# Dear Apple, I need an iLibrary



## chevy (Aug 12, 2004)

I like to read on my screen, but accessing the books (pdf files) is currently made through the Finder, and the viewer is preview, not bad but not very comfortable.

So I would need the equivalent of iTunes to access electronic books (not spoken books): easy browsing, all kind of categories (smart and fixed) and easy reading. This is good for reading software documentation (where the help system is very limited), for reading electronic documents, technical documentation (my work makes me read tones of datasheets)... and why not other written information, like emails or others.

And of course later the eBS (electronics books store... together with Amazon).


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## ora (Aug 12, 2004)

Wow, this would absolutely excellent for scientific papers too. Back when i was doing a science degree i had hundreds of downloaded pdfs of papers that normally titled themselves in totally stupid ways. [ie, science direct downloads just call themselves science.pdf, and i remember one session where i had up to science-64.pdf with know way of knowing which was which].
At best they are titled by page number, useless for finding what is what. A library that read some sort of meta data like title, author, journal, year, vol,page number etc would have made my life so much easier. 

And a search function!! Even when i titled all the files myself i often found myself saying things along the lines of "now one of those papers had that experiment on xxx mentioned, where was it?" and it would take me hours to find it. Admitedly this would require the publishers to add id3 style metadata to the files,but this can't be that difficult.

Nice plan chevy, if you can persuade apple to do this i'll  send you an e-card to congratulate you


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## qwikstreet (Aug 12, 2004)

^What kind of scientist are you that studies XXX? I'm all for the scientific research of porn?

As for an iLibrary. That would be a cool app to have. More and more the iApps will run and organize my iLife. I mean life, damn I always put an i in front of things. It gives me that security feeling that it will work.


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## mi5moav (Aug 12, 2004)

Yes, Apple is hard at  work on this and the first parts will be an included feature within it's new iTunes for Education suite. This will be released later this year for college campuses where proffesors can upload digitized versions of notes, sylabi, course work including books and such.  Apple and XanEdu have been working on this for the past year. Early next year Apples ipad will be released to compete with Sony's digital eletronic note pad with digital ink technology and all this will see the light of day with the release of the OpenBook API's


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## ora (Aug 12, 2004)

qwikstreet said:
			
		

> ^What kind of scientist are you that studies XXX? I'm all for the scientific research of porn?



The short answer: an ex-scientist  (dig the double entendre) Maybe if i'd been able to do research like you suggest i would have stayed with science!

I was writing a quick reply and was about to write "nmda nr2a subunit" but decided that wouldn't make sense to many people, so went for some x's instead, silly me! That said, people do some pretty weird research, such as a phd on how best to dip biscuits into tea,- see more on the Ig Nobel prize website at http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-top.html .


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## Cat (Aug 12, 2004)

What I use is a combination of Apple's very own Indexing+Search (and the Preview search! I've converted texts to PDF just to be able to use this ...) and the new feature of BibDesk to automatically organize linked papers in a directory by their cite key. The trick is to use a descriptive / understandable cite key. Author+date often works well, or simply the (abbreviated) title.

I expect that once we have Tiger and smart searches, this is going to get even easier.


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## mi5moav (Aug 12, 2004)

fortunetly I have access to all text at xanedu.com... great service.


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## qwikstreet (Aug 12, 2004)

ora, I knew you were using the xxx as a default search field. I just found it funny and decided to make the comment before some other pervert did.

As for biscuits, I dip and soak using my left hand at a 50 degree angle. This allows maxium absorbtion into all the nooks and crannies.


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## symphonix (Aug 12, 2004)

Haha, Ora, I saw an interview with an Australian scientist who won an Ig-Nobel prize for research into belly button lint. He said that shortly after winning the prize he was inundated with job offers and offers of research grants. He pretty soon worked out that most of them had mistakenly thought he'd won the Nobel prize.


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## ora (Aug 13, 2004)

qwikstreet: figured you understood but couldn't resist the ex-scientist joke: i have a pretty cheesy sense of humor!

symphonix: That is hilarious, was at ibm labs in zurich a week or two ago, where they won two nobels in consecutive years, can just picture them poking around in some portly gentleman's belly button in search of another (ig)nobel. Also, to show how silly research can get, a guy did a phd on why all teapots drip, and how it was an insurmountable problem. Two week slater a housewife came up with te world's first dripless teapot! Not only a silly phd, but wrong too, he should get two ignobels.

Back on topic- mi5moav- yes xan-edu looks interesting but limited to courses, and the problems really happened for me with dissertations. 

Cat: bibdesk looks interesting, and i have messed about with latex/Texshop a bit, sadly my MSc dissertation is due in in a month, so i don't really have time to learn all the functions, i really should have got into it earlier given how many acadmic/science people seem to like it.
I hadn't really clocked the preview search either, in fact i was still using the achingly slow acrobat reader for a while after i upgraded to panther cos the jaguar version of preview was always so slow. The newer version is excellent, though still missing the column select tool (unless i'm being blind) that i generally needed for lifting quotes/citations from academic papers.

In general, i really like the idea of an iLibrary, allowing meta data and searches. Content searches are excellent, but i have so much data on my machine i rarely get round to indexing it. What would be nice in an iLibrary is that you'd only really put files with heavy text-content in it, so indexing your iLibrary-library would be more of a possibility, maybe even automatic?

Mi5moav's speculations aside (no offense, but i've read other posts of yours, and while i hope you are right i'm not going to bet any money on it  ) I really hope Apple pursue this project, a lot of the work must have already been done for iTunes, so i can't imagine it would be too difficult.


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