it provides access to.

Loved it.

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In several jurisdictions (certainly the USA and Australia, Germany too) Amazon Kindle customers are told that by February 25th the ability to download books to your computer (for later transfer to your device over USB) will be disabled. I haven’t seen it in my Dutch Amazon store yet. That makes me wonder if it is a phased roll-out. [Update January 2026: the download option has been removed in the Dutch Amazon store too.]
This won’t prevent you from reading your e-books in any way, but will prevent you from storing them in useful formats outside of the Amazon silo (so that Amazon no longer can remove them at will).

I realise my steps to move all my Amazon bought e-books to an environment I control have been timely (yet, also late by several years one might say).

Within the next 10 days downloading Kindle book files and using Epubor to move them into your Calibre library should likely be a priority if you care about long term autonomy over your e-readings. Enshittification avoidance is a civic duty I’d say.

Where enshittification happens it must be made to hurt the companies choosing it. Like by no longer sending money their way. So this step just makes avoiding Amazon purchases easier to keep up for me.

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A year ago I blogged about federated bookshelves, in response to Tom Critchlow’s posting Library JSON, A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads.

As I reread both postings this morning as well as some of the links Tom points, specifically Phil Gyford’s posting as he starts from the reading experience, not from the tech, and Matt Webb’s for suggesting RSS/OPML, I jotted down a few additional notes.

  • Since the previous posting I stopped linking to Amazon and Goodreads, and having a way to point others to books and vice versa, for discovery is of more interest to me now
  • I envisage myself and others having multiple lists (by topic of interest, genre, language, year, author maybe)
  • I’d like to be able to point from one of my lists to another (from an author field in one list to an author centered list e.g.)
  • I care less about ‘factual’ reviews, more about reasons why people chose a book (‘the cover design jumped out at me in the store’ or ‘this book touches upon X connected to the topic Y that I’m currently exploring’, which goes back to my notions of social filtering
  • Similarly I don’t need images of book covers, which also potentially carry copyright issues, but links to author websites or their publisher would be useful, as is a link to a list sharer’s/reader’s blogpost
  • I’d like to be able to see/get/follow other people’s lists
  • I’d like sharing a list of other people’s lists I follow
  • I’d like to be able to adopt entries in other people’s lists into one of my lists (e.g. an authour, a book or thematic list
  • It would be great if such lists could be imported somehow into tools people might use, e.g. Calibre, Delicious Library, Zotero
  • I don’t think you need a unique ID for a book, like Tom originally suggested, if the aim is discovery. It’s enough to be able to build triangles that allow navigation and discovery, from me to a title or author, to another reader or more books by an author, or other books in lists where this one shows up
  • OPML with our without RSS seems the most simple approach here, as the type of info we’re talking about is very well suited to outliners. OPML outlines, and outlines of outlines, can be machine readable and human readable at the same time (case in point, my OPML list of blogs I follow, which is human readable as a blogroll and can also directly be imported into any feedreader
  • The first list I think I should make as an experiment, is the list of things I might read, my current non-fiction Anti-Library

That last point I’ve added to my things to do if I find some spare moments.


The other side of a book case, image by Ton Zijlstra, license CC BY NC SA