The 21-Word Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Surely someone, somewhere out there has graphed how all of these characters interact over time, in space and with each other?

The 21-Word Review: Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

A complicated and many faceted man who has been legitimately quoted on both sides of the political spectrum. A magnificent portrait.

reBOOKed Facebook login update and FB/reBOOKed linking

A user recently emailed that they were having trouble logging in via Facebook. While I'm not sure why it was happening, this appears to be a problem that several users encountered and the site has been updated to ensure it does not happen in the future.

If you created a reBOOKed account and would like to link it to your Facebook account, simply click the "Login via Facebook" button the next time you come to reBOOKed. (Make sure you are logged into your Facebook account first so the system can figure out which account to link to.) You will be prompted with a form to link your current account to your Facebook account. Enter the email address and password that you used to set up your reBOOKed account and the linking will happen automatically. From that point on, you should be able to automatically log in to reBOOKed using your Facebook credentials.

Sorry for the problems and don't hesitate to contact us if you have any others.

Creating a circle bug

We've found a bug that would not allow some users to create circles and would not load the circles tab if they were not already a member of a circle. That would be a problem.

It's fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

A single click

One of the biggest usability issues with reBOOKed has been how many clicks it takes to do anything productive. As of today, many of those extra click have gone away.

For example, you can now just click on a bookshelf to see its contents. Since that's usually the first thing that our users do anyway, we just made it the default. There are dozens of other similar examples throughout the site. Hopefully, these will make your reBOOKed experience simpler and more enjoyable. You can also now log out directly from the navigation menu.

There are also more graphics throughout the site in an attempt to brighten up the place a bit. We hope you enjoy them. They may change a bit over the coming weeks as we work on design and copyright issues, but overall we think they make the site seem homier and less academic - as it should be.

We're up to 244 users with more arriving every day. Thank you so much for your support!

Wilkinsons on the Web bulletin board is down

The spam on that message board has been out of hand for the last year at least. So much so that I stopped administering it, which was a bad decision on my part.

Today I received a message that the database had exceeded its proscribed limit of 2Gb ... by about 700%.  There was over 15Gb of text in that file, and there was no way I was going to be able to pick through and find the useful information.

So, at least for now, the message board is gone. I will try to work on restoring it at some point. Sorry about that, folks.

reBOOKed reDESIGNed

As of this afternoon, a project that has been in the works for the last months has finally gone live. The reBOOKed site has been completely redesigned to greatly increase usability and streamline operation.

The new site design is based on bootstrap, a free design scaffolding provided by the fine folks at Twitter and suggested to reBOOKed in a post at reddit, where the commentators do not pull their punches when they find your site design "horrendous". The new design should be more intuitive and simpler. Let us know what you think.

As a part of the new design, the requirement that users manually enter the titles, authors, and Amazon ASINs of their books has been eliminated. The site is now fully integrated with the Amazon.Com database and will now give you a list of valid titles from Amazon when you can't find the book on reBOOKed. My daughter has already tried it will an obscure dinosaur-themed book that she had on her shelf, and it worked like a charm. Again, this is all in an attempt to make the site easier to use.

We have over 200 users now! Keep 'em coming! The more of your friends you can convince to use the site, the better it gets.

Thank you as always for the support and encouraging words.

Integrating with Amazon

Remember that massive ASIN database that I mentioned in the last post? Well, forget it. It was a poor solution to the problem and a much better one has been found.

Why recreate that Amazon database when they are nice enough to allow coders to access it directly? Thanks to some online examples and a slow week at the real job, reBOOKed now links directly into the Amazon database when searching for titles.

One limitation is that when a user is searching for a book to put into their bookshelf, the Amazon code only returns 10 books (20 if searching for both title and author). This could be expanded, but I have noticed that in every case where someone has manually entered a book, that book is either the first or second choice that shows up in a search. So if someone doesn't see the book they're trying to enter, they either should be more specific in their search or they can assume it's just too obscure and enter it manually like before.

Since the Amazon search is working so nicely now, I went ahead and added Amazon results to the "Explore->Search" results. At the bottom of the page, where there used to be a box that said "Would you like to search Amazon?", instead there is now a group of book cover images. Very neat.

