Which e-reader should I buy?

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Between earthquakes and RSI, I’ve reached a point in my life where an e-reader would be an advantage. I’m not fussy about features.

I basically want to read books on it, synced from my (Mac) laptop.
I rarely if ever read anything that requires colour.
It must have native ePub capability (I’m not buying a Kindle); ideally I’d like it to support a range of basic formats like pdf, txt, rtf, html, but can survive if some of these have inexplicably not been implemented.
I like the idea of e-ink but am comfortable with LCD screens too.
Storage space and battery life are important though not to the exclusion of other considerations (including price).
Something RSI-friendly would be nice – lightweight, comfortable, with left-hand/right-hand redundancy.

I think I’m probably looking at a Nook or a Kobo and of the two I think I like the Nook better, but this is based entirely on looking at websites and feature comparison charts. All the charts say you should try them out yourself, but last time I saw anything one could try out was in a bookstore just before Christmas, and as near as I could tell approximately a gazillion other customers had already tried them out and broken them. As for now… half the bookstores in town are destroyed or inaccessible and the other half are on the verge of bankruptcy (okay, I admit it, I can name two exceptions, but neither has e-readers) and right now unnecessary travelling wears me out.

Bonus features I’d like but aren’t necessary since I don’t know if they really exist:

Full Unicode support (including Māori macrons). You wouldn’t think this would be so hard, and yet… Seriously, let me know if you know of anyone doing this.
Note-taking functionality – but not if to get that I have to also get a thousand other features and pay through the nose for the combo. An iPad, for example, would be ridiculously overpowered for my purposes.

Experiences, (dis)recommendations?

Earthquake update

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Family, cat and I are safe; I’ve blogged more on my personal journal. I’m disallowing comments here and encouraging comments there instead; it’ll be easier for me to keep communications in one place.

Converting a plaintext bibliography to Endnote/RIS format with help from Linux/Terminal

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[Update 16/7/2011: See my more recent post on the topic, Launching Ref2RIS – convert your typed bibliography to Endnote format, which makes things even easier.]

You won’t want to do this unless you’ve got literally hundreds of references. Any less, and these suggestions are way easier.

1. Format references so they’re each on their own line – no blank lines.

2. Use Word’s “Find Special” capabilities to replace a phrase in italics with {it}a phrase in italics{endit} and a phrase in bold with {b}a phrase in bold{endb}. (Similarly if the citations contain underlines.)

3. Save as plaintext – say, source.txt. Now the fun begins… My own source text contains 600-odd lines in ACS style, like this:

Bamford, C. H.; Tipper, C. F. H. {it}Comprehensive Chemical Kinetics{endit}; Elsevier: New York, {b}1977{endb}. 
House, D. A.{it}Chem. Rev.{endit} {b}1962{endb}, {it}62{endit}, 185

4. Open up Terminal or some other Linux command line.

5. Endnote records are separated by a line

ER  -

– that’s two spaces before the hyphen and one after. (All these details come from Endnote’s help pages.) This is the easy part: type in

sed -e 's/^\(.*\)/\1ER  - /' source.txt > source1.txt

6. The start of each Endnote record tells you what kind of citation it is – eg a book, journal etc. To find every line that includes a colon (ie separating the publisher from the city published in) type in

sed -e 's/^\(.*:\)/TY  - BOOK@@\1/' source1.txt > source2.txt

Note 1: The “@@” is in there as a sign that you’ll need to replace this with a new line later; but we want to keep everything on one line for now.
Note 2: This is a good example of why this whole method is highly suspect, because it’ll also catch citations which have a colon in the article title or in a typo or whatever. So if you can think of a better sign that a citation is a book then use that instead of the colon.

Alternatively, you could type in

sed -e 's/^\(.*{it}[0-9]*{endit}\)/TY  - JOUR@@\1/' source1.txt > source2.txt

to find every line that contains {it}[some number]{endit} which, in my source, is the best indicator that I’m dealing with a journal. The same caveats apply – you’ll get both false positives and false negatives.

