Our API directory now includes 53 books APIs. The newest is the Readmill API, a social platform for eReaders which we recently covered. The most popular, in terms of mashups, is the Google Books API. We list 11 Google Books mashups. Below you’ll find some more stats from the directory, including the entire list of books APIs.

In terms of the technical details, REST and XML lead the way. There are 44 books REST APIs and 8 books SOAP APIs. Our directory lists 35 books XML APIs and 21 books JSON APIs.

The most common tags within books are 16 reference books APIs, 11 social books APIs and 10 library books APIs.

On the mashup side, we list 83 books mashups. We named Small Demons as mashup of the day in January.

For reference, here is a list of all 53 books APIs.

  Abundant Barnes & Noble Price API: Book price retrieval service

  aNobii API: Book sharing service

  Bertram Books API: UK book retailing service

  Bible Gateway API: Bible lookup services

  Bible Lookup API: Bible lookup service

  bkkeepr API: Book reading social services

  Blurb API: Social book publishing platform

  Bol.com API: Dutch online retail store

  Book Glutton API: Convert HTML to EPUB

  Bookleteer API: Craft booklet creation service

  BookMooch API: Books exchange service

  Bookshare API: Accessible Books For Readers with Print Disabilities

  Bookworm ePub Reader API: Online book management service

  Bowker Book Metadata Service API: Book descriptive metadata service

  CatalogWS API: Academic library

  Copac API: Search UK libraries

  Direct Textbook API: Book price comparison service

  ESV Bible Lookup API: Bible lookup service

  Feedbooks API: Mobile book and RSS services

  Goodreads API: Book search and social book services

  Google Book Search Book Viewability API: Book search

  Google Books API: Book search services

  Hathi Trust Data Distribution API: Library catalog search service

  hon.jp API: Japanese eBook metadata service

  I'vRead API: Social Reading Record

  iTrackmine Simple API: Collection sharing service

  Library of Congress SRW API: Information database search

  Library of Congress Subject Headings API: Access to the Library of Congress Subject Headings

  LibraryThing API: Books database and community

  Living Stones API: Bible lookup service

  Luzme API: Ebook price data engine

  New York Times Best Sellers API: New York Times best-seller lists data

  O'Reilly Product Metadata Interface API: Book and publishing industry metadata interface

  Open Library API: Library data access

  OReilly Safari API: Book search

  PaperBack Swap API: Book exchange service

  PubEasy API: Publishing and book sales information service

  Random House API: Book search and viewing service

  Readernaut API: Social book review service

  Readmill API: Online eBook discussion platform

  ReadSocial API: Social reading service for reading applications

  SendToReader API: Send web pages to Kindle devices

  SharedBook API: On-demand reverse publishing system

  SharedBookshelves API: Book sharing service

  TasteKid API: Taste discovery service

  Unglue.it API: Digital content relicensing service

  USA Today Best-Selling Books API: Best-Selling Books Information Service

  USA Today Book Reviews API: Book review service

  What's on My Bookshelf API: Book trading community service

  WorldCat Identities API: Library data access

  WorldCat Search API: Library data access

  WorldCat xISBN API: ISBN and book edition linking service

  Yonda4 API: Reading lists and recommendations

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Related ProgrammableWeb Resources Google Books API Profile, 11 mashups

People sometimes ask me how I'm able to read 70+ books every year despite my extra-curricular, professional, and authoring activities. The truth is that although my reading count the past few years has remained fairly consistent, it's far less than my historical count (by half) and pathetically less than truly prolific readers. Alas, people ask and so I'll try to answer the best that I can. Below you'll find a short list of principles that help me to maximize my reading time and motivation. More »

Summers with Juliet, published February, 1992

 

Summers With Juliet started as an idea for a personal essay, one of my first ever (before that I’d only written formal essays and fiction), nothing more than this: My not-yet wife and I had seen an enormous fish in Menemsha Pond, Martha’s Vineyard, a sea sunfish, Mola Mola. One January day I started to write that story, and by late March, I finished it. After a year of revising and enriching the thing (while writing other stuff, of course), I sent the essay off in the mail. The Iowa Review published it, and “Mola Mola’’ eventually got an honorable mention in The Best American Essays, 1991.

Well, hey. I decided I was on to something, and wrote another piece—I considered what I was doing nature writing—about a great blue heron. Then another, about some blue crabs. My grad-school friend Betsy Lerner read them, kindly, and said the thing she liked best about them wasn’t nature so much as that Juliet was there in all of them.  Men usually left their women out of their nature writing.  She thought there was a book in there.  She even had a title for me: Summers with Juliet.  And then she helped me connect with a great agent.  Later, much later, she became my agent, but that’s another story.

So: a collection of nature essays in which Juliet played a role.

