Phil Bradley's weblog

Blog A Penguin Classic

Blog A Penguin Classic – Penguin Books Ltd. From the website:

Get involved with the biggest ever Classics blog, guaranteed to get the nation, and you, talking. Each of the 1,400 Penguin Classics is up for grabs and here’s how it works:

Sign-up, and if you’re quick enough, you’ll become one of the lucky people to receive a randomly chosen, FREE Penguin Classic in the post. Plus you’ll be the first to review it here, enabling the blog, and comments, to begin!

Each day, new reviews will be posted, so keep an eye out for yours and don’t forget everyone can comment on a book once it has become active.

50 best cult books - Telegraph

A week or so back the Telegraph did a list of 100 books you must have in a library or some such, and now they've done 50 best cult books. I have to say that I disagreed with almost all of their choices, which is what makes it all so much fun. Comments are worth a read as well!

110 best books: The perfect library - Telegraph

The perfect library. Skip straight past the list itself, which you won't agree with, and jump straight into the comments. That's the fun part where people are getting their knickers into a twist as to why their favourites are not included.

reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books

reCAPTCHA. is one of those really worthwhile things you find on the net now and again, and this should particularly appeal to those of us with an interest in digitizing books. You all know about Captcha programs, Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart - the box where you type in the word before you can submit some form.

Well, what reCaptcha is doing is providing access to resources that allow you to add a program to your website - such as a captcha program for your email address or some such. They use two words - one previously identified and another one. If you get the one right, it assumes you've got the other right as well, and this is then tested by trying it out on different people. It's a great way to help!

Amazon's Kindle in the UK

 

The blogs and news are all chattering away about Kindle, which is the new hand held ebook reader that Amazon are offering. You can see information about it on their home page for example. Alternatively, read about it in Newsweek or read about it in the library/information weblogs here and here and here or over here. However, don't expect to go to the UK Amazon site and find anything on it, oh no. Doesn't exist. I ran a quick search and the first thing that pops up is some other product entirely. OK, so maybe they're not selling it in the UK yet, maybe they never intend to, but they must expect people to be interested. After all, global economy, global interests, global company and all that jazz - but apparently not at Amazon.

Updated! Phil Bradley: My bookshop of titles

I finally got around to updating my Bookshop. This is a collection of links to Amazon of books that either I've written myself, or that I'd edited or been involved with revising. There's also a new collection of other books on aspects of Web 2.0, search engines from the search perspective and search engine marketing. It's not a huge collection, but if you're needing a book, this might be a good place to start. (Did I also mention that it makes me money as well?)

London Book Project

Looks like we've got the London version of Bookcrossing, and it's called the  London Book Project | London project. The London Book Project is a free book exchange on a massive scale. Using the London Underground as a high speed distribution network, they aim to bring real literature to London's commuters. Scrap the freesheets - read a free book instead! There's also Read It Swap It as well, which is slightly different, but if you like one you'll probably like the other.

MSN Live Book Search

Microsoft has gone head to head with Google on the 'search inside the book' concept over at Live Search Books It's very straightforward and is very similar to the Google offering. The interface is simple and clear, and the results give you various books to view. In the example above the main screen element is displaying the book, and on the left hand side of the screen we have the bibliographic details, with a 'search inside the book option'. Below that the previously searched keywords are displayed in context, so it's easy to jump directly to them.

Consequently I think the best search approach is going to be fairly broad to begin with, choose a title from the results and then really start to narrow down at that point. The main screen can either display part of the page or a click will get you the whole page, which I found slightly small to read comfortably. All of the scanning really looked neat and clear. The entire book can be downloaded as a .pdf file.

Is this going to damage the Google efforts? No, not a bit of it. I can see both services running very much in tandem with each other, and if you don't find what you want with one, you'll simply toddle across to use the other. It would be good if someone could create a little software gizmo type thing to search both in one go though - any takers do let me know!
 

Wired 14.11: Very Short Stories

Link: Wired 14.11: Very Short Stories. These are fun, and I can't resist including the link. Short stories of 6 words each around the theme of science fiction. My favourite from Joss Whedon 'Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.' Philipp Lenssen is inviting further examples, and there are some good ones there too. My contributions are:

• I experienced my birth yet again.
• My grandfather said to me 'Dad..'
• Previous three lettered mammailian lifeform? RAT.

NYT snipes at the e-Book

The New York Times has an article 'Trying Again to Make Books Obsolete' in which they have a bit of a bash at the new Sony Reader. They can't quite seem to make up their own minds however - I think it's supposed to be 'balanced' journalism, but they come down on the side of books are going to be around for a long time yet. Probably.

NowPublic

 

Tags: YEARS | TEXT | e-book | times | New York