Week 11 - eBooks & aBooks

Well this wasn't particularly hard but time consuming. Every time I looked I came across something interesting and would get distracted; start reading or listening then whoosh. Guest that's why I am not a librarian, I would be like a chocaholic trying to sell chocolate.
I found an interesting recipe book and started to reformat it, install a full index, highlight the tips etc this is still a work in progress, but you can see the listing in my LibraryThing. (had to stop as I was spending all my time doing this and not my homework). This also highlighted another reason why I am learning so much more from this course that I have been able to on my personal explorations.

Another thing I noticed and it annoyed me, was to discover that most of the sites did NOT have much more than an alpha list. My wish would be to have eBooks accessible as a search-able catalogue available to LibraryThing. In fact why aren't they just in the library catalogues like every other book? After-all they are just another format that doesn't take up shelf space (nor collect dust).
The intention would be to have the entry as a hot link and thus available for immediate recall when I needed access to it again. (I think a majority of books will end up this way before long, especially "text" books).

Audiobooks (why aren't they called aBooks?) was a bit of a revelation; another one of the shocks to my once neat and tidy picture of the world. For some reason I still had audiobooks pictured as cassettes. That they have evolved onto the web & MP3 etc had not entered my consciousness; another time consuming distraction. Plan is to investigate this further and burn a CD (my player will play MP3 CD's which makes it a lot easier).

Once the readers develop to a similar quality (contract & brightness & Full colour) to "real" books (will we then have a catagory call rBooks?) I think they will really take off.

Current tech articles indicate that this need is well understood (google has released an A4 better contrast Kindle in the last few weeks) and much better units are in the labs.

Looking forward to a bright exciting future.