Enjoy, and let me know if anything is not easy to understand or use.

The massive Amazon ASIN database at reBOOKed

One of the problems most reported about reBOOKed is that it is a pain to enter books from one's private collection. This is especially true for books that are not already in the database, as the user has to manually enter the Title, the Author, and (if they are ambitious) the Amazon ASIN. This is cumbersome and daunting for folks with large libraries.

The ideal solution would be to have some sort of scannerbot that comes to your home, automatically scans your library and inputs your books for you. That's not going to happen until sentient robots appear, so don't hold your breath. A secondary solution would be to have a scanner that works on book barcodes to get the information. There are solutions like that out there in the wild, and that may happen someday. Not now, but someday.

An interim solution is to get more books into the database to increase the odds that the book YOU are adding is already there. Over 500 books have been entered (mostly by reBOOKed staff and long suffering family members), but that's just a drop in the bucket. So, what's the best way to get more books into the database - including their Amazon ASIN numbers?

Recently, I stumbled across an online listing of Amazon ASINs that were scraped from the web and made available by archive.org's Open Library project. The downloadable file - which contains only a list of the 10-character codes - is over 400Mb. It's huge beyond belief. I broke it into files containing one million codes each and ended up with 47 files. That's 47 million entries. And none of them have any title/author associated information, just the ASIN codes.

To get the associated title and author, one could copy each code, paste it into the search box at Amazon, and record the results. This would take approximately 100 years to accomplish and would very quickly kill the operator from carpal tunnel and/or boredom. Rather than risk a stress-related death, I decided to try to use the tools that already existed to create a more automated process.

Inside reBOOKed, there is code that reads the ASIN for a book, asks Amazon for a copy of the picture, publication date, reviews, etc., and displays that information on the book's page. (Here's an example, viewable if you're a reBOOKed member and logged in.) To adopt this for the massive ASIN project, I simply wrote some code that reads through the list of ASIN codes, determines if they represent a book (as opposed to toys, food, tools, and everything else that Amazon sells these days), and writes the title and author to an ever-growing file.

The problem with the code is that it only runs in a browser and only if hosted on reBOOKed (it's part of the Amazon license). And, since browsers time out, it can't be a process that runs for hours or even minutes. No, I had to write code that reads in 100 lines, writes the result, then reloads the page to start reading the next 100 lines. It works, but it's ugly. Anything for you, my fabulous reBOOKed users.

So now that I'm getting hundreds of thousands of book listings, what can I do with them? I quickly discovered that there are hundreds of duplicates. Some are perfect duplicates, some are slight misspellings or punctuation differences, some are more complicated (author list reorganization, for example). One could plow through these individually to find and delete all of the duplicates, but that starts to have stress-related death overtones. Also, many hundreds of the listings are things like census reports, user manuals, and articles from magazines that - while valid - are really not all that useful.

My solution (partial solution really) to this problem is to dump all of the results into Excel and use a script to clean up the problems. The script will need to continue to be tweaked as new problems are found (the word "paperback" added to some listings, the name of a variety of publishers added to some titles, the list goes on and on). That's been done, and about 25% of all results are deleted immediately.

The result is still pretty ugly, though. The thousands of results include some that are obviously errors. One certainly does not want to corrupt good data (entered by loyal reBOOKed users) with junky error (generated by me). But one certainly does not want to add steps to the already cumbersome book-entering process.

The solution, as it now exists, is to present two separate lists (one after the other) in the book selection box. The first part of the list is the known good information (loyal reBOOKed users), the second part of the list is the junky information (yours truly). The nice thing about this approach is that I can continue to tweak the junky data over time and update it into the website whenever it changes.

If a loyal user chooses a book from the junky list, it will immediately be added to the more useful list and the junky entry will be deleted. I also added a "report a problem" button if, for example, the junky listing doesn't have the right picture (many of the Amazon listings don't - I think it has to do with used book reselling). Over time, the useful list should get more useful and the junky list less oppressive.

