For professional and expert users, however, there are some things that could be improved. First, afaik Google Book’s metadata is a total mess. Doesn’t it WorldCat have an api? Since my main goal was to alphabetize my books and keep track of them, super-detailed metadata was not that important, but I have a feeling that this app could easily be improved if the developers found cleaner catalogs to consult. Or maybe its not.

Secondly, and more importantly, is exporting your data. The app features a super-convenient option to export your data in SQL or CSV formats, but few of these formats are supported by standard bibliography software. As a result, getting your data out of the app and into Sente, Papers, Zotero, Mendeley, BibDesk, or even EndNote can be a pain. Even more important than getting clean metadata, then, is producing an ability to export records in bibtex format, which iirc is more or less the defacto standard these days.

Overall, this is a great app by a great developer that is undoubtedly one of the best (if not the best) of its kind. I very highly recommend it — and with just a few more tweaks it will have all of the ridiculously specialized features that niche users like me clamor for!

My review of the iPad was not unabashedly positive — I think it makes a great PDF reader, but that it hardly eclipses the laptop for most of the jobs that academics do. That said, I wanted to make a few comments about the iPad and the role it plays in the other major job in my life — raising my twin infant boys.

For raising small kids, the iPad is incredible. It’s small size means you can plop it down next to you anywhere, and you can work the thing with a single finger, leaving the rest of you free to burp an infant. When a good portion of your life is passively consuming media while juggling a bottle and a kid, the iPad is perfect for checking email, or reading the news. The speaker is big enough to be audible but small enough not to wake up people asleep in the next room, which means podcasts (wrapped up in fancy BBC or NPR apps, but still basically podcasts) of news are an option even if you were crashed out during the normal news time.

The iPad has turned me on to casual gaming — an area that I’ve ben trying to find time to explore for some time. I’m a little underwhelmed by the lack of tactile feedback on the glass screen, but with kids you don’t really have a lot of time to play real-time games. Turn-based stuff is ubiquitous on the iPad (including many cherished favorites like Rogue) and great to play in those half hour periods between when The Feeding Ends and They Fall Asleep, time that in the past, when I was less sleep deprived, I had the concentration to read.

What is so weird about the iPad + iNfant combination is the strange serendipities. The iPad isn’t just a netbook manque, it’s also become our photo album: we haven’t printed a single digital photo, nor had to view them on the strangely-ratio’d screen of our laptop. Instead the iPad lets us look through (and show others) baby pictures — and at a much larger size than most prints. We use the thing as a friggin’ nightlight when changing diapers at 3 a.m. in the morning. The white noise app helps the kids fall asleep, even if it doesn’t have the now-ubiquitous ‘womb sounds’ that seem to emanate from all childcare products these days. Just the fact that it doesn’t have to boot up and is on instantaneously makes it much easier to use than a laptop in situations where you need it up and running quickly.

There are a lot of apps that still need to be ironed out on the iPad (like a Mafia Wars client that connects with the actual Mafia Wars install on Facebook), but I will say that everyone in my household who is able to hold their own head up is glad that we spent the money on the device, despite the fact in the beginning that we worried it would be little more than an expensive frippery. No excuse me, I have a little boy who needs some supervised tummy time I’ve got to go see….

For years I have been trying various work-arounds, add-ons, macros, and scripts to make it eaiser to get information about books and journal articles. For books I find myself constantly switching between my library’s catalog, Amazon, Google Books. For journals I am constantly moving between Google Scholar, various Big Content sites (JSTOR etc.), and my university’s clunky interface for getting me past content firewalls. Nothing has worked really well and I’ve resigned myself flipping through multiple tabs in a browser and — horror of horrors — taking my hand off the keyboard and on the mouse, sapping precious milliseconds from my research routine.

Launchbar as a ’search template’ function that makes it incredibly easy to to create custom searches of websites: you basically just copy the URL of a successful search, look around for the string you originally searched for in there, and replace it with an asterisk. To invoke the search you just do command-space bar (what used to be the Spotlight shortcut) and type the name of the search template you want to use and hit return. Then you type your search string, hit return again, and a new browser tab is open with the result.

