Batgrl: Bookish Hooha

So this train of thought came from this post from ImagineDragonsFly (which thanks to her blog title I always think of as the "aaaaa deadly Aussie spiders!" blog, mainly due to my own reactions to arachnids), which has a fun bookish version of tarot reading using a book you have handy. (It's the kind of thing I always thought I'd do at teen slumber parties but didn't, even though all my friends were also bookish girls.)

Anyway, so in the comments I said something about how this probably couldn't work with an ebook...and then I thought about that, and randomizing page choices - and then I realized something to put on my ebook wishlist.

So you know how your mp3 player has a randomizer/shuffle setting? I'm still a dinosaur using iTunes, but I'm sure most programs allow you to set exactly what range of song choices play randomly. If I want to I can make it only play songs I haven't listened to yet but keep meaning to.

I NEED that exact thing for my ebooks! I need the ability to have my ereader open up a random book - which I can set to choose out of books bought between date X and Y, or books unread, or within genre Z, etc. Just for those times when I'm totally uninspired by what I'm reading and don't feel like digging through all the books in my TBR folders. It'd be the equivalent of reaching into a bag of candy and just grabbing one, just to see what I get. Not to mention, I have to dig through a lot of pages now to remember/rediscover what's sitting on my unread ebooks list/folder.

I'm probably going to someday do the "pieces of paper with book titles on them in the candy jar" routine for random choices (I've seen others do that and it looks fun). But boy would I love it if the tech got around to doing this first.

Also I wish I could code. There should be an app for this, especially since I have places to turn to for the raw data. It's probably not something an ereader designer would rush to create as it's not something that will sell new books, just let you rediscover what you own already. So I'm thinking it'd have to be apps makers that create this.

Anyway, another tech thing to wish for.

Now it just seems weird that I'm going to go read a paper book after writing all that. Heh.