fub

So, I have been reading again. But I have had to adapt my book selection strategy quite a bit, and I have adapted my tech accordingly.

When I was a wee lad, living in a village with a decent-sized library in the 1980’s, I’d simply roamed the bookcases in the public library (mainly those with fantasy and SF) and selected the books that interested me. My choices were constrained by what was available, but because so much was available, it was not a problem to just keep reading interesting books. Then I moved to Nijmegen, and I got a library membership there. As you’d expect, the library there is much bigger and therefore there was much more choice. Again, I restricted my choices by what was available, but that was not a problem because there was so much. And inter-library loans are possible, but cost money and I didn’t care to pay for that.

And when I started working and I got more disposable income, I bought more and more books (infinite choice when ordering from the internet!) and I stopped going to the library — I’m pretty sure I hadn’t set foot in a public library in 25 years. And somewhere in the past 10 years, I kind of… stopped reading books (with the notable exception of RPG books).

I’ve written about it before, but after the move to the Tiniest Village, I had enough mind space to pick up a book again, and I re-discovered my love of sitting down with a book and just… read. I decided to become a member of the ‘local’ public library. There’s no library in the Tiniest Village, but there is one in the next village, the Slightly Less Tiny Village. But I had to change my approach to selecting books to read.

You see, the closest library is small. The collection is not that large, so simply wandering in and finding something, while possible, is also not viable in the long term. But there is a library system that it is a part of: equally small libraries in villages all around, and slightly larger libraries in slightly larger towns. And you become a member of this system, not the individual library. And request a book to be brought from one library to another within the system is free! So even though the individual library is small, you have access to the whole collection. That’s a good deal, but it does mean that the online catalogue is much more important. And because there is almost no serendipitous selecting a book, I turned to recommendation lists to find interesting books.

There’s blogs with lists of “the best YA fantasy” etc, but I’ve also started using Storygraph (like GoodReads but not owned by a fascist) to get recommendations based on my preferences and the books I have read. I’d still have to look in the catalogue of the library system if that particular book was available — and since this is a Dutch library with books in Dutch, that also involved finding out if there is a translation available. So I had been copy/pasting author names back and forth a lot.

But I noticed that a query in the library catalogue is done through a GET request, with the query as a parameter. And that means that, given the name of an author or book title, it is possible to construct a direct URL to the catalogue for that information. So I have installed the extension Selection Search and configured the catalogue search in there. So if I see a book title or author name, I select the text, click on it and select the configured search; and then a new tab opens with that query. (I tend to use author names because recommendations are mostly for English books but of course the titles are often different in their Dutch translation!)

If the book is available in ‘my’ library system, I favourite them so I have a convenient way to request a reservation when I get to that book. I also add the book to my Storygraph “to read” pile. Sometimes the book is not available in my library system, but there is an ebook that I can loan from the “online library”. In that case, I put the book in Storygraph as well.

I built up quite the list of books to read, and that pleases me.