Now that the world has irretrievably, irrefutably, and most irritatingly been divided into app phones and crap phones, even neo-luddites like myself have had to shuffle up from their picket and shift their allegiances and join the queue in laggardly gait to techno nirvana.
After a great deal of sentimental bullshit about privacy and alone time, I got a smartphone only last year. It was a birthday present from my best friend, a great lover of latest phones, when she probably could not bear to accompany me in public with my tin box any longer.
I have listed, here, my dream list of bookish apps. Can someone invent them already?
Home library management
This is just a garden variety organizational app. but it might be super handy for those with large messy collections of books, which keep getting messier and larger all the time. From maintaining a record of what books one has – especially if one maintains collections of books in different cities and in different forms, p-books, e-books, audio books, for example – to recording the personal histories behind each book (say, Rumours of Rain by Andre Brink, published by Minerva, bearing the original sticker Elizabeth’s H$ 9.90, bought in the secondhand bookstore next to the Masjid in Paharganj in March 2015), this can have multiple elements.
One should be able to specify exactly where a book is stocked because sometimes hunting out a specific book at home gives the feeling of a cyclone in the living room. But one element which is a must is that the app must record book loans to friends, and at the end of appointed time – whether week, month, year or decade – send a reminder to said friend about book recovery. And what’s more, it’s not even personal; if friend gets offended, you can just say, it’s not you, just the app shark.
Scraping news of books
Just the other day, my book editor friend Milly was saying that had she not worked in publishing, she would never have known what new books were coming out, especially because both social media and mainstream media highlight only a few books – while a large number of really good books simply get buried in the pile.
In any case, our reading is far wider these days, thanks to Kindle, so there is a distinct possibility that one’s favourite author is physically located two continents away. So I think there ought to be an app where one can feed in websites of publishing houses, cross reference it with favourite categories and favoured authors, to aggregate news about new books and bring it together in an easy-to-use fashion.
Healthy reading
We are now venturing into fully futuristic terrain. Each of us has a bookish comfort zone – stuff that we invariably pick up and read – and a bookish vision, where we get out of the comfort zone and sample interesting new fare. I’ve been meaning to read the Tom Clancy books that the spouse devours for as long as I’ve known him – and I still haven’t.
The list of books I absolutely want to read but haven’t got around to yet (Madame Bovary, Brothers Karamazov, Hopscotch, Arthashastra – I know, I know!) haunt me from time to time. If there are apps that help you monitor your diet and your general health, how about an app for monitoring your bookish diet? C’mon you geeks, get cracking on those algorithms. (Yeah, I agree, my book diet needs more books on the sciences.)
Ass-on-chair
This one is for writers with book deadlines. Might be the greatest book idea ever, birthed by the supremest genius alive and worth a whole lot of money to boot, but it ain’t going to be written if someone’s butt does not sit on that chair and face that computer for hours and hours and hours. There are many writers who find this last bit most tiresome. So how about an app for them that clocks the ass-on-chair hours and goes straight to handholder/bossy spouse/ frazzled editor when the bathroom breaks seem to get far too long?
Matchmaking through bookish desires
I hear of all these online dating apps that promise to help their users find true love – and, well, if not true love, at least a decent interesting person who might be dated for a while. How about a dating app that specialises in bringing together book lovers, through situations that simulate real life scenarios involving books? I mean, say there is a giant virtual bookshop, and the online avatars of the users are required to take a walk through it and record their observations. Something like that. And that becomes a person’s online testimonial. Is there the tiniest possibility that this might actually work?
Devapriya Roy’s latest book, The Heat and Dust Project, is co-written with husband Saurav Jha. It chronicles an eccentric journey through India on a very very tight budget. She has written two novels in the past: The Vague Woman’s Handbook and The Weight Loss Club, and has very little knowledge of technology.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
After a great deal of sentimental bullshit about privacy and alone time, I got a smartphone only last year. It was a birthday present from my best friend, a great lover of latest phones, when she probably could not bear to accompany me in public with my tin box any longer.
I have listed, here, my dream list of bookish apps. Can someone invent them already?
Home library management
This is just a garden variety organizational app. but it might be super handy for those with large messy collections of books, which keep getting messier and larger all the time. From maintaining a record of what books one has – especially if one maintains collections of books in different cities and in different forms, p-books, e-books, audio books, for example – to recording the personal histories behind each book (say, Rumours of Rain by Andre Brink, published by Minerva, bearing the original sticker Elizabeth’s H$ 9.90, bought in the secondhand bookstore next to the Masjid in Paharganj in March 2015), this can have multiple elements.
One should be able to specify exactly where a book is stocked because sometimes hunting out a specific book at home gives the feeling of a cyclone in the living room. But one element which is a must is that the app must record book loans to friends, and at the end of appointed time – whether week, month, year or decade – send a reminder to said friend about book recovery. And what’s more, it’s not even personal; if friend gets offended, you can just say, it’s not you, just the app shark.
Scraping news of books
Just the other day, my book editor friend Milly was saying that had she not worked in publishing, she would never have known what new books were coming out, especially because both social media and mainstream media highlight only a few books – while a large number of really good books simply get buried in the pile.
In any case, our reading is far wider these days, thanks to Kindle, so there is a distinct possibility that one’s favourite author is physically located two continents away. So I think there ought to be an app where one can feed in websites of publishing houses, cross reference it with favourite categories and favoured authors, to aggregate news about new books and bring it together in an easy-to-use fashion.
Healthy reading
We are now venturing into fully futuristic terrain. Each of us has a bookish comfort zone – stuff that we invariably pick up and read – and a bookish vision, where we get out of the comfort zone and sample interesting new fare. I’ve been meaning to read the Tom Clancy books that the spouse devours for as long as I’ve known him – and I still haven’t.
The list of books I absolutely want to read but haven’t got around to yet (Madame Bovary, Brothers Karamazov, Hopscotch, Arthashastra – I know, I know!) haunt me from time to time. If there are apps that help you monitor your diet and your general health, how about an app for monitoring your bookish diet? C’mon you geeks, get cracking on those algorithms. (Yeah, I agree, my book diet needs more books on the sciences.)
Ass-on-chair
This one is for writers with book deadlines. Might be the greatest book idea ever, birthed by the supremest genius alive and worth a whole lot of money to boot, but it ain’t going to be written if someone’s butt does not sit on that chair and face that computer for hours and hours and hours. There are many writers who find this last bit most tiresome. So how about an app for them that clocks the ass-on-chair hours and goes straight to handholder/bossy spouse/ frazzled editor when the bathroom breaks seem to get far too long?
Matchmaking through bookish desires
I hear of all these online dating apps that promise to help their users find true love – and, well, if not true love, at least a decent interesting person who might be dated for a while. How about a dating app that specialises in bringing together book lovers, through situations that simulate real life scenarios involving books? I mean, say there is a giant virtual bookshop, and the online avatars of the users are required to take a walk through it and record their observations. Something like that. And that becomes a person’s online testimonial. Is there the tiniest possibility that this might actually work?
Devapriya Roy’s latest book, The Heat and Dust Project, is co-written with husband Saurav Jha. It chronicles an eccentric journey through India on a very very tight budget. She has written two novels in the past: The Vague Woman’s Handbook and The Weight Loss Club, and has very little knowledge of technology.
