7 ms·

Omg I need a book wheel!!! I've got so many thick reference books (in a variety of subjects), I would love to be able to have them all open at the same time...

• haroldp 12y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I15SB16 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I15SB16
  • ht_th 12y ago
    That's not what he's asking for. He wants multiple books open at the same time with easy access and in view, I suppose. Of course, you could have more kindles, like a bunch of the star trek [PADDs](http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD) lying around on your desk, but the kindle is too expensive for that at the moment. And even then, when I am doing historical research or writing a conceptual piece on some scientific or technical topic, it is not uncommon to have ten to twenty books, articles, documents or artifacts open at the same time and it never fits on my desk comfortably. So I end up using multiple table-like areas on different heights alongside my desktop: a coffee table to the side of my chair, another chair in the corner, an open closet with shelves just below eye level, and so on. A document "wheel" or carousel would help a lot.
    • VLM 12y ago
      "but the kindle is.." Currently cheaper than some of my hard cover textbooks, and I graduated in 2005, so I imagine its worse now. So that is expensive in a absolute experimental sense but not excessive in the book industry as a whole. Also carpentry project expenses can add up if you make things fancy, so I can imagine spending about as much on the raw materials as loading a wheel with kindles.
      • ht_th 12y ago
        > "but the kindle is.." Currently cheaper than some of my hard cover textbooks, and I graduated in 2005, so I imagine its worse now. Yes and no. Text books are needlessly expensive and, to be honest, often superficial content-wise. The information contained in them can be easily gotten from the Internet or, if that doesn't work out, from a good library. But even if I'd want to use 10 text books at the same time, one kindle isn't going to cut it. I think the biggest problem with using digital documents, for me, is that there's no natural geometrical mapping that I can keep in my head the way I can with books, articles, and stuff scattered around my office. I know that the information on concept A is in that corner, for example, and that going deeper into that pile means going in deeper chronologically. And I put documents on related concepts closer to each other. Somehow, these stacks of documents form a concrete representation of the argument I am constructing. I tried to do the same with digital documents, I've got thousands of them, but tagging them, or putting them in directory trees, and so on, does not give me the same handle on the the information as I understand it at this moment in my mind. It is quite frustratingly, as digital documents are a lot easier to handle otherwise.
        • theflubba 12y ago
          Try searching through a book vs. search for a tag within your tagged collection of data. It's a way more logical structure on the digital side.
      • vxNsr 12y ago
        You're forgetting that unless he plans on stealing the ebooks he still has to pay very nearly the same price for the textbook just now they can make it expire (and don't forget to tack on the price of the kindle). tl;dr [price of kindle] + [price of textbook] > [price of textbook]
• keithpeter 12y ago
  Yes, that device looks absolutely amazing. I wonder if anyone ever used two of them side by side like a medieval Memex? My less elaborate solution to a similar problem is to sneak into a lab when I'm making notes on multiple (paper) references. I just shuffle left and right along a bench with all my books and papers spread out.
• benbreen 12y ago
  Anthony Grafton (polymathic historian of the book at Princeton) actually built a replica of the book wheel pictured in the original post. Only one of its kind in the world, as far as I know: http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_new/PAW06-07/11-0404/features_grafton.html http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_new/PAW06-07/11-0404/f...
  • nl 12y ago
    There's a better picture of his wheel (I assume - it looks the same) here: http://www.sil.si.edu/exhibitions/odyssey/images/ramellibookwheelmodel_1.jpg http://www.sil.si.edu/exhibitions/odyssey/images/ramellibook...
• brudgers 12y ago
  Steampunk has never interested me...but monkpunk? Me want bookwheel.