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Alex Holden's Book Catalogue
This database driven book catalogue includes all of the fiction books in
my collection that I have read apart from a (fairly small) "incoming"
pile. I haven't bothered cataloguing my non-fiction books or the large
drawer full of books I haven't read yet. The web interface is a work in
progress (and has been for quite some time).
The interface right now is extremely simple: a list of all the authors
who have written or co-written at least one of the books in my collection,
and a list of the genres (note that I've used "mainstream" as a genre-
not technically correct but never mind) of which I have at least one
example. Follow any of the links and you will be taken to a page with all
books by that author or in that genre. Currently the results are not
divided into sub-pages so the result page can be massive. In the case of
books with more than one author, the book will appear in all of the
co-author's book lists.
This is where I keep my fiction collection
(larger picture).
I designed and built it myself from solid pine. Unfortunately it isn't big
enough: the seven shelves all have two rows of books on them, and I had
to put the oversized books on top. This lack of space is one of the main
reasons I almost never buy hardback fiction books: they nearly always
take up much more room than the paperback. They're also less convenient
to carry around and read in the bath, not to mention being quite a bit
more expensive. Incidentally, I also designed and made the small single
cylinder oscillating steam engine on the second shelf down.
I use a Handspring Visor Edge
with Weasel Reader on it
to read my eBooks. Weasel's converter program takes a plain ASCII file and
puts it into a compressed database format which allows you to add
bookmarks and annotations. Unfortunately many publishers haven't yet
realised that honest customers are willing to pay for books and dishonest
ones aren't, and DRM doesn't do a thing to change that. If I wanted to I
could buy DRMed eBooks and crack them (like the pirates do) so that I
could read them on my PDA, but I don't want to encourage the continuing
use of a stupid and pointless technology, and I can't really be bothered
anyway. I would buy many more eBooks to read on my PDA if they were
supplied as plain ASCII. The eBook showing on the screen
(larger picture) is
Charlie Stross's
Accelerando. The lid
was autographed by both
Cory Doctorow and
Charlie Stross at
Interaction, the
2005 World Science Fiction Convention
(Worldcon).
Don't bother asking me for pirated eBooks. If you want to find legal free
eBooks in unrestricted formats, try
Project Gutenberg,
Baen,
Cory Doctorow,
Charlie Stross,
John Scalzi,
Michael Coney,
Peter Watts, and
Mike Brotherton.
Please send comments and queries to 
The catalogue currently contains 404 books by 126 different authors with a total of 133488 pages.
Authors
Genres
