Infrequent thoughts of a professional geek
The current Humble Bunddle is all about Bitcoin and Blockchain – two topics which are well understood in technical circles, but not well understood in many others. Like the post on Crypto and Cybersecurity with the Humble Bundle, I think this is worth seriously considering. At the $8 level it is good value and handy to have a handful of electronic textbooks. I’m no expert, but I plan to at least validate what I think I know against useful sources. Happy reading.
SoyletNews gave me a great tidbit of random trivia – the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson is 30 years old today. I remember reading this book when it came out and being totally dazzled by the concepts (don’t guess my age please, it’s not polite). Gibson wrote substance which resonated for decades, and is still pseduo-relevant even after so many other fantastic authors have launched further from his base.
Thank you Mr Gibson, the work is darn appreciated.
I’ve just wandered across the Booki.sh tool – a web based eReader that can handle ePub formats in almost any modern browser; created by Inventive Labs in Fitzroy. Damn smart.
The creators have answered all the obvious questions (many platforms, moderate compatibility, DRM and free, and offline/online) in reasonable and commercial ways. It has a robust FAQ and help area, provides a sample interface for what the app is like, and is well designed.
I’m pondering an eReader of some sort at the moment, and I’d have to say that the idea of having one repository which can be used on any of my devices is just the perfect way to go. One device to rule them all, one device to bind them….yup. I wants it.
It also helps that these folks are not only Australians, but also from Fitzroy in Victoria, a place I’ve lived and still love to this day. So yes, call me a screaming fan for anything this high quality done in Melbourne, especially when it looks this strong.
From a CMS perspective you can see why this hangs off a good content management system; you develop a smart back end to process the content, then delivery is all about the platform specifics. Mark-up an interface for selection and bingo (bingo being months if not years of development). The fine folks at Fusion (where I worked a few year back) did something similar for a Uni’s online course catalogue – and it was a darn successful product too.
My only peev would be the bloody name – where I can say and type Bookish easily, Booki.sh is off to me personally. Its like dotNet development rather than .Net development – brain hurts.
So go visit Bookish and see what these clever people have done. I’m kind of jealous.
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Andrew Breese 