Anyway, keep doing what seems best given your source, and fix up the inevitable mistakes by hand until each line starts with TY – something. If you want to give up and just assume that everything that isn’t already assigned as something must be a journal then try

sed -e 's/^\([^(TY  - )].*$\)/TY  - JOUR@@\1/' source2.txt > source3.txt

I now have source looking like:

TY  - BOOK@@Bamford, C. H.; Tipper, C. F. H. {it}Comprehensive Chemical Kinetics{endit}; Elsevier: New York, {b}1977{endb}. 
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR@@House, D. A.{it}Chem. Rev.{endit} {b}1962{endb}, {it}62{endit}, 185 
ER  -

7. Now we keep playing with patterns. (You may be able to do large chunks of this with regular find/replace, but for illustrative purposes I’ll keep using Terminal.)

For example, in my source the authors are nicely set off: they come after “@@” and before the first “{it}” (or “in {it}”), and if there’s more than one of them they’re separated by “;”. So a few commands:

sed -e 's/@@\(.* in {it}\)/@@A1  - \1/' source3.txt > source4.txt
sed -e 's/@@\(.* {it}\)/@@A1  - \1/' source3.txt > source4.txt
sed -e 's/;\(.*;\)/@@A1  - \1/' source5.txt > source6.txt (This one I had to repeat a few times depending how many authors could be cited in one reference; there's supposed to be a way to do it globally but my unix fu is not strong.)
sed -e 's/;\(.*{it}\)/@@A1  - \1/' source8.txt > source9.txt

Journal titles:

sed -e 's/^\(TY  - JOUR.*\)\({it}.*{endit} {b}\)/\1@@JO  - \2/' source9.txt > source10.txt

Years:

sed -e 's/\({b}[0-9]*{endb}\)/@@Y1  - \1/' source10.txt > source11.txt

And so forth. You pretty soon start to see why the first suggestion on most lists of ways to convert plaintext citations into RIS format is always “Just type it in / search for it again by hand”. The method above is really only suitable if you’ve got literally hundreds of citations. (I have 639, plus or minus.)

8. Eventually you’ll be at a point where you can do a simple find/replace to change @@ to a new line and nuke all the {it} and so forth. This will be a great relief.

9. Rename your final saved file from source12.txt to source12.ris and open with Endnote.

10. Bonus material: if this was a bibliography to a paper using numbered citations in order using eg [1], then in that paper you can do a find/replace on [ -> { and ] -> }, then tell the Endnote plugin to format citations, and voila, the best magic ever. (If the paper uses author/date citations then you’ll have to link them by hand, sorry.)

A rule about rhetorical questions

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At intermediate and high school we learned the basics of debating. One technique we learned about was the rhetorical question; and we also learned an important rule for their use: Don’t ask a rhetorical question if there’s a chance your audience will respond with the ‘wrong’ answer.

@libsmatter reported from an ALIA panel:

What if when our budgets were cut we asked – “so – what do you want us to stop doing?”

which I used to agree with. And I still agree that if our budgets keep getting cut then we’ll have to cut services. But that doesn’t mean the argument will make everyone say, “Oh, right. Um, we didn’t think of that. Here, have an extra million dollars.”

Because if an institution wants/needs/thinks it needs to cut the library’s budget, it can really easily reply, “You need to keep providing the same service. Be more efficient. Work smarter. And if you can’t figure out how to do that for yourselves then well, we’ll send in our favourite efficiency experts and cut your staffing for you.”

And if we’re not prepared to accept that answer then we should be very careful about asking that question.

Library day in the Life January 2011 – Wednesday

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Tuesday was more or less like Monday.

Today I started at the desk, which was surprisingly busy, with grad students and academics coming down to collect books they’d requested and renew books they had out. Someone else did the first lot of retrievals, but I went hunting for a disputed return (a book we’d send an overdue notice about, but the borrower said they’d returned it) – I found it, checked it in, and e-mailed the borrower.

Among the other little morning tasks was posting a blog entry about some e-book titles we have access to for the next week. And there was filling out an ACC form – when you get RSI apparently the first, second, and third things they make you do are fill out forms.

Just before 11 AM, I left with a colleague to go and do an Endnote tutorial: he taught while I hung in the background and helped the students keep up, as it’s a fast paced introductory class. At the end of the class, one of the students asked me a question about interloans too.

On the way, my colleague and I talked about an issue that had come up in a meeting last week. So then I sat down and wrote an e-mail to our wider colleagues proposing a solution by a third colleague; I wanted to run it by her before sending, and we ended up not running into each other until after 4 PM.