Juliet now, with a new character

My new agent–Binky Urban at ICM–asked for a couple more and an annotated table of contents to describe the unwritten ones.  She gave me ten days to do this.  She was testing me.  I did what she asked.  She liked one of the new pieces, tossed the other, formed a proposal, messengered it to ten or so top editors and sold the book on the second day out, to Houghton Mifflin.

I was kind of happy.  Then I had to do the work.  It took a year.

When I’d finished the seventeen essays that made the first draft of the book, everyone said to tie them together. And gradually, that’s how the structure of Summers With Juliet emerged. That structure is self-consciously classical: three acts—situation, development, denouement (this last is from the French, as you know, for untying).

Act one comprises six scenes (I should say “scenes,’’ since each is a chapter in itself, and some freestanding essays): “Hot Tin Roof,’’ “Berkshire Turkeys,’’ “Cross Canada,’’ “Volcano,’’ “Bluefishing,’’ “Turtles.’’ The situation: a callow young man (myself) in love with a young woman not impressed. A romance develops despite obstacles, mostly of the young man’s making. The last scene (“Turtles’’) ends with his realization that his own growth is required, and the arc of the narrative rises to act two.

In act two, which is comprised of “Out of the Frying Pan,’’ “Hummingbirds,’’ “Callinectes Sapidus,’’ “Mola Mola,’’ “Fishing With Bobby,’’ and “Canyonlands,’’ the situation (the romance) is developed in a series of tableaux, each built around a carefully nested central metaphor, each metaphor growing nearly absurd (especially when said directly, as will follow): Juliet is a wild trout in an unfished stream; Juliet is a bossy bird; Juliet is an elegant crab; Juliet is an ungainly and rare fish of enormous proportions; Juliet is a gawky heron; Juliet is dangerous as a snake and as big as the canyons of Utah. Or perhaps the word love should replace the name Juliet above: Act two has grand pretensions. Ends with our boy’s resolve to marry.

Juliet in 1982, Martha's Vineyard, Age 20

Now, while I was about knitting my various essays together into a book (we’ll get to act three in a minute), I realized that Summers With Juliet was doing something subversive: standing up to the boys from the cult of the expert and messing up the central mode of a traditional form—Nature Writing (yes, so self-important is the form that it must be capitalized). Which central mode is that a man goes alone into the wilderness and finds transcendence, glory, absolution, expertise, and so forth. As the central figure in his own autobiography, he finds his way to nothing less than him-ness (or Him-ness, if he gets to God, which is the Emersonian model). It’s a male figure made countlessly by male practitioners over centuries, a particularly American figure: I faced the wilderness alone, made peace with it, and in that way conquered.

Bill that same summer (too much sun)... Going on 29

All I really had to do to subvert was to introduce a woman. And make her and her feminine contempt for the rites of the male my foil and my catalyst (because they were in life). To end the book with a wedding was to complete the subversion: Male autobiographies have not, historically, ended with weddings.

Act three, our conclusion: “Water,’’ “Visitors,’’ “River of Promise,’’ “Bachelor Party,’’ “A Wedding on the Water.’’ The situation having been developed to an almost ecstatic height, our narrative arc begins its fall. The young man, now well feathered, bathes his beloved in an act of devotion, struggles with fear (again the trope is at work, everything to be read as an examination of love with its subtext of mortality), climbs a mountain to ask for her hand, goes fishing with his best man in Central Park (a reprise, a look back, a caesura), then is wed.

The book was published in February, 1992.  I can hardly believe it has been twenty years.  But it has.

Juliet and I met in July, 1982.  Thirty years this summer.  She was twenty.

.

author photo, taken in Helena, Montana, 1991

Functional Analysis by Elias Stein and Rami Shakarchi is a fast-paced book on functional analysis and related topics. By page 60, you’ve had a decent course in functional analysis and you’ve got 360 pages left.

This book is the last in a series of four volumes based on a series of lectures that began at Princeton in 2000. The first three volumes are devoted to

Fourier series and integrals
Complex analysis
Measure theory, Lebesgue integration, and Hilbert spaces.

The first three books are not necessarily prerequisites for the fourth book, though the final book does assume familiarity with the basics of the topics in the earlier books. The final book does make fairly frequent references to its predecessors. Someone who has not read the first three volumes — I have not — can let these references go by.

Stein and Shakarchi bring in several topics that may not be considered functional analysis per se but are often included in functional analysis books, namely harmonic analysis and generalized functions. It goes into territory less often included in a functional analysis text: probability, Brownian motion, and an introduction to several complex variables. This broad selection of topics is in keeping with the stated aims of the lecture series

to present, in an integrated manner, the core areas of analysis … to make plain the organic unity that exists between the various parts of the subject …

The goal of integrating various parts of analysis may be most clearly seen in the fourth chapter: Applications of the Baire Category Theorem. The material here is not organized by result but rather by proof technique.

