What is a book ?

First I saw the cover of an old novel pop up on my LibraryThing collection and then, a post about Ludditism on Digital History Hacks reminded me of the same novel, and today a post titled Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge Review, reminded me of it again.
The novel, Days by James Lovegrove is an old favorite of mine, and a significant section of the plot revolves around an escalating conflict between a book shop and a computer shop.

What sticks in my mind is this lovely piece about books, spoken by Miss Dalloway the Luddite bookshop manager.

"A book. As a source of easily retrievable information, portable, needing no peripheral support systems, instantly accessible to anyone on the planet old enough to read and turn a page, a book is without peer. A book does not come with an instruction manual. A book is not subject to constant software upgrades. A book is not technologically outmoded after five years. A book will never ‘go wrong’ and have to be repaired by a trained (and expensive) technician. A book cannot be accidentally erased at the touch of a button or have it’s contents corrupted by magnetic fields. Is it possible to think of a object on this earth more – horrible term – user-friendly than a book?"

That was written in 1997, when computers were outmoded in five years. (yeah right)

I've long since been waiting for the arrival of e-ink, I have wanted a good ebook reader for years and this post on Signal vs Noise, gives an encouraging review of the Sony Reader PRS-500 (massive image), encouraging enough for me to look around this room for something to sell.

Books they be changing.

Python, Amazon, graphs, oh my! : Part 3

In previous posts here and here, I looked at a reading list on Digital History Hacks, and examined the liked between the books and suggested new book, using Amazon's API.

I wrote my scripts with the idea of looking at some other reading lists, one such list is from the Long Now Foundation (list). Read about the foundation here, and listen to their superb seminar series here.

The majority of the code work has been done, we can take the original script (scrape1.py) and tweak it for the new list.
All that's required is the new source of data (URL), an appropriate regular expression pattern to identify the ASINs and a new prefix to keen the results separate from previous tinkerings.
Here are the changes...

#the page we want to scrape
URL='http://www.longnow.org/shop/books/'

# the pattern we want to look for
PAT="ASIN\/([0-9]+[X]*)"

# the prefix for the filename
filename='ln'

This produces an new pickle of ASINs, and the file name is usefully prefixed, ln_asins.pik.
Now all we have to do is alter the filename prefix in graph4.py and that will produce the following SVG, bitmap below.

I though the list would be more connected, and I was initially surprised how few connections there are. On reflection, the Long Now covers a broad range of subjects and the connection between them is the foundation.

Still we can still search through Amazon's similar product suggestion and see what recommendations we can offer.
Change prefix in graph5.py and amazon offers up 280 items, we'll use any suggestion with more than a third of the connections of the more connected original.
here's the results. (SVG)
Well, there's plenty going on here, too much maybe.
The neat and tidy cluster in the top right is by the historian and author Daniel J. Boorstin.
There's another cluster where three titles, previous unconnected, become connected.
So if you're interested in these...

• When Good Companies Do Bad Things: Responsibility and Risk in an Age of Globalization
• Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Hardcover)
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Paperback)

...the consider these...

• The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)
• Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great (Paperback)
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Paperback)
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Paperback)

The large node is actually a duplicate of another title but an alternate format.
Perhaps a future version will include some dupe checking, LibraryThing's API provides for matching ISBNs and titles.

Python, Amazon, graphs, oh my! : Part 2

In this post we looked at Digital History Hack's proposed reading list and visualised it using using Graphviz's SVG output.

Now lets finish what was started and add in the book titles which are considered considered similar by Amazon.

From the original list, Amazon suggest nearly 780 titles, that's clearly not useful.
I've chosen to limit to those which have at least a third of the number of the most connected.

The new books added as new nodes and have a double circle node shapes.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
The Victorian Internet


Heres the code graph5.py and the SVG, bitmap below.