Tag: books

I read the reviews, couldn't resist, and bought myself an Amazon Kindle Latest Generation Wi-Fi e-reader, the one without 3G. The price together with shipping came to about $160, or almost 1280 UAH. With a price and specs like that it was hard to hold back, all the more so since I'll be able to read e-books bought on Amazon without any hassle. I know that new e-books already cost more than paper ones, but factoring in shipping it works out cheaper, and the old ones come out something like half the price. The only catch is you have to buy through an American proxy to the right address, so it's cheaper and so you don't pay an extra $2. After all, I have the model without 3G, so I'm within my rights, and I hope they won't fight this too hard.

I placed the order on Tuesday, and they only processed and shipped it on Thursday. The package spent the weekend in Germany, and by Monday it was already in Kyiv. I got lucky with customs — they didn't hold it up, though they could have demanded a bank statement, which costs 50 UAH, but that's for residents of Kyiv; everyone else still has to travel to the capital if it gets held up there, or pay the UPS delivery service to sort the matter out, and they can charge up to $100 for that.

Around midday Monday the package set off further on its way, judging by the scan code. On Tuesday I couldn't resist and called the delivery service; they told me it would be there in a day or two and that they wouldn't be able to deliver it to my work or home, since they deliver to the city center, so I'd have to go to them almost at the river port and pick the package up myself.

And the next day in the morning they called and notified me that the package had arrived, asked whether I would be home. I said I'd be at work all day and gave them the address. In the end, around midday the courier delivered it to my work.

At the end of the post I'm putting up all the stages of the package's movement with scan codes and times, in case anyone is interested in the exact delivery time and approximate meanings of the UPS code statuses, the meanings of which I wasn't the only one looking up on the internet. Nobody called me about any of these statuses, and nothing was required of me.

I set up a library on my site using the BookLibrary component. Yes, the quality of the component leaves much to be desired, since it was originally written for Joomla! 1.0, doesn't use MVC, and everything in the code is jumbled together. But I couldn't find anything better for building a library for Joomla! Plus, thanks to its simplicity, some bits of the code can be tweaked to get proper display and operation. It would also be nice to attach SEF links to it, but after JoomGallery's SEF links that shouldn't be a problem, if only the will were there. If I end up doing it for someone, maybe I'll get around to little details like that — not for nothing did I work on an electronic library for my thesis in my 4th year, only it was in ASP.NET.

I did this not only to explore the component's capabilities, but also to organize my home library. I added only the books I bought myself. Two bookcases of my parents' books, my childhood books, and textbooks would be too much to add to such a catalog. It's a pity that the chance to buy literature for myself came only after I got a computer, by which point I'd almost stopped reading books... The desire is there, but I can't manage to read. The last work of fiction was "When the Mountains Fall (The Eternal Bride)" by Chinghiz Aitmatov, which I read over the course of the winter on a smartphone that I've since lost. I can't recall the work of fiction or non-technical book before that.

Today I added four more books to the library, three of them needed for professional work, and one finally about lions — a book by Craig Packer that more than one article about these big cats references. Here's the link to my library with books about lions and a few technical ones on development.

Turns out packages from the American Amazon don't take all that long to arrive either — Kevin Richardson's book was shipped on September 1st and arrived today, two weeks later, even though at shipping the expected arrival date was given as October 8th. The only shame is that the order of three books was split into three parts and they were sent separately; though they didn't charge extra for it and a book keeps better being alone in its packaging, now I'll have to go to the post office for each one. This time the mail carrier called the house so as not to drop off the notice or the parcel itself, last time it was just the notice.

I was also glad that the book has a price of 25.99 on it, but they sold it for 17.15 plus 5.32 for shipping.

P.S. For anyone interested, I put up a torrent on torrents.ru with the electronic version of Mystery of the White Lions: Children of the Sun God.