
Life Behind the Stacks: The Secret Apartments of New York Libraries - ohjeez
http://www.6sqft.com/life-behind-the-stacks-the-secret-apartments-of-new-york-libraries/
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behind-the-stacks-the-secret-apartments-of-new-york-libraries/)

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kiba
Tangentially, but I love the aesthetics of having lot of books on shelves, but
now that's clearly obsolete with digital libraries. In the future, digital
e-books may be superior to traditional books in all the way it matters, even.

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WalterBright
I like the smell of old books. I also like the ability to flip back and forth
through a reference book.

I also speak as a person who does about 98% of his reading on ebooks.

I don't get why ebook makers don't have a proper "bookshelf" display of the
ebooks. Arggh.

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WalterBright
I've used maybe 20 different ereaders on various devices. Pretty much all of
them have some stupid fatal flaw on them. None of the vendors ever respond to
my suggestions.

1\. touchscreens and eink do not mix. give me fwd/back buttons

2\. the newer kindle can only remember your last read place in one pdf. Open
another pdf, bam, you're reset back to the beginning on the other! This makes
me furious.

3\. Windows' pdf reader ups the ante by remembering the place in the last 4
pdfs you were reading. Open a 5th, and the oldest one gets pushed off the bed.
You'd think with a 512G machine there'd be enough memory to remember 5, maybe
even 6!

4\. no MicroSD slot in most of 'em

5\. miserable bookshelf display. Come on, how hard can this be? Just look at a
real bookshelf. Do it like that. Click on the 'spine', and you can then see
the front and back covers. I'd like to sort the bookshelf by a 'star' rating I
assign myself, so I remember which ones I want to read next.

6\. some correctly display the first page of the book as the thumbnail. Some
display a stupid generic PDF logo. It makes you want to scream.

7\. Microsoft does even worse, if you add a folder.jpg of the cover, it warps
it into some ridiculous trapezoid, surrounded by so much whitespace you have
to do lots of scrolling.

8\. The Kindle DX has this stupid toggle button that sticks up so it's easily
busted off.

Amazon got it (mostly) right with the ancient Kindle 3 (the keyboard one) and
my beloved Kindle DX. I am very careful with the DX so I don't damage that
button! I regularly buy their newer Kindles, and they just wind up in a drawer
somewhere or given away as I go back to the old ones.

iBooks in the iPhone is pretty good, except for the small screen, which is
uncomfortable for dedicated reading. The bookshelf view is barely acceptable,
still making poor use of the screen real estate. I suppose getting an iPad
would fix that. Battery life is an issue for it.

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WalterBright
Ebook dev departments ought to have a checklist entitled "Critical Features
List". For example, Windows 7 had a PDF reader that incredibly forgot to have
a method to go to page N. Can you imagine furiously swiping the touchscreen
trying to get to page 462 of a 700 page PDF? The next update, that was fixed
:-)

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roflchoppa
Ya theres another issue, sometimes on my textbooks the page that is in the
book (ex pg 100) is not the same as the page in the application (ex pg 107)
this causes issues esp. because sometimes their way off. that would be a must
have fix.

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WalterBright
The Kindle e-format has a way to embed page numbers that correspond to the
physical book. It's optional, though, and you can blame the ebook author if it
wasn't done or wasn't done right.

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roflchoppa
yeah thats true, but most text books pdfs that are passed around in higher
education are not from the publisher, if you are picking up what I'm putting
down. >.>

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f_allwein
This may also be a way to reduce vandalism. E.g. in France, libraries are a
favorite target during riots, apparently as they are seen to represent the
state: [http://www.booksandideas.net/Why-are-people-setting-fire-
to....](http://www.booksandideas.net/Why-are-people-setting-fire-to.html)

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msandford
That sounds like a pretty fun job, actually. I've always had a knack for
mechanical things, I write software, I use software, and I don't mind a fair
amount of on-call if it's in my own house. Where do I sign up?