The genius of launchbar is that it trains itself to guess what search template you are going to use. It only takes a search or two for it to learn that ‘g’ means ‘google’, ‘gb’ means ‘google books’, and so forth. This means that with just a few keystrokes, in any application, you can check out a book, the author’s departmental homepage, or pretty much anything else. No more tabbing between windows or clicking on search windows to get the cursor in a place where you can type your query in.

It speeds up searches by, like, orders of magnitude. For anything.

Apparently it can do lots of other things — like the coveted ‘send as an attachment to an email the PDF file I’m looking at now to someone in my addressbook’. If you are really into controlling your entire computer through a single command line then this is the app for you. But if you are just a normal person who wants to do normal things like locate and save Anna Tsing’s entire scholarly output — fliers for guest lectures on her campus and all — in under ten minutes then you will quickly find that this application is like crack and you will turn into one of the junkie guys in The Wire.

Serious.

I think someone needs to write a science fiction novel about a virtual world or online game which suddenly and mysteriously becomes inhabited not by non-consociates, but by non-contemporaries: suddenly people from Elizabethan England and paleolithic Java are logging on to the game. Historians and anthropologists scramble to conduct interviews in chat rooms. And then… ok I don’t have a plot, just an idea. But it would be an interesting permutation on the whole space/time thing. So get on that, ok?

I bought a kindle because I live in Honolulu and I go to the mainland (or farther away) two or three times a year) and each time I take 5-10 kilos of books with me because of 1) my bizarre need to read constantly 2) I read non-fiction which comes in larger sizes than the normal paperback 3) as an American I constantly need to feel I have a ‘choice’ about things, including what I read. Most importantly, I’ll be traveling to Papua New Guinea, living there for 2 months, and coming back this summer and will need a lot to read. So even though I am not a gadget person these travelling needs pushed me over the edge of a decision I would not normally have made. My bags just got much _much_ lighter which really _really_ matters to me.

Professors, or at least social scientists like me, have very particular reading needs. We read the way athletes work out, and for all kinds of reasons — we read specialized literature for our research, we read popular and general pieces with an eye towards teaching them, we read for pleasure (actually I don’t read for pleasure that much, but when I travel I do). How well does the kindle handle our specialized needs?

Most of the Kindle is Amazon website. Before I bought a kindle, I used Amazon.com constantly for my scholarly work as a ‘discovery’ or ‘awareness’ tool — the website helps you discover books by understanding your preferences, making recommendations about similar books, and providing access to lists that others have written that can be used as the basis for further browsing. It also helps you filter these books and decide which I want to read, why, and how badly. It does so by providing metadata that quickly helps you judge the books (date, publisher, author and author bio) as well as the ability to quickly scan the table of contents (I rarely get to the point where I need to read an excerpt). It also allows you to organize and store your discoveries via various arrangements of your shopping cart, lists, wishlists, and so forth.

Almost all of these features are missing from the Kindle shop. The product details (year, publisher) are still there (and, alas, you still have to scroll down to see them), the recommendations are there, and the listamania lists are around (but much scarcer) and may perhaps grow in time. But there is no quick and obvious way to save kindle editions of books to a wishlist, or to take a look at their tables of content — instead you have to download the free sample or switch to the Amazon paper bookstore, check out the TOC, toggle back over the kindle bookstore, and then keep browsing. This is a big pain.

Paper books are available in many different versions and at many different prices while kindle books normally are not (tho, to be sure, there are multiple editions of public domain texts). Therefore a good way to sort them would be by price — by saying you want to spend more than US$2 and less than US$20 you essentially not only find books in your price point, you are also categorizing books by date since the numerous (and often irrelevant) public domain books get filtered out. Except, of course, that Amazon does not allow you to search in this way.

The best tip for searching I can give so far is to search for the name of a press (University of California, e.g.) and then expand the nested menu on the left hand side of the screen to search through their inventory.

At any rate, all of this applies solely to the kindle website when viewed on a browser on your computer. The version of it you get on the kindle itself is really inadequate as a research tool, and so far I’ve found impossible to browse effectively in any serious way. I know that Amazon is out to serve the ‘serious reader’ rather than the professional one, but if I was looking to further adoption amongst academics I’d seriously work on making the kindle section of the website look and feel more like the rest of the website, and get the on-device store more usable.

Go librarians go!

“Passively Multiplayer”:http://passivelymultiplayer.com/ — the PMOG blog.