I have often wondered as to why is it that we see no icon on the desktop called ‘My Book-Shelf. ’when ‘My computer‘ is so universal. Is it because computers have replaced books ? Can they ever do that?
In my own case, the very first computer, I owned was an AT286 Machine, which just displayed a DOS prompt. Even then, as I recall, I had one folder (called a directory , those days) where I kept such files which was for any kind of reference. Since Windows 3.1 days then I have always had an icon on my computer desktop, which took me to my digital resources like Dictionary, Railway Time table, CDA Hand Book , a few Tamil books etc. Today, I have a Linux Machine with the “Calibre’ meeting all my needs of ‘reading off the screen’, which includes some reference material, some fiction and some news feeds.
While it may be true that we do not need a book shelf in every office or home PC, a E-Bookshelf on every computer is not only necessary, but very much practicable. Today with the rising popularity of open source resources, we have a huge volume of rich contents in the public domain. To manage all these resources we have open source e-book management software applications like Calibre. All you have to do is to download an application, configure it and start surfing the net for resources of your interest. Mind you, not for a moment, am I suggesting piracy. There are any number of projects like Project Gutenberg which are involved in digitizing classical works. There are sites like it-ebooks.info which are giving away good E-books for free and they charge only for the print edition.
Even if one is not interested in classical poetry or for that matter any kind of serious literature, a book shelf is required even if it is purely for resources of utility nature, like CDA Hand Book, Railway Time Table, Dictionary, or may be ‘Golf made Easy’ .
I only wish, a ‘My Book-shelf ‘ Icon becomes a reality, at least in Schools and other Educational Institutions even if it is not as omnipresent as ‘My Computer’.