I am very pleased with the application and the possibilities is represents. There were no installation problems, it is very stable and it seems quite intuitive. It appears to have some memory leaks though; it starts out about 45MB and climbs to above 100MB after using it for a couple of hours. It seems to release the memory when it is closed and memory usage is at the low end when it is restarted. Thanks for a great application. I wanted to offer the following based on my experience so far.
Suggestions:
Provide the ability to use sub-folders in the bookshelves. Or in keeping with the current line of thought, call the first level All Items the Library; Other current bookshelves would become Bookcases; and the sub-folders would then be individual Bookshelves. An arrangement like this would, for example, allow people that get newspapers or magazines to break them up by year, month, etc...
Offer a tagging system that would allow users to tag their bookmarks so that they could be associated with other bookmarks throughout the library. Then using a filter one could pull together different books or articles about a subject based on these tags and go directly to the relevant passage in each. This would be especially useful for students or professional collecting information to produce reports or write a thesis or term paper. Such a system would be most useful if the user is allowed to provide names for the tags.
Develop a means that allows the user to provide an alternate Title for the document. Document titles don't currently have the consistency and accuracy needed to accept them as is. Some have a default title that makes no sense while others have some text from the first page of the document. The ability to re-title documents, if necessary, in the library would make it easier for the user to recognize and use the material. As an example, I download a daily newspaper that has the same meaningless title every day; it would be great if I could rename them at least to the paper's date. Understandably, the titling issue is one for the publisher and it is likely that their procedures could be changed, but that will not affect existing documents.
Create a way to export bookmarks; at least the text the user has inserted. This could prove invaluable for books that have been borrowed, particularly when someone is doing research to produce schoolwork or a professional report. At present it appears all information is lost when a document is removed from the library. How does it work with a borrowed book when it is returned? Do you have to leave the book file on the computer even though it cannot be accessed? Can the bookmarks still be accessed even if the book is dead? I have not tested borrowed books yet but being able to save user generated comments for future use seems like a natural extension of this application.
And finally, Contextual Advertising; three words don't do it why must an outstanding application like this be ruined by advertising, in particular contextual ads? By incorporating contextual ads it turns a promising truly useful tool into nothing more than glorified spyware/adware. It is inherently wrong to invade someone's work, study or private personal time trying to sell them something while they are reading a book. It is worse yet to be spying on what they are reading in order provide some context for said advertising. There is no tasteful way to present ads that confirm someone else is watching every thing I read. The Flash platform used for this application is a dichotomy of astounding proportions. It one of the most useful, innovative and effective ways to learn; and it is the most obnoxious medium for advertising ever devised. If it were not for the few providers that supply meaningful content, Flash would not be installed on my system. I understand that Adobe needs to generate revenue, but there has to be a better way.
Sam
3
Replies
AdChoices