Libri gratis di Salvatore Aranzulla. La diffusione di dispositivi come tablet ed ebook reader ha favorito lo sviluppo di un mercato come quello dei libri digitali, che consente a noi lettori di avere accesso ad una vasta gamma di opere a prezzi stracciati se non addirittura azzerati.
I recently listened with great interest to an online recording of the 2019 Malkin Lecture delivered last month at the Rare Books School in Virginia by Heather O’Donnell and Rebecca Romney. Its provocative title was: “The Right and Wrong Ways to Collect.” If you missed the live performance and haven’t yet caught the recorded version then I would strongly encourage you to click this link – – and listen to what they had to say.Their title captured my attention because it connected directly with the topic of another lecture I had, myself, presented at the University of London’s Senate House some five years earlier. For my lecture the title was: “Taste and Technique in Book Collecting – An Update for the Digital Age”. In my case, however, there were no recording devices present. I had instead intended to rework my original oral presentation into something more readable and then post it on our website where I knew that, if nothing else, our friend the Googlebot could be counted on to find and read it.Of course, as often happens, action did not readily follow intention and the notes from my talk soon found their way, instead, into an archive folder on my laptop where they were eventually saved and forgotten. They would likely have stayed there, too, if listening to Heather and Rebecca had not brought them back to mind.
I was thus nudged to update my own thoughts on the subject and put them into a form more suitable for appearing online. You can now find that here:Both lectures focused, in particular, on the ways in which the established “rules”and practices of book collecting have been altered, if not made completely irrelevant, by the internet and related technologies. Traditional collectors, and the booksellers who serve them, regularly bemoan the resulting loss of “standards” and complain of a general decline in book collecting as the inevitable result. I was happy to hear that Rebecca and Heather have seen a very different and more encouraging horizon. Theirs has been informed, in particular, by the numerous young collectors who have submitted entries to their annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. They give us a glimpse of a very positive future and I was pleased to hear about them.Many of these young collectors have no interest in following in the footsteps of their predecessors. Nor should they.
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Some of their interests may seem incomprehensible to the collectors of my generation; they may have confessed to the prize judges that “I know I’m doing it wrong,” but what we learn from them is that, in fact, there is no such thing as “doing it wrong.”My own lecture concluded with a similar message. It leaned heavily on the prescriptions of John Carter, the English bookseller who did more than anyone else of the previous century to explain and defend the “rules” of book collecting that guided my own generation of bibliophiles. Those are among the rules that are now being being tossed aside, or simply ignored, by a new generation – one that is mistakenly accused of having no interest in books. I personally find it fascinating to examine the origins and evolution of those rules, but it is even more exciting to think about the huge opportunities that are now opening up to this new wave of collectors who feel no need or interest in being told how or what to collect.So if you are among the many who are skeptical and pessimistic about the future of book collecting I would like to direct you to the two links above. I hope they will cheer you up. Are you getting more Libribot matches than you really want?This is not a problem we expected, but we have, in fact, recently received a handful of emails with requests from users who were unhappy because they were getting too many matches. The source of their discontent: eBay.This is not, of course, the majority view.
Since we started including eBay in our searches last summer we have received many appreciative emails from regular users thanking us for this expansion. I was, frankly, surprised at how enthusiastic the response was. The number of clicks, and purchases, has, as a result, significantly increased.While the addition of eBay was applied generally, it is the Libribot matches that have, in particular, increased. While most of our Libribot users have been happy with this, two or three have written to complain about getting too may matches and that eBay was the primary source of their surfeit. These particular users told us they hardly ever find what they are looking for on eBay and wanted to know if there was some way to eliminate all the eBay items from their Libribot search results. When they wrote to us about this our answer, unfortunately, was “no.”But we hate having “no” for an answer (Al especially). So we (mostly Al) pushed this forward on the to-do list.
We have now added another new feature that provides check boxes for all the sites that Libribot can search. If you don’t want books from a given site (or sites) all you have to do is go to your Account Details page and uncheck its box. It will look like this:Unchecking the box for an individual site will tell Libribot to ignore that site when it is searching for books on your want list. It will not, however, have any effect on the conventional searches you make using the home page form. The way that works has not been changed.You also need to be aware that this Libribot site exclusion will apply to all your wants. If you only want to exclude a site from searching some of your more fertile wants, but still want to leave that site active in searches for other rarer items, then you need to do something else.You may already be familiar with the exclusion filters that prevent matches on books that include specified keywords. The same filters will also work with the names of bookselling sites.
For example, if you want to exclude eBay matches from your searches then all you need to do is put ebay into the keywords field of the Libribot search form. This will exclude everything that has the word “ebay” anywhere in the description, including the name of the site where the item is for sale.
You will have to do this individually for each of the permanent wants you have saved to your Wants Manager. If you have a large number of wants then this could take a long time. However, if you are like most users with multiple wants you probably find that it is only a small portion of those wants that produced a large volume of unwanted results. If you set up an exclusion for just those wants you will probably find that your results become quite manageable and you can leave the rarer items unchanged.However, if you are certain you never want to see any books that are for sale on eBay then you can simply put ebay into the “Keyword Filters” box on your Account Details page. This will prevent eBay matches being made not only by Libribot, but by all the one-off searches you may make manually from the home page.Of course, these techniques are not limited to eBay. You can use them to create an exclusion filter for most of the sites we search. Most, but not all.
For example, using bibliophile as a keyword exclusion will filter out all the books from the bookselling site with that name, but it will also exclude all the books where the word “bibliophile” appears as part of the title or description. This might filter out items you actually want. There are several sites where some caution may be necessary.We think this new feature will be helpful for many of you. More are in the pipeline. If you have any suggestions for other additions please let us know.