In the meantime I had an e-mail exchange with a colleague in another branch about a meeting tomorrow, then lunch. At two o’clock I ran the retrievals report then was reminded about some RFID training, so I went to that and then did the retrievals.

The last couple of hours were quieter – more e-mails and reading, and a grad student asking if he could put his paper in our institutional repository if he published with a certain journal, and checking hours we can cover another branch which is shortstaffed next week, and discussions about workspace after my colleague reported back from a meeting she’d attended, and tidying up in time to go home.

There’s some collections work I really want to do, but it’s going to involve a lot of cutting and pasting, and I can tell my hands aren’t up to that yet. Another day…

Library Day in the Life January 2011

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My bus gets me to work quarter of an hour early, and I spend the extra time catching up with colleagues and reading a bit more of my commute novel. We start at 8:30 at the moment – summer hours – and I catch up with the e-mails that have come in over the weekend.

Actually, my routine at the moment isn’t the same as usual. (Although for one reason or another it’s probably been a year since anything recognisable as “usual”.) For about a month I’ve been wrestling with some mild RSI so when I sit at my keyboard I put on my wrist braces and I don’t do any any type of work for more than an hour at a time. And I’m dictating this post with the voice recognition software I have on my home laptop.

So at nine o’clock I go and do our retrievals which someone else would normally do. These are the books that our users have requested from the areas upstairs being renovated after the earthquake. Earlier this summer the stacks were covered in black plastic, but that’s been taken down now, so I don’t need the torch any more.

At 9:30 I walk across campus to another branch where I can work on the front desk, which is busier than ours. I do my stretches on the way. It’s still fairly quiet this morning, mostly students borrowing textbooks.

After an hour I walk back, and arrive in time for an impromptu meeting with a new supervisor and a tour of construction progress (even before the earthquake we were planning to renovate the entire ground floor. All except two small spaces at the back of the building which we’ve been working in over the summer while they’ve gutted the rest of the floor – our temporary main entrance is normally a fire escape).

I do the retrievals again, scan some blogs, and then it’s time for lunch. I take my book out into the sun and by some miracle don’t get sunburnt in the glorious weather.

Checking my twitter alerts, I notice a news article about the library, which I forward onto our Facebook page. Then I go back to the other branch, where we get engineering students asking about earthquake damage and a phone call with an Endnote query from a desperate student with a deadline.

II getback in time for afternoon tea, then retrievals again, and then join my colleagues with a trolley full of books that have thrown up errors in the RFID conversion process (another project going on above our heads at the moment) to determine what’s causing the error in each one and whether we should be keeping each item. Most of them are terribly old, and half aren’t even on the catalogue. One of my colleagues comments that we come alive when weeding, and it’s funny because it’s true. Between this, and issuing books to the occasional borrower who manages to find us, we fill the time to 5 o’clock, and home.

Oh, and I’ve made it through the day without any twinges of discomfort from my wrists. 🙂

Links of interest 21/1/2011

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Library instruction
I’ve recently been pondering the idea of database searches as an experiment – hypothesis, experiment, evaluate, modify the hypothesis and try again. This might make a useful way to introduce sci/tech students in particular to the idea that you’re not going to necessarily get your best results from your first search; I’ll have to see how they receive it when I’ve actually got a class to test it on.

Incorporating Failure Into Library Instruction (from ACRLog) discusses the pedagogy of learning by failure and talks about times when it’s more or less suitable for library instruction.

Anne Pemberton’s super-awesome paper From friending to research: Using Facebook as a teaching tool (January 2011, College & Research Libraries News, vol. 72 no. 1 28-30) discusses Facebook as a useful teaching metaphor for databases.

Don’t Make It Easy For Them (from ACRLog) – with caveats in the comments that I think are at least as important as the main post.

Databases
Heads they win, tales we lose: Discovery tools will never deliver on their promise – and don’t miss the comment thread at the bottom of the page, which segues into the dilemma of increasingly expensive journal bundles and possible (vs viable) solutions.

Research data
There’s a whole D-Lib Magazine issue devoted to this topic this month.

Web services
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium discusses the idea that “the fundamental question of the web” is “Why wasn’t I consulted?” – that is, each medium has its niche of what it’s good at and why people use it, and webpages need to consider how to answer this question.

Library Day in the Life
Round 6 begins next week, in which librarians from all walks of librarianship share a day (or week) in the life.

