Just open a text file and write down the books you've read and want to read. All this complication gains for you essentially nothing.
Or just add them to your wishlist on amazon
The new reading stack
41–50 of 74 posts
Re: The new reading stack
#42I like the idea of reading books; well, I read a lot[1] and my plan this year is to reduce the quantity and focus on quality. As suggested by some comments on this thread, I've also, quite a while back, moved more and more towards a plain-text life. Nonetheless, I let GoodReads[2] track the books I read on the Kindle. Here is something I found on the Internet and have made my ways of reading books more thoroughly and…
Impressive. How do you take care of your eyes? Reading 100 books/year means that on avg. you read 1 book in 3 days. I imagine that must put a lot of stress on your eyes?
I read most mostly in the open (Parks, Greens), while riding/flying, etc.
Re: The new reading stack
#43I've decided to get rid of Amazon, and ebooks are one of the difficult issues. Are there no independent sites like goodreads or LibraryThing left? I don't really need the tracking, but the discovery. Also I have found that actually ebooks are sometimes cheaper on other places than Amazon, so a price comprison would be good. It could be integrated into a site like LibraryThings- LibraryThing already has it to some ext…
I recently started using https://www.thestorygraph.com/ — it's for keeping track of your own reading, and they're promoting their own reco algorithm. Also, there's a paid plan with extra features.
It's early days, but it's neat and clean and it feels the opposite of Goodreads' everything-for-everyone-at-once-all-the-time approach.
Re: The new reading stack
#44Just open a text file and write down the books you've read and want to read. All this complication gains for you essentially nothing.
I find some level of trusted recommendations valuable and also love talking about books with friends.
Just because you only care about a small sliver of the product doesn't mean that others feel the same
Re: The new reading stack
#45Just open a text file and write down the books you've read and want to read. All this complication gains for you essentially nothing.
Or just add them to your wishlist on amazon
I've found the Amazon app to load very slowly when the LTE connection isn't great, which is often the case in bookstores, at least where I live.
I agree with the grandparents comment. I just use a list in Apple Notes.
Re: The new reading stack
#46'Amazon embodies the idea that companies need to “maximize shareholder value” - a total falsehood invented in the 1970s by Milton Friedman' One can agree or disagree with this statement of values, but it is not a dishonest "falsehood".
There are two hyperlinks in that sentence that I hoped would avoid ambiguity by citing sources, but I'll make it more explicit in the copy.
Re: The new reading stack
#47I've decided to get rid of Amazon, and ebooks are one of the difficult issues. Are there no independent sites like goodreads or LibraryThing left? I don't really need the tracking, but the discovery. Also I have found that actually ebooks are sometimes cheaper on other places than Amazon, so a price comprison would be good. It could be integrated into a site like LibraryThings- LibraryThing already has it to some ext…
For discovery I still use LibraryThing. It is also possible to use it without an account, with some more work. The UX is not great though. Thalia has curated reviews from their librarians and a book graph with recommendations. The coverage is not superb, but if you happen to find 1-2 librarians with similar tastes, you can get some ideas.
I don’t care much about the price comparison, I mostly just buy from ebooks.de or thalia.de. Often they have a copy from a cheaper publisher (at least for English ebooks) and whether it costs 4.5 or 5 euros doesn’t make much of a difference. I am just glad I am not giving the money to Amazon. The last time I bought an ebook from Amazon is more than 10 years ago.
Re: The new reading stack
#48The Library Extension is a browser plugin which helps you find books in your local library:
https://www.libraryextension.com/
The StoryGraph is another Goodreads alternative:
https://readervoracious.com/storygraph-a-better-goodreads-fi...
Re: The new reading stack
#49Just open a text file and write down the books you've read and want to read. All this complication gains for you essentially nothing.
Avid book readers might make a similar statement about writing code :-)
To be more clear, when a database (with multiple fields, and better workflows) is clearly the right tool, why would you try to implement it one ad-hoc in a simplistic text file/editor!?
And if someone says Emacs+orgmode, that’s basically a nice framework for implementing applications backed by structured data stored in our format :-)
Re: The new reading stack
#50The best thing about reading technical books is that it naturally leads one to get aquainted deeper with the topic at hand. Usually many ideas spawn out of some brilliant work which is published for a while already and its really worthwhile to try to track down those. Knowing history makes it easier to understand works which in some way depend on the original, even small bits - something called syntopical reading. Wh…
I feel like I'm on one extreme of this spectrum which is: I 'need' to develop a deep understanding of systems from the bottom-up and only then can I feel comfortable building on top of it/abstracting it away/being productive with it.
When I started learning socket programming I didn't feel completely comfortable with using it until I had a complete understanding of the networking stack from the PHY upward. I even needed to write my own simple ARQ implementation to feel like I could fully appreciate and have a "feel" for what two machines are "actually doing" when they're sending packets back and forth.
I had the same obsessive desire to completely understand from the bottom-up how database engines were implemented because I just didn't feel comfortable with just the knowledge that "selects on tables with indexes on the field being queried are 'fast'". I just _had_ to know what was making them fast. Funny thing, when I found out that databases and database indexes were just disk-persisted/in-memory self balancing search trees or hash tables, I thought to myself, "that's it? why didn't anyone just tell me that instead of just repeating "queries are fast/optimized by the db"?"
I don't know if my brain just works differently because it seems most people I've worked with seem to get frustrated/annoyed with these details and not even have any desire to learn a system in-depth like this. They seem to only want to reason about a system at its highest level of abstraction, whereas to me, with the database example, once I learned that B+ trees were one of the primary data structures that backed database systems, I felt like the system as a whole just became that much more transparent and easy to reason about because now I could leverage all of my intuitions+past experiences relating to performance of operations on tree structures, having an intuition of perf implications of using linked data structures, reasoning about issues like paging chunks of data in and out of disk, etc.