Goodreads+libgen+kindle. Liquidtext on iPad for material you want to thoroughly annotate. Amazon gets nothing and you get everything.
The new reading stack
61–70 of 74 posts
Re: The new reading stack
#62Re: The new reading stack
#63Take a look at bookshop.org, one of the sites called out by this article. I was surprised by the level of bias and ideological possession on display in their curation choices, and without a shred of self-awareness that I could find.
They seem obsessed with pushing e.g. Critical Race Theory on the front page, a religion about on par with Scientology.
How embarrassing for a site called “Bookshop”, which (ostensibly) claims to cater to a wide variety of tastes. Such an obsession with disreputable religious material will probably only serve to alienate most potential customers.
Re: The new reading stack
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 nee…
You just have an interest in different parts of the stack. Someone could write the same thing, but instead talk about why they needed to understand how the computer hardware was implemented to run the programs and even needed to build a small computer themselves to get a feeling for what the computer was "actually doing". Alternately, at a systems design level, the constraint may not actually be the implementation of…
That's a really good point. I've also done what you mentioned in your first paragraph but stopped digging deeper once I hit the "now I have to understand physics to actually understand why electricity behaves the way it does in order to flow through transistors/logic gates" barrier. My reasoning at the time was a combination of asking myself how much time I actually had to dive into that as well, plus how much of a potential return I thought I could get from having resolved those questions.
Re: The new reading stack
#65I’ve been using StoryGraph the last couple of months as a GoodReads alternative, and it’s been great! I’m not interested in the social side of GoodReads very much, so the network effect wasn’t much of a pain point in jumping ship.
I have moved over too. While I still log my reads on Goodreads as well, I've really stopped interacting there and mostly enjoy the StoryGraph experience so much more. If it wasn't for a few people who I like to see what they're reading as we have similar tastes, I would never look back.
Re: The new reading stack
#66Just 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 :-)
Unfortunately, you really can’t tell in advance what fields you need. All these precious specialized tools are frustrating.
Plain (-ish) text is flexible and searchable.
Re: The new reading stack
#67Re: The new reading stack
#68I'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.
From what I've seen of their recommendation algorithm, it's actually better that Goodreads's as well. The only issue being it seems to aggregate what you put in as your mood and preferences as well as what you've read, whereas on Goodreads you can filter by 'shelf' (which is usually horrible, but a feature I'd love to have on StoryGraph)
Re: The new reading stack
#69Just 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 :-)
If someone wants to go the plain-old-text-files route for books, I'd stan for GNU Recutils over org-mode.
This is the kind of thing recutils is specifically designed for, where org-mode is merely capable of it by virtue of its kitchen-sink nature.
IMHO recutils should be the first choice if you find yourself wanting both a database and a text file simultaneously.
Re: The new reading stack
#70[deleted]