This is a long term project. Amazon limits the number of queries to 1 per second from anyone who doesn't sell thousands of Amazon products (which reBOOKed doesn't). At 1 per second, in an ideal world, that comes to about 1.5 years just to get the information from Amazon. This is not an ideal world, so double that. We'll be at this for a while. Stay tuned.

reBOOKed little annoying box

So I've added a little box in the upper corner of reBOOKed on all of the pages that require login (Explore, User Home, etc.). It lets you know how many incoming messages you have and how many open transactions (loaned books) you have. I can't decide if it's useful or annoying. Hrm.

reBOOKed

In September, I came up with the idea for a website that would allow friends to share books among themselves. The impetus was the result of a convergence of two events.

The first was an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the growing popularity of "My Little Libraries", which are birdhouses that people put in their yards containing books for neighbors and passers-by to borrow. It seemed like a nice idea, but most people probably don't want to put a structure in their yard, worry about books getting wet in the rain, and have to deal with strangers hovering in the driveway.

The second was a reading list brought home by my daughter, containing a list of books that had to be read over the next few months. Of course, since everyone in the class had the same list, the local library was bereft of every title. However, as the list varies little from year to year, certainly someone else in the neighborhood had a copy that could be borrowed. But, how to find out who?

 The convergence of these two events led to a brainstorm that, through fits and starts, became reBOOKed.

I spent some time working in the only programming language that I knew (Visual Basic - for Access in this case) and got the basic framework for how the site would work fleshed out. I bought a spiral notebook and kept track of all of the plans and interworking. I searched for a way to convert Access programs to web applications to no avail, and I finally posted on reddit.com in the subreddit "r/learnprogramming" to get some suggestions. After about a month of perusing PHP and SQL books and websites and asking the reddit community obnoxiously ignorant questions, reBOOKed was finally born.

The problem now is getting people to actually use it. The biggest issue seems to be actually entering one's own books. I've entered over 350, and it's not all that hard, but you really have to want to do it. I am hoping that more will want to do it. So, if you've run across this blog and want to do a favor that will cost you absolutely nothing, head over to http://www.rebooked.org and take a look. I'd really appreciate it.

The 21-Word Review: Disquiet, Please!: More Humor Writing from The New Yorker by David Remnick and Henry Finder

Is this not a wonderful navel? Entertaining, beautiful, and uniquely wrinkled. I could simply gaze upon it for hours. Couldn't you?

The 21-Word Review: The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

My sister and I have an ongoing contest to determine whose family is the weirdest. The Fangs would beat us both.

The 21-Word Review: Crisis by Robin Cook

"Physician heal thyself" seems trite, but appropriate. The ending makes little sense and is incredibly unsatisfying. Robin phoned this one in.

The 21-Word Review: TinTin (DVD)

Not nearly as creepy as the train movie or the awful Beowulf thing, this motion-capture animation thing has real promise.

The 21-Word Review: Captain America (DVD)

Since I don't get to the movies much, I rent the prequels of the current blockbusters so I appear somwhat cooler.

The 21-Word Review: The Husband by Dean Koontz

Finally a superhero we can all get behind! He mows the lawn in straight lines while balancing the household budget similarly!

The 21-Word Review: Cirque de Soleil Mystere at Treasure Island

You know how at a circus, you try to look behind the scenes to see how they work? Not an option.

The 21-Word Review: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

So many notes and references that I thought I had at least two more chapters to go when the book ended.

The 21-Word Review: Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage by Douglas Waller

Sometimes it takes a person with some significant personal flaws to get an important job done in a time of war.

The 21-Word Review: Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch

Better than I expected and than most that our study group has picked up. You can't change the world, just you.

The 21-Word Review: Sucker Punch (DVD)

Thinks it's much cooler than it is. I recommend just watching the trailer for 60 minutes instead. You won't miss much.

The 21-Word Review: IP Man (DVD)

Perhaps the coolest and most complex and interesting "martial arts" movie out there. Very loosely based on a real man. Loosely.

The 21-Word Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I believe I would have gotten more out of this book if I’d known more Spanish. Or perhaps more Puerto Ricans.

The 21-Word Review: Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami

My first Murakami, based on a friend’s recommendation. All I can think of is “The Stranger” – based on tone, not content.