Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

• BookMooch: exchange books and trade them, like a book swap or book barter

I’ve joined Bookmooch, an interesting book-trading social site. You join, add books you’re willing to give away to your inventory, and when somebody else wants to “mooch” the book you mail it to them (you pay the postage). Doing so accumulates points that you can then use to mooch books off of others. Economically, it probably works out to your advantage…it costs about $2.13 to send most paperbacks anywhere in the US, but since you need a 2:1 ratio of books sent to books received, that’ll be about $4.50-$5.00 including packing materials. Oddly, you get 1 point per book mailed, plus additional fractional points just for listing books, and it only costs 1 point to mooch a book; the 2:1 rule is separate from the points accounting, so it seems like over time you’ll accumulate more points than you can possibly use unless you’re mooching books from overseas (which cost extra points).

So far, I have sent out about eight books, and haven’t mooched any myself since I haven’t really dug through what’s available or bothered to enter a wish-list of books I know I’d like to mooch if they were available. On the other hand, since I’m mostly doing this because I can’t stand the idea of throwing out books even if I’ll never read them again, but pretty much every other way of disposing of books has gotten to be too much of a hassle (local libraries won’t even take paperbacks any more, used bookstores cherry-pick one or two titles, etc), I’m not too concerned. Eventually I’m sure I’ll mooch something…or, you know, get tired of it.

I got this a little while back, and while it was enjoyable enough, I found it a bit repetitive. If you know anything about linguistics (even as little as I know), there’s not a lot here that will be new to you…I’d guess that you’d be able to outline the main argument of each essay if not all the details just from the title. Possibly the most surprising thing to me was encountering a myth that I’d never even heard before, that “In Appalachia They Speak Like Shakespeare.”

Possibly the most eye-rolling bit is treating all black people regardless of time or geography as belonging to the same culture in “Black Children are Verbally Deprived” (so the oratorical traditions that gave rise to Kwame Nkrumah, Odumegwu Ojukwu, or Desmond Tutu, or even Frederick Douglass are somehow supposed to count as part of the culture of African-American inner-city children); it would have been better to stick to Jesse Jackson, Barbara Jordan, and Martin Luther King as examples of the richness of at least semi-current African-American oration. But, beyond the question of whether the examples are actually relevant, the structure of the argument is off. Nobody would accept that inner-city African-American children aren’t economically deprived just because they’ve come from a culture that’s given rise to the multi-millionaires Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and so forth. The rest of the essay goes on to do a much better job, but it’s a really weak opening.

I’d say my favorite essay was “English Spelling Is Kattastroffik.” I think it’s the juiciest, with the most concrete examples, and so probably the only one I would have referred back to later.

I passed this book along yesterday via Bookmooch, so even though I wasn’t blown away by it, I hope its new owner finds it informative and useful.

1. The study game: How to play and win with “Statement-PIE”, by Laia Hanau
The book that taught me how to study and take useful notes. I so wish I ran into it before my Junior year of college.

2. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
This shook up my thinking about more than just evolution, but how the world operates, and the deep mathematical foundations of growth, competition, and distributed problem-solving.

3. How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method - George Polya
Another book I wish I had read earlier in my academic career

4. How to Win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie
Not at all what you might think. I read it because a professional magician recommended it in the strongest possible terms as an aid to performance, and darned if he wasn’t right. If I had to boil it down I’d say it makes the case for sincere empathy with the points of view of everyone you interact with, understanding your role as a bit-player in the story of their lives and getting what you want only through helping them get what they want (what ethicists might call treating people as ends and not means).

5. A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar - Huddleston & Pullum
In which I learned that nearly everything I’d been taught in English class about grammar was either wrong, or worse, nonsense.

6. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated - Judith Martin
In which I learned the central importance of politeness and etiquette in civilization. The book is highly entertaining, but fairly discursive since large portions consist of letters and answers, for a more concise statement of the central thesis, see her essay The World’s Oldest Virtue.

7. Historian As Detective - Robin Winks
The book which changed my college career and convinced me I wanted to be a historian.

8. The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space - Gerard K O’Neill
The book which rescued me from wanting to be a historian, and probably prevented me from having a miserable existence as a History grad student at UC Berkeley, where I had been accepted into the PhD program, but where there was no funding available for the first year.

9. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain - Antonio Damasio
The book which finally overthrew emotionless ratiocination as the top of my personal totem-pole of valuable mental qualities. It had been wobbling for a while. Hume certainly pushed it close to the edge, and Nietzche set it teetering, but it took Damasio’s to fully demonstrate through case studies how man cannot live by reason alone, and the model of reason being the core self while the visceral emotions and passions are intruding influences is empirically false. (Don’t worry Reason, I still love you, but you have to play nice with the other parts that go into making up my self, k?)

10. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement - Milton and Rose Friedman
The book that opened my eyes to the moral beauty of Capitalism. Given my origins and predilections, this was as big a brain-quake in its own way as The Selfish Gene.

11. The Substance of Style - Virginia Postrel
This helped me get over my reverse-snobbery in regard to style and design, as well as demolishing the place that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs occupied in my mental landscape.

