So this morning whilst perusing my feeds I came across a post about being more of a bookworm than I already am. Unfortunately, there were no tips about how to extend the day by another couple of hours so I have more time to read in my already cramped life but there was a little gem tucked inside: BookMooch. BookMooch is like what LaLa was to CDs in that you create an inventory of stuff you want to unload and a wishlist of what you’d like to get in return. Here’s my inventory and it is also in my side bar showing six random items.
Getting started was pretty easy requiring you to choose username and password and to make your postal address available so that people you want to mooch from can ship to you. Adding books to your inventory is as easy as banging in the ISBN number, books without one can be easily looked up by author and title, and failing that you can always hand enter the item in. I knocked out some 49 books in under an hour and had three people looking to relive me of four in a couple more hours. Not too bad.
The system relies on a sort of karma system in that each book added to your inventory nets you 1/10 of a point, shipping one domestically nets you 1 point and 3 for international shipments. You’ll need those points when you want to get books for yourself with a domestic mooch being -1 points and -2 internationally. Reading Kafka at Work lays out the system better than I.
So far the system beats trying to set up an auction on eBay and feels a little more social than just dumping them in a box and posting it on Freecycle. I am particularly impressed with how easy it is to use and the first three people mooching off me are awfully polite people who are just about as book-addled as myself. I’m looking forward to figuring out what I would like to mooch and see how that end of the system operates.
Surprisingly, I am still able to pick up a book and read but that could be due to the small fact that Gabby is still only a couple of weeks old.
A couple of nights ago I knocked back the last book in the Wheel of Time series and am in the process of noshing on the prequel novel, New Spring. While I found the books to be good, campy, high-fantasy fun–nothing too serious, just solid escapism–after spending a year in the world of swords and sorcery (some 9,000 pages!) I’m thinking a change of pace and setting is in order.
Here’s four that I’m thinking of tackling:
Where should I start? Dystopia or whaling? Interstellar colonization or positronic mysteries?
Help!
I made the final push to get all the books on my list loaded into the database, some 119 [Edit: missed three..] titles in all, and took the time to tweak the templates a little more. For the sidebar (picture on left), I moved the current book to the top as it was a little lost between planned and finished, though the original layout reflects a transition better. Additionally, I added the sums of each book into the header with the stock function call found in the library template (I’m grateful for Rob’s well laid out code!) to add a sense of perspective–if I read a little over a book a month I have seven years remaining!
One of the coolest things about Now Reading is that it is fairly extensible, the functions are well documented and data is stored in separate tables which will allow me to do all sorts of different things (RSS feeds, sorts, groupings, etc.). I just need to take the time to hack at it. One thing I would like to do is to be able to associate comments to books and authors as it would be neat to have the potential for a dialogue to emerge on those topics. My inital thought is that it would have to be separate from the regular Wordpress commenting system as if I ever decided to deactivate Now Reading or it breaks with a later version of Wordpress I’d be left with one hell of a mess. Things to chew on.
Back to reading!
Well, it appears that the site I was relying on for tracking my reading list, Reader2.com, is down (SQL connection error) and has been that way for several days. The programmer, it seems, last updated it over six months ago–along with all the other related sites–so it looks like it’s reached the state of abandonware. It was a great service while it lasted and I managed to load in some 90+ books, tagged, reviewed, and cross referenced so loosing it is a bit of a downer.
Regardless, it’s passing gives me the chance to pull the reading list into the site which gives me a greater degree of control and to do so I’m using Roblog’s Now Reading plugin–after some hacking of the default templates it flows decently with K2. On the left you’ll see a grouping of pending books, currently reading, and finished as well as a link to the “Library,” while at the moment is a tad sparse I’ll be filling it out over the next couple of days. Hopefully, I’ll be able to revamp the existing reading list page to reflect the information from the plugin to make the page a little more useful.
In other site news, I’ve moved onto the latest K2. I’m finding it to be a more polished experience; live search is tightly integrated and commenting flows smoother. One minor annoyance was that page template with comments was broken so I had to make a copy of the non-comments one and commenting to it. Beyond that I decided to change the background color to draw eyes to the posts rather than have them sort of bleed out into the surrounding page.
Good times.
Looks like I haven’t really kicked my eBay used book habit. I was going strong there for a while but my insatiable need to finish a series once I start it pushed me into trying to round out the back half of Jordan’s wonderfully trashy soap opera series The Wheel of Time. In the process of hunting down the missing books I found myself bidding on other sets by other authors, this time four by Greg Bear.
Seriously, I have a problem. As if my “To Read” list of trashy fiction wasn’t already long enough (around 87) and my non-fiction list, which I haven’t touched in over a year, still remains with some 20 books waiting to be read. At my current rate of one book = one month Gabriella will be heading into middle school by the time I’m done. That is of course if I STOP BUYING BOOKS. Like some perverse math word problem my little habit will certainly outpace my ability to read and finish. “If Jimmy finishes one book per month but purchases four books every other month how soon until Jimmy is buried under pulp fiction?”
When Gabriella comes onto the scene this is likely only going to get worse as I try and hunt down every cool children’s book so that she can be buried just like her dad. If I’m lucky she’ll turn into a little reading junkie like us and her grandparents. If you’re going to be strung out on something literature isn’t the worst thing.
