“Library in my pocket, knowledge at my fingertips.”
This is a phrase that we used to promote the eBookMan, an eBook reading device that my company had the license to manufacture and exclusively distribute in the Philippines.
It also served as a music player, MP3 and audiobook player aside from being a very good eBook reader. Amazon.com later on bought its technology and its successor device became the Amazon Kindle.
Having distributed the eBookMan, I learned to convert ordinary documents into the eBook format and download them into eBook devices. Correspondingly, I was able to create electronic libraries that are stored, retrievable, searchable, bookmarkable and annotatable in the eBookMan initially, and in all handheld devices eventually.
The most popular electronic library that we created in the Philippines was the electronic law library that contained all the Philippine laws and the Supreme Court decisions since 1901. We coined the phrase, addressing it to customers- mainly lawyers and law students, “You can now take the law into your own hands.” For PALM Pilot devices we called the library, “Law on the Go”.
When the Amazon Kindle became available in the United States, I purchased it knowing that all my existing libraries are transferable. It also let me continue converting documents into the eBook format that are downloadable and readable through the Kindle or Kindle Readers installed in other devices.
When I say documents, I mean docs that are in my computer as well as from online sources. Once these documents are stored in my computer or in my external hard drives, they are indexed. Hence, they all become searchable especially when they are converted into the eBook format.
Having access to a lot of data, information and knowledge from the Internet and from my own computer are indeed luxuries that many of us enjoy in this digital age. They all make us learned or potentially become one if we just desire to be such and dedicate some time to doing it.
Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others index the documents in the Internet. Of course, the offline search engines of your computers do the same.
Lately, I have explored other sources of knowledge derived from published and indexed books. These are the national and local public libraries and the university libraries.
As a resident of Fairfax County, Virginia my library card allows me to access eBooks and audiobooks online and/or download them into my laptop, Kindle, iPAD, iPod (audio), Android, or iPhone.
As an alumnus of two universities in the U.S. I can also access their libraries. Their digital libraries are also good sources. Google is now digitizing the books of many major universities and is gradually making them available online. Project Gutenberg has digitized hundreds of thousands of books and making them available for free. With public support, they continue to digitize more and offer more.
When I was a young boy my father, who was a schoolteacher, used to say, “Just master the art of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, and you can survive, be competitive, and succeed.”
Nothing can be more true in this digital age.
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