Books

There are 17 posts filed in Books (this is page 1 of 2).

Book review: “It’s Up To Us” by John Kasich

The subtitle of this book is “Ten Little Ways We Can Bring About Big Change”. I stumbled across this while researching some other posts, and recently got it from the library. It draws on John Kasich’s career in public service (governor of Ohio, US presidential candidate, US House rep). The ten ways are as follows:

  • Start A Movement – Mentions the women’s suffragist movement, environmental issues (think Greta Thunberg) among others
  • Be The Change Where You Live – Look at what you can do in your neighborhood, your town or city
  • Be Prepared To Walk A Lonely Road – Being out in front of an issue can bring criticism, but accept that you might need to stand out from the crowd before you can find a way to convince others to stand beside you
  • Slow Down – Take time to stop, look and breathe
  • Bounce Back – After a setback, we need to be able to dust ourselves off and get back in the mix
  • Love Thy Neighbor – Work to lift people up, not tear people down
  • Get Out Of Your Silo – Take in other points of view and stay open to revisiting your own points of view
  • Put Yourself In Someone Else’s Shoes – Understand other people’s struggles
  • Spend Time Examining Your Eternal Destiny – Think about the footprints you are leaving behind
  • Know That You Are Made Special – Live each day in a way that lets your individuality shine through

I thought this was an uplifting book, if short on specifics, worth a read if you are thinking about activism.

Elle Griffin writes about recent BigPub merger settlement (merger did not go through), and how few new copies of most books are sold, and lots of other interesting financial details. I mostly buy used books, so I can believe this story (via Simon Willison). Killer quote:

The DOJ found that, of 58,000 books published in a year, “90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.”

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

Requirement brainstorm and some tools for Federated Bookshelves

I summarized requirement-type information from a number of posts on the Federated Bookshelves/Library JSON idea, see the Github repo for details. If anyone is interested in participating in a conversation on this topic, I have created a Github issue to capture comments.

Also, I found two tools today to more easily view OPML and JSON files:

  • OPML Viewer  – Can open an OPML file (local or online) and show original text and XML tree view
  • JSON Viewer   – Can open a JSON file (local or online) and show original text and object view

I added these to the tools section on the main Federated Bookshelves repo file.

Library JSON test viewer now available

I have created a test viewer for the Library JSON format as defined by Tom Critchlow. It reads a JSON file following the format and displays the elements in the JSON file. I have a working one on my website reading Tom Critchlow’s test file. I have added the HTML file for the viewer to the Federated Bookshelves Github repo.

Now that we have a simple way to view both OPML and Library JSON files, I am going to put some thoughts together on Github about the next items to work on….