When you are a writer, a common piece of advice is to read as many books as you can to improve your writing. Though I don't have the luxury of the free time to read these days, there was a time in my life when I used to churn through them by the shelf full. Now at the time, if you has asked me what I had read 3 days ago most likely I wouldn't have been able to tell you, just because of the sheer volume of what my brain was absorbing. Well, it was either that or my chronic case of A.D.D.
I could have seriously used something like OCUBE's new app, FriendItem. The core concept behind the software is to keep track of all of the books you are currently, are planning to, or have read, in order to help keep your head straight. Once again, we have another reason why technology is such a godsend to those of us with the attention span of a sack of hammers. The developers are boasting some seriously helpful functionality, including:
- Recognizing the barcode of a book with camera installed in iPhone
- Google Books Mashup (Utilized as a basic data of books)
- Book status (books that you already read, books that you are reading, books that you want to read) and book management function
- Management of reading date and monthly reading statistics
- Review and evaluation function
- Underlining management function including photograph
- Function of purchasing books in online bookstore, such as Amazon.com
Something like this would be an absolute dream from an academic that reads through an uncountable number of different publications at any given time. There are even ways to attach screen shots of important passages that you could refer back to at a moment's notice. That sure beats my old "sticky note in the margin" solution.
But what would the benefit of having all of your back library of literature logged, without the ability to share that with the world? FreindItem even allows you to transfer any or all of the items in your library via Facebook, Twitter, Email, or even BUMP. Talk about having all of your bases covered. You should really take this app out for a test drive and see if it appeals to your inner bookworm. When the cost of entry is absolutely nothing, you can then afford to add a couple of new paperbacks to your library.
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