STRANGE TIMES

I am finding that the Kindle 3 is a great little learning or research tool. I’ve had mine for a couple of months now.

It keeps your place, so you can have numerous books on the go at the same time. And as you are reading you can highlight areas of text and add notes. These are then assigned to a file called “My Clippings.txt”. Every clipping or note has a header giving the title of the book, the location in the book and the time and date.

There are nevertheless a number of problems in using a Kindle which reflect the half-arsed proprietary way that technological progress occurs under capitalism. The Kindle is tied up with Amazon wanting you to buy their e-books, so you can’t read DRM locked books you have bought from other e-book sites. Although anything without a lock on it can be read albeit often requiring format conversion. The other even bigger problem is that there are a vast number of academic books not available in electronic form. This is a problem generally not just for the Kindle. There are millions of in-copyright titles that should but are not available electronically. This includes a lot of out-of-print ones. They probably will be eventually but even then there will be efforts to force people to pay prices that are beyond poor students in Lagos or Ramallah. (The deal that Google Books is working out with US publishers will only allow for reading online after making the purchase and only for American residents.) There will then be further delays because those committed to setting knowledge free will have to devote considerable amount of time getting around this problem. Nudge nudge wink wink. There has already been a bit of this as you will see if you check out P2P.

Every now and then I import the Kindle clipping file into a data base called Zoot which I highly recommend. Each clipping is separated by a short row of equal signs that I use in the program’s extraction feature to split each one off into a separate record or item. You can then add a keyword field if you want. You can also give each book or document a short title and then give each item an item number. So the clippings from a book with the short title Smith2006 would start with Smith2006 0001. To add these numbers you have to export the items as a csv file, process them in Excel and then re-import them. In Excel you just create a column entitled item_number, type in the first number in row one, then select the cell and drag it down with your mouse cursor until every row has a number. If you are not sure what I mean just open Excel right now, type in Smith2006 0001 and then drag the cell down. You get Smith2006 0001, Smith2006 0002 and so on. I used this technique when doing research for a book called Bright Future some years back, However, whenever a publication was physical rather than electronic I had to pencil sideline the sections of interest and then scan and OCR them. That was quite time consuming.

While I am extolling the virtues of Zoot, I will also mention that it has its own clipping feature which you can use while you are reading web pages or PDF files on your computer. Selected text becomes an item in a Zoot folder. And you don’t have to remember where it comes from because it automatically includes a URL or some other source information.

So, I would definitely check out Zoot (it’s free to try, nagware I recall) and whatever e-book reader you get make sure it has a clipping and annotation feature and not just bookmarking.