About libra.re

An exploration of what it means to live with ebooks #

When I began to acquire ebooks, after a lifetime of living with books—and bookshelves and stacks, and piles, and notes, and moments in time, and place, with people—I quickly realized something was missing.

Ebooks, as they have been made available to us, do not afford the attendant contextual experiences that books in the physical world do. Sadly, they seem to only address the most basic technical—and mercantile—experience of books: read it once, then find another to buy.

I built this web-based platform to explore how we might recapture some of those missing experiences… and what novel ones may be made possible with digital technologies.

As you might guess, there is so much. The neurological, psychological, sociological, and cultural dimensions books engage with in our lives easily rival the purely intellectual.

Caveats #

While I do intend to share these experiments—and in the future, find ways to collaborate on them!—for now, I can only showcase them. It turns out that actually living with ebooks, especially in any social way, comes very close to contravening digital copyright legislation.

That means that the site you see here is a "limited" version of the webapp I have running locally, just for myself. It is that local version that I will document in various ways, here and elsewhere.

If this interests you, please subscribe and/or follow. I'll start posting stuff soon.

Also, I am always happy to talk about any of this!

In draft:

• How is libra.re built?
• eTsundoku, or Eco's Antilibrary
• Digital Gardens and Personal Libraries
• Current experiments & features (book sizes, screen saver, etc…)
• On skeuomorphism & human experience
• Social reading: avoiding the performative aspect
• Annotations: reading as creative act
• The flattening of our neuro-cognitive abilities