Even though I won't be receiving my Kindle for another few weeks, I thought it prudent to utilise my holiday time in order to start building an e-book library. It turns out that there are plenty of e-books available, if one knows how (and where) to look. I have managed to collect around 280 books, of which I own (or have owned) about 90%.
It will be interesting to see how my reading habits will change. I have managed to find books which I once owned and lost/gave away/discarded over the years; I wonder whether these books will find favour in the 55 year old me. A case in point is Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complain", an archetypal book for adolescents. I was informed about this book by my History teacher whilst in the fourth year of secondary school, aged 14. I have no idea what happened to my copy of the book; it probably disappeared a few years after I bought it. I'll read the book and probably delete it immediately afterwards. This behaviour will be interesting from a psychological point of view. Should I keep the book even though I know I'll never read it again (regret)? Should I delete the book from the Kindle but keep it on my computer?
One very useful tool for the Kindle is the ebook library manager/conversion tool Calibre. It took me a few hours to figure out how to use this program effectively, but once on the right track, there was no stopping me. Apart from maintaining a database of my e-books (title, author, tag/style and other bits and pieces), the program excels by being able to convert a multitude of formats into a multitude of formats. As the native format of the Kindle is MOBI, I was only interested in converting to this format. The books which I have found have been in formats txt, pdf, doc, rtf, zip, lit, epub and probably a few more; Calibre had no difficulty in converting them.
To be honest, I haven't looked at the output so I don't know how good the conversion engine is. I imagine that there should be little problem in converting lit or epub books to mobi, but I understand that doc files - with tables and diagrams - are liable to be problematic. Fortunately I don't think any of the books I found fit into that category.
I also discovered that the Edinburgh Business School, in whose MBA programme I am enrolled, does offer its course material (to registered students) as PDF downloads, so I downloaded the material for the Finance course and converted it. This will be useful to look at the closer I get to the exam (first week in December).
From a programming point of view, Calibre is interesting because it implements a database without a traditional database manager. I think it does this via text (or similar) files but I haven't been interested enough to examine this yet. The interface is also interesting; the conversion part of the program seems to be implemented as a separate thread whereas the rest of the program typically used modal dialog boxes only.
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