Amazon.com: Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device

Initially I misread the announcement and thought that the Kindle came bundled with the OED as its built-in dictionary. I would happily have paid $399 for the complete contents of the OED in something that weighed less than a paperback book that happened to also be able to wirelessly download 80,000 other books and store up to 200 of them at once, particularly since the OED on CD-ROM goes for about $236 (and if my experience is any guide will just stop working round about the 3rd license update). Unfortunately a second read reveals that it’s the far less exciting New Oxford American Dictionary that ships with the Kindle. The NOAD is the dictionary that comes bundled with Mac OS X, which is fine and all, but without the quotations and the date chart, it just isn’t the same. sigh

Google Print (application/pdf Object)

Despite the attempt by the Authors Guild to cut the noses off of their authors to spite their faces, according to this analysis Google will probably prevail with a fair-use defense, assuming that the court follows the holding in Kelly v. Arriba Soft. There was a point when I would have been surprised at the various authors who are up in arms over Google adding their works to what amounts to a gigantic online card-catalog (if the authors and publishers don’t specifically license Google to display more, the search results only return a few sentences on either side of the search term, and the search term will only return three hits per work so you can’t stitch together a complete copy of the work by searching for common terms such as “a” or “the”). Then I learned that when it comes to intellectual property law, most authors that I’ve talked to about this are cranks who in their heart of hearts still resent the fact that public libraries are allowed to exist.

Roger L. Simon: You never write, you never call, you never email!

Google’s not asking permission, because what Google is doing is fair use, if it’s even reproduction or distribution at all. Google and its lawyers say (and I happen to agree) that they are under no legal obligation to seek permission from an author, although as a courtesy they’ll exclude an author’s works from the program if requested to do so. They aren’t making the works available online, they’re just making them searchable. In your view, would somebody need explicit permission from the author if a friend who knew you had a copy of the book called up and asked you to look up whether a particular line occurred in the book, or to consult the index and tell him whether there was an entry for a particular topic? If not, then why would automating the process be different? It seems to me the only tricky bit is making sure that they don’t display so much of the context as to violate fair use, or allow people to access the whole thing by searching for successive chunks in context.

Terrence Ross is either being misquoted or tricky with words, because under copyright law you do *not* need permission to “use” a copyrighted work; you only need permission to reproduce or distribute it, and even then there are the “fair use” exceptions. I’m sure the Authors Guild and various publishers have lawyers who are prepared to argue that it’s the scanning into the database that’s an unlicensed reproduction, even if there is no way to access that copy except under conditions that would not conflict with copyright or constitute fair use. That might even prevail, but it’s hardly settled law. Google could argue that regardless of the copyright in the original work, the number of times the words “Moses Wine” occurs in the work is a fact, and not subject to copyright and that moreover they have a right (recognized in Feist v. Rural) to use the copyrighted work to compile their own work.

528 books cataloged, 4 bookcases complete, 17 bookcases to go. Several of them are full of manga and comic collections, though, so that might wait til a second pass…

I’m discovering books that I had forgotten I owned, or had thought I lost. Would I have bought that hardcover Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide if I had known that I still had all three of the original paperbacks, scattered about? Well, possibly, since it was on sale for only $16 dollars, but still. It doesn’t help that I have most of my paperbacks doubled up on the shelves (with paperbacks that I doubt I’ll ever reread on their sides beneath the back row so that I can at least glimpse the spines of the back row). I’m thinking that once I finish cataloging, if I pack away most of the trashiest of the paperbacks and the things that I can’t imagine ever looking at (am I ever going to consult the Handbook of Employee Benefits again? I don’t think so. Ditto for Patterns in Java, Volume 2) I might be able to free up an entire bookshelf. Bliss.

I was up past midnight last night cataloging, and I’ve gotten 237 books done. That’s approximately the builtin bookcase next to the fireplace, plus the top two shelves of the bookcase next to the computer (which are stacked two deep w/paperbacks). I’m trying to be methodical about it, otherwise I know I’ll end up skipping bunches, so I’m going shelf-by-shelf, doing the complete shelf even if it means entering the book manually (mostly the older paperbacks, that don’t have a Library of Congress listing or an ISBN number). I’m skipping the manga for now. I’m thinking of reshelving them, or storing them some other way anyway, and I’ve already discovered that works in multiple volumes appear in LibraryThing as duplicated (my lovely four-volume set of A Dance to the Music of Time revealed this to me), so I don’t know whether I’m going to bother to catalog the manga. If I do I may just do one volume per series, and use the notes to indicate the volumes I have. I’m also trying not to get to compulsive about exactly which edition I have; most of the genre paperbacks are found on Amazon instead of in the Library of Congress, and Amazon tends to list only the most recent printing unless somebody is selling a used copy through zShops. I try to make sure that it’s at least the right publisher, but even then I think there are some slip-ups.

I’ve added a widget in the sidebar that displays random books from my library, via LibraryThing Cool, ne? Hacking the WordPress template wasn’t hard, but figuring out exactly where to hack was a pain in the tuchis.

LibraryThing | Catalog your books online

This looks really interesting: a way to catalog your books online. It’s cheap (free for up to 200 volumes, $10 for a lifetime subscription after that), and it appears to be really easy to add books; you just do a search that looks through Amazon and the Library of Congress catalog, and then check the correct book from the result list.

hat tip: language hat