From hungary-online-owner Mon Oct 2 04:58:15 1995 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id EAA07551 for hungary-online-announce-out31415; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 04:58:15 -0700 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id EAA07536; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 04:57:56 -0700 Received: from steve@isys.hu () via =-=-=-=-=-= for hungary-online-announce@hungary.yak.net (7534) Received: from kingzog.isys.hu (KingZog.iSYS.hu [194.24.160.4]) (fnord) by nando (8.6.5/8.6.5) with ESMTP id EAA07531 for ; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 04:57:37 -0700 Received: from [194.24.160.22] (bubba.iSYS.hu [194.24.160.22]) by kingzog.isys.hu (8.7.Beta.11/8.7.Beta.11) with SMTP id MAA25246 for ; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 12:57:01 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: steve@mail.isys.hu Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Mon, 2 Oct 1995 12:58:27 +0100 To: hungary-online-announce@hungary.yak.net From: steve@isys.hu (Steven Carlson) Subject: (HOL-A) there's nothing like a good book Sender: owner-Hungary-Online-announce@hungary.yak.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net Hello - I've finally got around to creating a WWW-based archive of my HOL columns. More exactly, my colleague Attila Beno did the grunt work. You can check it out at . I could quibble about the design, but anyway there it is. I welcome any feedback. Thanks, Attila. One reminder - the Metaforum conference starts Friday. Here's the details: Oct 6 - 8 Metaforum II Budapest Networking Conference Hungarian Fine Arts Academy, Intermedia Dept Topic: No Borders This is the 2nd annual conference of the Intermedia Dept. Topics include Cyber Democracy, Network Sociology, and Commerce on the Net. Special guests include John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, Heath Bunting of the London Cybercafe, as well as folks from the Digital City and XS4ALL/Hacktic in Holland, THE THING as well as Hungary's own East Edge and many others. This will be a very happening event. For more info: Contact: Dianna McCarty szia there, or on the net - =steve= -- there's nothing like a good book hungary-online by Steven Carlson After a hard day of slapping electrons around the globe there's nothing I enjoy like a good book. The old-fashioned paper kind. I love crinkling back the cover of a solid 3-D book, turning the pages, and propping it against my stomach. Books are my way of retreating from the world; I could never find that same state of mind staring at a screen. I belong to a generation that will never give up data you can hold in your hands. But now I can use the net to shop for books. Amazon.com bills themselves as "the Earth's biggest bookstore," and they aren't joking . Normally I would walk down the street to Tony's bookshop. He keeps a decent stock of good reading material on his shelves, and what he doesn't have he'll gladly order. But can Tony swim against the tide? "The Earth's biggest river surges with ten times the volume of the next mightiest river," reads the storefront literature. Amazon claims to offers one million titles: "If it's in print," they boast, "it's in stock." I have no means to verify this claim, but I also have no reason to doubt it. Everything about the Amazon site is colossal. The shopfront interface is easy enough for my mother to navigate, yet the store's creators have put deceptively intelligent technology to work here. Over at Tony's, if I can't find a title on the shelves I ask him. He feeds my query into that database between his ears and within minutes he's located what I want. No problem. At Amazon I can use a search engine to locate books according to author or title. I can dig through the day's special price bin or browse through my favorite category or even scan lists of prize winning authors and their lives' works. I'm sure there's more. But my favorite feature is an innocuous little link, highlighted in fine print at the top of Amazon homepage: "If you explore just one thing," it teases, "make it our personal notification service." Alright, I say to myself - go ahead and wow me. I like to think I've seen it all on the net, but once again I am wrong. The Eyes and Editors Personal Notification System uses a combination of machine intelligence and human drudgery to keep you informed about your favorite books. And, naturally, to keep you coming back. The system is a knockout. "Eyes" is a "tireless, fully automated, totally customizable, highly anthropomorphized search agent." You tell her what authors or titles you'd like to keep track of. She regularly scans the newly released books and informs you by email when a book meets your specifications. Eyes is all software. "Editors" is a group of people "who preview galleys, read reviews, pick especially great books, and tell you about just those that fall into the genre or subject areas that interest you." You can chose from 21 categories, including vegetarian cooking and comic art, with plenty of more mundane topics. The editors periodically send out an email describing new titles in the field. They also offer discounts on these selected titles. I've seen enough. I'm intrigued. I have to push the system to the limit. I want to find an author surely nobody knows, so I decide to search for books by Kilgore Trout. Now, this isn't fair of me. If you're a Kurt Vonnegut fan, you know that Vonnegut's protagonists invariably end up raving about an obsure author named Kilgore Trout, who writes absurdly stupid science fiction. It's a running joke thoughout Vonnegut's work. And the best part is someone actually _did_ publish a novel under the name Kilgore Trout. The trouble is I've never been able to locate a copy. What do you know? Up pops "Trout, Kilgore:" _Venus on the Half-Shell_, It's currently out of print, but I have options. I can write my own review of the book for others to read. Or I can activate the notification system. A click of the mouse takes me back to Eyes, the searching robot, where I click a box to ensure that if _Venus on the Half-Shell_ is ever reprinted, or if someone named Kilgore Trout ever publishes another book, I will know about it. I then decide to create an account at Amazon and do some shopping. Creating an account means I can browse the titles and place books I want to purchase in a virtual "shopping basket". I can even choose to wait a few days and return to make the purchase. The system remembers me and my choices. As I'm browsing, an advertisement pops up for Harry Wu's _Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag_. At $11.95 I figure it's a deal. I stop, however, to read a brief review and press clippings. An enthusiastic reader has added his comments. Great, sold. I then hit upon _The Bridge on the Drina_, by Novel Prize winner Ivo Andric. It cost $10.95. I'll buy this one two, and that's enough for a start. Now what will this cost me to get to Hungary? How long would it take? As I'm filling out a purchase form I learn that standard shipping charges to countries other than the US are $5 per order plus a per book charge of $2.95. Shipping times typically range from 2 to 8 weeks depending on destination. Airborne Express costs an extra $25 per order plus $3 per book. I have to deal with Hungarian tax and customs when it gets here. Hmm... that's one thing Tony always takes care for me, customs. And in Hungary that's no small thing. Will I shop at Amazon.com again? Probably. Especially if Kilgore Trout comes up with a sequel to _Venus on the Half Shell_. Thanks to advanced technology I'll the first to know. Still, Tony's just down the street and we don't talk about just books. I don't think I'll replace him with the Internet just yet. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright (c) 1995. Permission granted to redistribute this article in electronic form for non-profit purposes only. My byline and this message must remain intact. Contact me for reprint rights. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- Steven Carlson iSYS Hungary info@isys.hu steve@isys.hu http://www.isys.hu ############# # This message to Hungary-Online-announce@hungary.yak.net # was from steve@isys.hu (Steven Carlson) # # To unsubscribe, # send "unsubscribe" to # For a full subscription (rather than this announcement-only subscription) # mail "subscribe" to # Send mail to for more information, # or to if you need human assistance. #############