@Bob Smith

How well does 1passwd work?

It’s worked great for me so far, Bob. Even for bank sites, Google, etc. — site sthat try to defeat autofill with javascript and whatnot.

The irony is that 1passwd is more secure (at least in my opinion) since I can generate an otherwise impossible-to-remember 20- or 50-character password full of weird characters that 1P remembers for me and keeps locked in a keychain that’s also password-protected (and locks automatically). No more 5 or 6 mnemonic “hamburger helper” passwords for me.

(Need to do a full post on this some time.)

“Bobos in Paradise”? Oh man… Brooks sucks so bad. You must get over that idiot.

Thanks for the tip though.

Chris the Librarian and arendallsalvetti both mentioned a limitation of Jon Udell’s Library Lookup bookmarklet. The bookmarklet searches by ISBN number, and since ISBN numbers are associated with a particular version of a book (hardcover, paperback, large print, etc), the bookmarklet will only check for a particular version of a book, and not for any version of the book.

Both LibX and BookBurro will search for any version of a book at your local library. I am not certain how BookBurro does this, but LibX uses OCLC’s xISBN service. Jon Udell wrote a follow up post about a Greasemonkey version of Library Lookup that used the xISBN service:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/01/30.html

But since Jon wrote this Greasemonkey script, OCLC created a simpler interface that will query your local library for all versions of a book using just a single URL (instead of diving into all of the AJAX and DOM parsing issues Jon documents in his second post). If your library uses a supported OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) and you can extract an ISBN number from a page, then you can search your local library for any version of a book using a URL that looks something like this:

http://labs.oclc.org/xisbn/liblook?baseURL=http://catalog.lib.rochester.edu&opacID=voyager&isbn=0613915313

If you know a little bit of JavaScript, it shouldn’t be hard to modify Jon’s original Library Lookup bookmarklet to use the xISBN service and search your local library for any version of a book.

If you’re going to read Bobos In Paradise, don’t forget to read this takedown article:

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboosinparadise/

Also, This Modern World has repeatedly exposed Brooks’ lazy writing and fallacies.

http://tinyurl.com/2upd3h

This is amazing! This in conjunction with Delicious Library and Library Books (http://haroldchu.id.au/?q=node/2) makes my life complete! I shall check out BookBurro as well. Thanks!

I am a librarian, and I use John Udell’s Library Lookup bookmarklet every day. It’s fantastic! I do have to second Chris’s word of caution, however: it does an ISBN search, so if you search for one edition and your library owns another edition, it won’t show up. Does anyone know if Book Burro works the same way?

I was going to second the recommendation for BookBurro, but a fellow Ann Arborite beat me to it! Anyway, it’s a really great little add-on, and works with every library system I’ve come across via Worldcat. As Edward mentioned, it’s extensible for any bookseller you care to mention via its settings applet.

I’ve been using Google notebook to make a note of books I’m thinking of reading - if I put them all on the library list too soon, I wind up with too many books at once!

I switched from Jon’s original bookmarklet to a modified copy of his Greasemonkey script, and then to BookBurro. BookBurro will search multiple local libraries for a book, and rewrite the Amazon page to indicate availability:

http://bookburro.org/

LibX also has some very powerful features, particularly if you are searching for information at a University library:

http://www.libx.org/

This generally works really well, but a comment: 1) The search generated is an ISBN search, which looks for a particular edition of the book. Which means if you’re looking at the hardback copy on Amazon and your library bought the paperback it’ll look like the library doesn’t have it. This frequently happens. 2) Once you’re in your local library’s catalog, a simple title search will usually resolve this problem