The link below is to one of my Tumblr Blogs, ‘The Book Stand.’ The Book Stand is a place for finding free books available in Kindle and/or PDF formats. I post anywhere up to a dozen a day on the Blog and they are all free when posted (but they don’t all stay that way for long).
Visit at:
http://bookstand.tumblr.com/
I am into my last days of annual leave, so it is doubtful I’ll be able to read anywhere near as much as I have this last week. I’ll probably have the Kindle out at lunch for a bit, so I’ll still be getting some reading in even while I’m at work. The Kindle has certainly made it a lot easier to have good reading material available no matter where I am. Loving the Kindle.
Social Networks, Web Applications & Other Tools
Not a lot has happened with the social networks in the book/reading niche over this last week, except that I have been updating Goodreads on a regular basis as to what I am reading, progress and cataloguing the books as I go.
I did do a quick addition to Quotista, which has a lot of potential but doesn’t appear to be being developed any further, which is…
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I finished reading this book today.
Treasure Island was the first major novel of Robert Louis Stevenson. It was first published in 1883 and has remained a much-loved book. First penned as a story for boys, it was as a young boy that I first came across Treasure Island. It was the first real book that I ever read – certainly of my own choice. If I remember correctly, the copy I had was a small book, not much bigger than my hand and illustrated throughout. The illustrations weren’t coloured as such, but I think I may have started to ‘colour them in’ as I read the story several times. The name of the ship, ‘Hispaniola,’ came back to me in one of my first compositions at school. In that early attempt at writing I wrote a story about piracy and a ship called the Hispaniola. I believe I was written into the story, along…
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I am about to start using a new web application called BookYap. Put simply, BookYap is an application that recommends books based on criteria you enter. There are over 650 000 books in its database, so chances are it will find a book for you.
You can search for a book by using keywords or the filters it has available (based on personality types). By becoming a registered user, the application learns more and more about you and your reading habits, improving the recommendations it makes for you.
Books appear with thumbnails of their covers and book ratings. A brief description appears by hovering over the thumbnail. You are able to interact with the application and associated community by sharing books you have read and your reviews of them. There is connectivity with both Facebook and Twitter also.
You are also able to add books to a reading wishlist if you like. Books can be purchased from Amazon when you choose a book to read.
Visit BookYap at:
http://bookyap.com/
Today’s link is to a site for people who are interested in or are actually writing a book or books. Storybook is Open Source software and available for free. From what I’ve seen of the software and a tutorial that I found on using it, Storybook looks to be a very useful piece of software. For a change I have two links – one for the software itself and one for the tutorial I found on it.
For more, visit:
http://storybook.intertec.ch/joomla/
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/organize-create-stories-novels-storybook/
If you are looking for a book and want to see if there is an ebook version, you should probably try PDFse, which is a search engine for ebooks. These days you can read ebooks on a reader or on a laptop with pretty much the same convenience as that of a normal book. That’s my view anyhow.
Have a look at:
http://pdfse.com/
If you are into books and sharing your thoughts about them, whether that is by book reviews, lists, what you own, etc, then Goodreads may be a social network for you. I am on Goodreads and I am using it to catalogue my entire library (both hard copy and digital) – it will take me a while to complete the exercise. I use Goodreads and Shelfari – at the moment Goodreads is probably my preferred book sharing social network.
If you are into books and sharing your thoughts about them, whether that is by book reviews, lists, what you own, etc, then Shelfari may be a social network for you. I am on Shelfari and I am using it to catalogue my entire library (both hard copy and digital) – it will take me a while to complete the exercise. You can embed your bookshelf into your website, start a book group and share with others within the Shelfari community, plus much more. Well worth a look.
Bookcrossing is a social network that I have an account with. It is a community for booklovers and booksharers. Basically Bookcrossing comes down to labeling a book (having registered it online with Bookcrossing), sharing a book (by leaving it in a public place somewhere which has been logged at Bookcrossing) and then tracking that book online as it continues to be shared in the Bookcrossing way. This can be a great way to get rid of those books you no longer need or want and passing them on to others.
Get into the Bookcrossing community at
http://www.bookcrossing.com/
Diigo has been about for some time, but I have only just registered an account. I use Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and the other bookmarking and surfing web applications/social networks that I have posted about in recent weeks, yet diigo adds another element to my web adventures.
Diigo is a social network sharing site, in that you can share the bookmarks/favorites that you save. But the new element that diigo gives me in my surfing the net is that which I have at hand when I am reading a book or magazine offline – a highlighter and the ability to add notes to the written page (which in diigo is done via a sticky note that is attached to the page you are on). I can then return to the page I am reading with a bookmark as it were attached to where I got up to (by way of a sticky note), highlighted sections that were of particular interest to me and the ability to share what I have added to that page by way of my highlights and sticky notes. It is also possible to take a collaborative approach to this sort of online research by creating a group of users within diigo.
I can see diigo becoming a very important research tool that I will use for many years to come.
Visit diigo at:
http://www.diigo.com
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