New online book resource: Librarything.com

Here's a new resource I found for those of you who like books and reading. I have recently joined Goodreads.com, which is a pretty cool site, and this one looks similar. It looks like you can enter 200 books for free, but after that they want you to pay a fee (either $10 per year or $25 for a lifetime membership). I don't know if what they have is worth paying for, but since you can join for free and catalog 200 of your books, you have plently of time to decide for yourself. More information from the site is below.


LibraryThing | Catalog your books online:

A home for your books.
Enter what you’re reading or your whole library. It’s an easy, library-quality catalog.

A community of 900,000 book lovers.
LibraryThing connects you to people who read what you do.

WHAT’S GOOD?

Join the world’s largest book club.
Catalog your books from Amazon, the Library of Congress and 690 other world libraries. Import from anywhere.
Find people with eerily similar tastes.
Find new books to read.
Free Early Reviewer books from publishers and authors
Enter 200 books for free, as many as you like for $10 (year) or $25 (life)."

Onyx's Boox 60 e-reader. I'd still go with Kindle.

Onyx has just come out with a new product: the Boox 60 e-reader. It looks exactly like a kindle, with a few exceptions. First, it has no external keyboard. Instead, a stylus is used for input. What does seem neat is that the stylus can be used to make highlights, which seems more intuitive than the Kindle's cursor.

A big improvement looks to be the web browser. As you can see in the video, the web browser looks far prettier than the Kindle's. Onyx says you can access it with both 3G and WiFi.

The device is $349, compared to the Kindle's current price of $259. I have been using a Kindle for the majority of my reading since March 2009, and have absolutely loved it. I can't really see the Boox 60 giving it any serious competition, but it's nice to see some more competitors getting out there.

Archive.org Texts

I just discovered another great site for online texts. In fact, it may be the best yet, though I will hold out on that statement until I've tested it out some more.


The site is Archive.org, and in addition to millions of books and text documents at http://www.archive.org/details/texts, they've also got video, audio, software, and the way cool Internet Wayback machine.


For a few months I've been trying to find books from Carl Jung online. I had absolutely no luck, not even on torrent sites, not at Gutenberg, nada.

But archive.org has a ton. For example, they have 7 different ways to read Psychological Types Or The Psychology Of Individuation (1953), by C.G. Jung. One of those 7 was a Kindle (.mobi) version, so I just browsed to that site on my Kindle and downloaded it in a few seconds.

I don't quite understand the legality. My understanding is that, in the U.S., books remain under copyright for the life of the author +70 years. Jung died 48 years ago. I assumed this is why his works were so hard to find online.

When I'm done reading Psychological Types, I will begin adding those ideas to the database. I know that none of Jung's works are on my Master Reading List, but that is all the worse for my list! I am going to have to make some judgment calls from time to time. Jung was a man that clearly took part in the conversation of humanity, which is obvious by the number of old writers he references in the first couple chapters that I have read so far.