Each chapter ends with a set of “exercises” and a set of “problems.” The former are closely related to the material in the book and include generous hints. The latter are more challenging and go beyond the scope of the book.

Comments

No Starch Press sent me a copy of The Art of R Programming last Fall and I wrote a review of it here. Then a couple weeks ago, Manning sent me a copy of R in Action. Here I’ll give a quick comparison of the two books, then focus specifically on R in Action.

Comparing R books

Norman Matloff, author of The Art of R Programming, is a statistician-turned-computer scientist. As the title may imply, Matloff’s book has more of a programmer’s perspective on R as a language.

Robert Kabacoff, author of R in Action, is a psychology professor-turned-statistical consultant. And as its title may imply, Kabacoff’s book is more about using R to analyze data. That is, the book is organized by analytical task rather than by language feature.

Many R books are organized like a statistical text. In fact, many are statistics texts, organized according to the progression of statistical theory with R code sprinkled in. R in Action is organized roughly in the order of steps one would take to analyze data, starting with importing data and ending with producing reports.

In short, The Art of R Programming is for programmers, R in Action is for data analysts, and most other R books I’ve seen are for statisticians. Of course a typical R user is to some extent a programmer, an analyst, and a statistician. But this comparison gives you some idea which book you might want to reach for depending on which hat you’re wearing at the moment. For example, I’d pick up The Art of R Programming if I had a question about interfacing R and C, but I’d pick up R in Action if I wanted to read about importing SAS data or using the ggplot2 graphics package.

R in Action

Kabacoff begins his book off with two appropriate quotes.

What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations? — Alice, Alice in Wonderland

It’s wonderous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it’s not for the timid. — Q, “Q Who?” Star Trek: The Next Generation

R in Action is filled with pictures and conversations. It is also a treasure chest of practical information.

The first third of the book concerns basic data management and graphics. This much of the book would be accessible to someone with no background in statistics. The middle third of the book is devoted to basic statistics: correlation, linear regression, etc. The final third of the book contains more advanced statistics and graphics. (I was pleased to see the book has an appendix on using Sweave and odfWeave to produce reports.)

R in Action includes practical details that I have not seen in other books on R. Perhaps this is because the book is focused on analyzing and graphing data rather than exploring the dark corners of R or rounding out statistical theory.

Kabacoff says that he wrote the book that he wishes he’d had years ago. I also wish I’d had his book years ago.

Related links:

R programming for those coming from other languages (referenced in R in Action)

Calling C++ from R

Better R console fonts

In The Art of Readable Code, the authors call the following the “Fundamental Theorem of Readability”:

Code should be written to minimize the time it would take for someone else to understand it.

They go on to explain

And when we say “understand,” we have a very high bar … they should be able to make changes to it, spot bugs, and understand how it interacts with the rest of your code.

A few weeks ago I reviewed Peteris Krumins’ book Awk One-Liners Explained. This post looks at his sequel, Sed One-Liners Explained.

The format of both books is the same: one-line scripts followed by detailed commentary. However, the sed book takes more effort to read because the content is more subtle. The awk book covers the most basic features of awk, but the sed book goes into the more advanced features of sed.

Sed One-Liners Explained provides clear explanations of features I found hard to understand from reading the sed documentation. If you want to learn sed in depth, this is a great book. But you may not want to learn sed in depth; the oldest and simplest parts of sed offer the greatest return on time invested. Since the book is organized by task — line numbering, selective printing, etc — rather than by language feature, the advanced and basic features are mingled.

On the other hand, there are two appendices  organized by language feature. Depending on your learning style, you may want to read the appendices first or jump into the examples and refer to the appendices only as needed.

For a sample of the book, see the table of contents, preface, and first chapter here.

Related links:

Learn one sed command
Daily tips on sed and awk

Amazon just sealed the deal on a partnership with 11,000 public libraries in the United States to allow Kindle owners to visit and check out books using their ereaders, straight from the library's web site. Just make sure to have your library card handy. More »

destinyland writes "Amazon announced this morning that they're making Kindle ebooks available for free in America through 11,000 local public libraries. 'We're thrilled that Amazon is offering such a new approach to library ebook...' said one Seattle's librarian, and one Kindle blog listed out the top advantages to having them available in libraries."


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Did you know that now you can get books into your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch without having to download them first in your computer and synchronizing? It's very easy. Just follow these steps: More »

When Mandy Brown, Jason Santa Maria and I formed A Book Apart, one topic burned uppermost in our minds, and there was only one author for the job.

