I need to get back to reading books. I haven’t bought a physical book in quite a while now, but I’ve collected a fair number of ebooks from bundles, sales, giveaways, etc. Time to, you know, actually read some!
So what the heck, go to the Calibre menus, “Pick a random book”. Hmm, no. *Pick* Nope, not that one. *Pick* No…
ebook library problem #1: On this digital bookshelf, “The Book of Kells” lives right next to “Functional Programming in Python” and “Pathfinder Core Rulebook”. It’s just a big pile-o’-stuff that’s not very consistently tagged, so it’s difficult to organize in the same ways you might a regular bookshelf.
Problem #2: Since I got a lot of them from bundles and giveaways, I’m not actually very familiar with a lot of these titles and authors. Any random book might be great…or it might be a complete waste of time. Some of them are parts of series, which weights them more heavily in the count, and might expect you to be familiar with a larger universe.
So, new approach: I’ve added a custom Yes/No field to Calibre named “interested” and I’ll go through the whole library. Any titles that I recognize as “ooh yeah, I’ve been meaning to read that one” or just look intriguing I’ll mark as Yes. Then I can do a random pick from this limited set.
After applying all that, I’ve reduced my set of candidates from 840-ish down to 31, and the random pick from that is…*drumroll*…The Computer Connection, by Alfred Bester.