Wild ideas free to a good home

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1.You know in sf you get to say “Oh hi computer, calculate this for me / find me information about this thing / make me some hot Earl Grey tea!” and the computer says “Sure thing, my friend!” and does it?

Here’s how that could work in the near future:

speech recognition – this is fairly well developed already (I’ve recently started using it myself for navigating and dictating on my home computer) and will continue to improve
+ a search engine
+ a whole lot of aps for different functions, with associated metadata which can be matched against what the user’s asked for.

The computer, like a librarian, doesn’t have to know everything, it just needs to know where to find everything. Ask it a calculating-type question and it gets a Wolfram|Alpha-style widget that can calculate the answer. Ask it an encyclopaedic-type question and it brings you an answer from a Wikipedia-type source. Ask it to convert your word processing document into pdf and it finds the appropriate ap to do that. Tell it you want a pizza, it finds the aps from the local pizza places, asks (or remembers) your price/quality/toppings preferences, and places the order for you. In due course, your doorbell rings.

I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this was working within five years. I also wouldn’t be overly surprised if it wasn’t; while we’ve got all the pieces, gluing it together mightn’t be quite so straightforward as an idealist would think.

2.Dynamic/adaptive website navigation. For sprawling websites: instead of having the traditional static navigation links, have the server generate the links based on the most popular recent destinations for visitors to the same page.

This one’s easier to program (I think, if I put the work in, I could come up with a clunky implementation myself) – you just need server-side scripting with access to stats of a) links clicked and b) keywords searched. I’d weight keywords searched a bit higher than links clicked (partly to keep things dynamic but mostly because people will tend to click a link first if it looks even halfway relevant, so just the fact of searching will indicate that the current links are useless).

So when you go to (say) the uni library’s homepage at the start of term it’ll show links to the catalogue, and tutorials, and computer workrooms. Towards exam time people will start searching for “past exam papers” so that’ll soon appear on the homepage, while “tutorials” will drop off, but people will click the “computer workrooms” more so that’ll stay on.

There are obvious downsides to this approach. Confusion about links shifting around, for one. Also ideally it should be customisable so postgrads can see a view which isn’t overwhelmed by the preferences of undergraduates for most of the year. But. It would be interesting. I’d like to try it sometime (or see someone else try it).

Review: Journal of Library Innovation

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My favouritest new journal ever is currently the Journal of Library Innovation. I have vague memories of issue 1 being decent but issue 2’s contents are totally awesome. They include:

an editorial (pdf) pointing out that: a) when we innovate we don’t have to seize on every expensive new technology, and b) on the other hand sometimes failing to use a new technology can be expensive too
Quick and Dirty Library Promotions That Really Work – whee, fortune cookies!

[I would really like to amplify this squee. I think we should do this: it puts a smile on people’s face and it 99% guarantees they’ll actually read the promotional message, which is at least 90% more than traditional signage. (Fudge factor because I can’t remember the number I saw the other day, though I think it was less than 10% and included primarily mature students.]
Accommodating Community Users in an Authenticated Library Technology Environment – making a computer kiosk for non-members to use which respects database license agreements; not my thing at present but cool enough that I nevertheless recognise the super utility of it.
Making Physical Objects Clickable: Using Mobile Tags to Enhance Library Displays – QR tags in book displays – evidence that these increase usage of promoted materials/webpages

[See also Embedding tutorials into physical objects – using a QR code on a photocopier to link to video instructions. I think here I’d use QR codes in conjunction with a bit.ly link for people who don’t have the right hardware/software combo to make it work, but this caveat shouldn’t be construed as decreasing my enthusiasm for the idea.]
The Library is Undead: Information Seeking During the Zombie Apocalypse – another quick and dirty library promotion, jumping off a student event.

[Why do we insist that big promotions have to be planned months in advance? Maybe it’s Parkinson’s Law (“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”) – when you plan 3 months in advance, it still feels rushed at the end so you figure next time you should plan 4 months in advance. But if you start planning 6 days in advance (as this library did), sure you’re rushed at the end, but the short timeframe has forced you to forgo normal inefficiencies and brush off the temptation to perfectionism, so you save thousands of staff time and in the end you’ve still got it done.]
and also book reviews which seem genuinely helpful and balanced evaluations of how useful the books are and for what purposes.