Journerdism

Will Sullivan's guide to mobile, tablet & emerging tech ideas

November 12, 2012
by Will Sullivan
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What’s the best digital library tool to manage a huge ebook collection in the cloud?

CC Image by See-Ming Lee
Every Thanksgiving weekend I take some of the fun time to back up my entire archive, defrag and clean up my computers (very exciting, I know). This year I’ve made the resolution to go all cloud in the future, so I hope that I just bought the last external hard drive for my archives, ever.

One of the productivity and archive challenges I’m facing is finding a killer digital library management tool. … Anyone have suggestions?

I’m basically looking for the Amazon Kindle library functionality, without their DRM locking to their own app (and they also don’t allow non-Amazon file uploads, and different file formats other than the email option and I’m not emailing hundreds of books/presentations to myself).

This may not exist, yet. I know there’s lots of pieces of these kind of services that I’ve found through searching and trying out applications, but I haven’t found a perfect solution yet so I’m turning to the crowd to see if there’s something I should try out.

Must haves:

  • Android & IOS support (web availability would be awesome too)
  • Cloud-based with large storage (the library of books/pdfs/presentations I’m moving has thousands of documents from the past 12 years), so large cloud storage space is excellent, but offering the ability to only sync/download the books/files to the deviceI’m currently using would be very helpful
  • Support for ePub, Mobi, PDF (and ideally other formats, but at least those three are deal breakers)
  • Library-wide deep search
  • Sync your reading location across platforms
  • Note-taking/tracking that are private, but can be made publicly shareable (Advanced sharing features would be huge, I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of how powerful ebooks can be, but I just need to get the library up first, then I can worry about this next level of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Digital Needs)

Would be awesome, but not deal breakers:

  • Support for audio books and music, too! ;)
  • Book lending support
  • Some way to sign into my Amazon & Apple accounts for those books too

Some of the tools I’ve been testing have pieces of what I need, but nothing’s knocked it out of the park that I’ve seen so far:

Suggestions?

Are there other workflows I should be considering because this is totally unrealistic? (I know it’s a first world problem but syncing books between the phone/tablet every few weeks as I work through them seems like something that should be eliminated by cloud-based library technology by now.)

Thanks for any ideas you can offer!

October 10, 2012
by Will Sullivan
3 Comments

Lost a human, gained a new life

What a difference a year makes.

SND CLE is about to kick off in my home state of Ohio and I, unfortunately, can’t attend but I wish them the best and will be tracking the event from social media.

Running SND STL, just over a year ago, marked a pivot point in my life. Actually, most of 2011 and half of 2012 was the pivot point where I came to a serious realization: I needed to find a better life balance.

Don’t get me wrong, SND STL was a blast and I’d do it all over again if I had the chance; I learned a lot, the overwhelmingly positive response and impact it made from folks who I really respect like Yuri Victor and Joey Marburger fills my heart and makes me proud of our team. What we pulled off with very limited financial and human capital blows my mind and I’m so fortunate to have had amazingly hard workers like Steve Dorsey and Jen Hermann by my side.

But I knew after I fulfilled my commitment to SND STL, I needed to step back and reboot.

I needed to start saying no to things.

I needed to start taking better care of myself.

I needed to recognize that I can’t know everything about everything, and can’t spend almost every night and lots of time on the weekends on a computer. There’s no badge or certification for being the ‘most knowledgeable’ in every single digital news technology. Trying to pour through 1,000+ RSS feeds is insanity.

I needed to find a better balance.

So as I alluded to before, this shift has been a pretty big project for me and I recently passed a pretty major milestone that I’d like to share — I’m down 200 lbs from my peak weight.

It’s not just food/exercise (although major changes in my diet and regular exercise has helped tremendously); I’ve made a conscious change in how I consume information and interact with digital content, largely sparked by Clay Johnson’s “The Information Diet” a fantastic book on the gluttony of information overload.

I still have a long way to go but I’m pretty pleased with the progress so far. There were times where I’d totally lost hope and never thought this would have been possible.

I really want to thank my close friends and family that have been supportive over the years, especially at times when I should have taken more time for them.

Onward and upward.

May 7, 2012
by Will Sullivan
13 Comments

My next adventure: DC with the BBG

I have some pretty big news: I’m leaving Lee Enterprises to work for the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) Office of Digital and Design Innovation as their Mobile Products Manager in Washington D.C.

I know what you’re thinking, “Did he say the BBC?”

Nope. :)

So who are they and what do they do? The BBG‘s mission is, “To inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” It’s an independent agency of the federal government focusing specifically on delivering journalism to countries who don’t have a free press or who have governments that control information access. Some of the properties include: The Voice of America, Radio and TV Martí, Middle East Broadcast Network, Radio Free Asia and Europe. The gig will be executing products and partnerships across mobile and emerging platforms — from the complete spectrum of tools like SMS through the mobile/tablet device array to broadcast and ‘second screen’ social experiences. It’s very tech focused and will offer an amazing array of opportunities to learn, grow and tackle very unique challenges from low bandwidth, low tech countries to places where the leadership is actively jamming your signals and blocking your satellites. It’s going to require a lot of creativity, a lot of learning, experimenting and a whole lot of innovation.

Leaving Lee and the Midwest is going to be tough; we’ve made a lot of progress and had some good times, but this new adventure is going to be amazing. A multi-platform, multi-media, multi-national, multi-talented team and I can’t wait to get started at the beginning of June.