Reader.listen.watch

Gary Frost tracks trends and changes in the book industry at Future of the Book. I've only begun browsing his site, but he seems to stay pretty much on-topic (is there a lesson for me there?) and both provides and points to some excellent resources.

The piece below points to a PDF file that is really good reading. If you're interested in what is happening in the e-book/e-publishing/POD arena you should check pp. 10-13 of ...

Cites & Insights. Walt Crawford picks up a number of items in the August Cites & Insights ebook column indicating the quiet realignment of the ebook revolution as it shifts toward a Print on Demand (and future of the print book)agenda.

[future of the book news]

How About a Personal Library App

3:41:23 PM

comment []

Maybe it's just me, but I never understood how Amazon was going to be profitable until they took over the e-Commerce and web operations for Borders. When I saw that it dawned on me that Amazon's Path-to-Profitability may well lie in its excellent web and infrastructure services.

This latest web services API and SDK seem to fit that vision, and I think it is a very smart thing the company does in stirring up the developer community this way. How it turns out is anyone's guess, but it's an interesting approach to leveraging their infrastructure superiority.

What I want to know is this:
Can someone use this SDK to write a personal library application?

I want to buy an inexpensive, hand-held barcode scanner, plug it into my PC, scan the ISBN codes on my hundreds of books, and let some software package run about the web building a database of all the critical info about the book.

I have thousands of dollars worth of books and if my house burned tomorrow I'd have no hope of recovering even part of it from the insurer. But a personal library program could sure help.

Any of you software mavens out there want to write such an app?

Search Amazon from Python. DiveIntoMark has written a piece of software that combines two things I love: Amazon and Python. (Makes sense, right? You expected to find Pe(a)rls in the Amazon?)
Mark has written PyAmazon, a Python wrapper for the just announced Amazon web API. [...]