Nothing else, not even “real fonts” or CSS3, has stirred the standards-based design community like the imminent arrival of HTML5. Born out of dissatisfaction with the pacing and politics of the W3C, and conceived for a web of applications (not just documents), this new edition of the web’s lingua franca has in equal measure excited, angered, and confused the web design community.

Win free copies of HTML5 For Web Designers on Gowalla!

Just as he did with the DOM and JavaScript, Jeremy Keith has a unique ability to illuminate HTML5 and cut straight to what matters to accessible, standards-based designer-developers. And he does it in this book, using only as many words and pictures as are needed.

Watch Jeremy Keith discuss HTML5 with Dan Benjamin and me live on The Big Web Show this Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern.

There are other books about HTML5, and there will be many more. There will be 500 page technical books for application developers, whose needs drove much of HTML5’s development. There will be even longer secret books for browser makers, addressing technical challenges that you and I are blessed never to need to think about.

But this is a book for you—you who create web content, who mark up web pages for sense and semantics, and who design accessible interfaces and experiences. Call it your user guide to HTML5. Its goal—one it will share with every title in the forthcoming A Book Apart catalog—is to shed clear light on a tricky subject, and do it fast, so you can get back to work.

4 May 2010
Jeffrey Zeldman, Publisher
A Book Apart “for people who make websites”
In Association with A List Apart
An imprint of Happy Cog™

The present-day content producer refuses to die.

And don’t miss…

Read Chapter One free in today’s issue of A List Apart!
The author, Mr Jeremy Keith himself, shares his thoughts!
Creative director Jason Santa Maria discusses the design of A Book Apart!
Editor Mandy Brown discusses the business side of A Book Apart!

Michael J. Ross writes "Like all major programming languages, JavaScript can be extended in functionality through the use of libraries, such as jQuery, which is currently seeing tremendous popularity and enhancement in the Web development community. Designers and developers who want to learn how to use jQuery for creating rich user interfaces through client-side JavaScript are advised to begin their journey to jQuery proficiency by reading one of the many books dedicated to this powerful JavaScript resource — such as jQuery Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for jQuery Developers." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I don’t have an iPad, but watching this amazing video (embedded below) demonstrating the Alice in Wonderland app made me want to run out and get one — and if I had a young child, it would make me want to get one even faster. I know that many people believe reading should be a quiet and relaxing activity, and that there’s nothing quite like communing with the pages of a well-read classic, but this video makes reading “Alice in Wonderland” look like…well, it looks like a lot of fun. And I have a feeling if Charles Lutwidge Dodson (i.e., Lewis Carroll) could see his story represented like this, he would probably think it was kind of fun as well.




More on iPad



Apple Delays the International iPad — Too Many Wi-Fi Orders?
Tech Insider


5 Things Google Must Do to Make Its Tablet Competitive
Tech Insider


What To Read This Weekend: The iPad Edition
Tech Insider


Video: Verizon CEO So Wants an iPhone
Tech Insider






The app comes from Atomic Antelope, which makes iPhone apps, including one called Bauble that lets you turn your iPhone into the world’s most expensive Christmas card. The Alice app brings an interactive element to the pages of this children’s classic, with features that are based on the original illustrations and allow readers to stretch Alice’s body when she comes to the table with the “Drink Me” bottle, to throw tarts at the Queen of Hearts and watch them bounce off her, and to rock the baby that turns into a pig. The app costs $8.99, although there’s also a free “lite” version. Chris Stevens, one half of Atomic Antelope, wrote about creating the app here.

So is this the future of e-books — every book its own app? It’s certainly a great example of the kind of full-color and interactivity and motion (using the accelerometer) that isn’t possible on other e-readers. These kinds of apps could certainly help the tablet app market hit the $8 billion-mark that GigaOM Pro analyst Mike Wolf forecast it would in a recent report on the sector (sub req’d). It’s also a sign of the creativity that traditional publishers seem to lack, as they try to maintain their traditional stranglehold on book prices in the online world, as Paul Sweeting detailed in this recent GigaOM Pro analysis. Now I’m trying to imagine what a Dr. Seuss book would look like as an iPad app.

Lisa J. Murphy has written an erotic book with tactile images for that special visually impaired porn connoisseur in your life. Tactile Mind contains explicit softcore raised images, along with Braille text and photos. From the article: "A photographer with a certificate in Tactile Graphics from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Murphy learned to create touchable images of animals for books for visually impaired children. Then she realized that there was a lack of such books for adults only. 'There are no books of tactile pictures of nudes for adults, at least the last time I looked around,' says Murphy. 'We're breaking new ground. Playboy has [an edition with] Braille wording, but there are no pictures.' She says that while we live in a culture saturated with sexual images, the blind have been 'left out.'"


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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