I’ve been looking for a good way to unclutter my programming bookshelf, so I was excited to find out that O’Reilly, one of the foremost publishers of technology books, is currently running a promotion to allow owners of paper versions of their books to buy ebook versions at a substantial discount of only $4.99 per book.

While many people prefer paper versions of books for readability, ebook versions have a few notable advantages that make them particularly useful when it comes to technology books.

• Tech books are typically big and take up a lot of shelf space. Ebook versions are quite a bit smaller, and take up approximately zero shelf space.
• Code samples cannot be cut and pasted from paper books. Some books include an additional DVD, or link to a website, that contains sample code. This is unnecessary with an ebook, and can save a lot of time when trying to learn new concepts quickly.
• Ebook text can be searched much more easily than paper text. Especially across multiple books at once.
• Ebooks make it possible to take your bookshelf with you on the road, and nobody wants to be anchored to an office just because that’s where his books are.

To take advantage of this offer:

• Visit oreilly.com and log in to your account, or create a new one.
• Register each book you own using its 13 digit ISBN number.
• Find one of your registered books in the O’Reilly store and add the ebook version to your shopping cart.
• Enter the discount code 499UP during checkout.

The promotion runs through the month of October.

Why all the links? On Monday, my husband and I became parents to a beautiful baby boy.

Our little man is an excellent sleeper, so I’ve been able to find great things around the internet to share with you and comment on while he has been napping, but my mind is a bit overwhelmed and original content isn’t flowing. Since we are adoptive parents, parenthood caught us (pleasantly) a bit off guard.

My first link of the day is to a book review professional organizer Julie Bestry wrote about Everything I Know About Perfectionism I Learned from My Breasts. This book, written by the talented organizer Debbie Jordan Kravitz, has been on my to-read list for months but I haven’t yet reached it in the pile. Julie’s review of Debbie’s book, however, has convinced me to jump it ahead on my list. And, since it persuaded me to read the book, I thought it was a review you might wish to read as well.

From Julie’s review:

As a breast cancer survivor, Debbie’s revelations about the necessity of overcoming her perfectionist tendencies (for her own sake as well as her family’s), informed her desire to write this book. But, to be honest, until I had a copy in my hands, I think I was expecting a memoir, even a breasts’ eye view, as it were, of how her cancer and recovery brought Debbie to some sort of epiphany about the challenges of fighting perfectionism.

In fact, while Debbie does share her own story, this book offers much more, both to those of us who struggle with the ideals of perfection and those of us who have friends, family and co-workers whose perfectionism drives their own behaviors. Everything I Know is informative (indeed, eye-opening) about perfectionism, but also offers practical guidance and motivation to those seeking to become recovering perfectionists.

The subtitle of the book, Secrets and Solutions for Overpowering Perfectionism, explains the direction of the text — and shows that this isn’t a book just for women.

“People have this innate view — it comes from friendship and marriage — that commitment is good. Which I agree with,” he says. That view shouldn’t, he says, carry over to inanimate objects.

It’s not that he’s not a voracious reader — he finishes more than a book a day, not including the “partials.” He just wants to make the most of his time.

“We should treat books a little more like we treat TV channels,” he argues. No one has trouble flipping away from a boring series.

Do you have a pile of books on your nightstand that have been lingering for months or years because you can’t seem to bring yourself to finish them? Are your bookshelves filled with books that you plan to get to one day but just can’t muster the energy to slog through them? If so, I vote to abandon the books. Say farewell to the bad to make room for the good.

The Toolbox Book: A Craftsman’s Guide to Tool Chests, Cabinets, and Storage Systems by Jim Tolpin is a fantastic resource for any woodworker looking for ideas on how to store and organize woodworking tools. In addition to providing a number of designs for a variety of different tool cabinets and totes, it also provides helpful tips to efficiently store tools.

If you want to lose the next hour of your life looking at some amazing pictures of custom-made tool cabinets online, check out the entries that have already been posted in Fine Woodworking’s Tool Chest Contest. We particularly like the inside of this hanging cabinet, submitted by one of their community members:

This week, I learned about the Piegato One shelves and instantly wanted to share them with you. They’re designed by Matthias Ries and will be manufactured by his company MRDO Products. The shelves ship flat and then you bend the metal into place with very little effort:

A short video shows how to setup and install them.

I know that the industrial look isn’t everyone’s favorite style, but you can still appreciate that such a beautifully engineered product exists. This shelving system is simple, streamlined, and wholly uncluttered.

(via Dwell)

Most of the books are between $10 and $20 per download, and they already have more than 10,000 titles for sale. The new service will compete with Audible, iTunes, and Amazon for your audio book dollars. The audio books will play on any device that supports MP3s, like an iPod, your computer, or a Kindle.

If you’re looking for ways to expand your book collection but without bringing more physical books into your home, be sure to give audio books a try.

(via Publishers Weekly)

Immediately, I noticed that there were a few advantages to the Kindle app:

1. With a library of more than 240,000 books, all organized in one central location, the shopping experience is vastly superior with the Kindle app.
2. If you have a Kindle, you can access a book you purchased for it on your iPhone, and vice versa. The program will even tell you what page you were on in the other system. This feature is called “Whispersync.
3. One advantage it has over an actual Kindle is that you can see a book’s cover in full color, instead of 13 shades of gray.
4. You don’t have to carry two electronic devices with you when you go somewhere — put your iPhone in your pocket and leave your Kindle device at home.

Noting these benefits, I think I should also note some of its weaknesses.

1. To buy a book, you have to go out of the Kindle app and into Safari. Once your book is purchased, you then log out of Amazon on Safari, and log back into the Kindle app. Most other programs don’t require that you leave the application.
2. The screen is much brighter than other reading applications and may eat away at battery life more quickly (tried to do a timing, but my service kept changing between Edge and 3G, so I’m not certain the power issue was fully the fault of the application). To read many chapters in a book will definitely require turning your iPhone into Airplane Mode to conserve power.
3. The application wipes out the clock at the top of the screen, which some might think is good, but I found to be annoying. You have to tap the screen to see what time it is.
4. There isn’t a landscape mode. You have to read the text vertically.

Almost all of the other features in the Kindle app are identical to features in Stanza (font size adjustment, scroll through pages, the application itself is free, etc.). I will definitely use the Kindle app for reading newly released texts and books not yet in the public domain. For classics, though, I’m sticking with Stanza.

And, don’t forget the benefits of audio books and how you can buy them from Audible or even download them for free from your public library. Have you tried the new Kindle app for the iPhone? What are your thoughts?

My wife and I recently discovered the website One More Story. It is a great way to supplement your child’s book collection while increasing her reading comprehension and basic computing skills. The site has the equivalent of books on tape with highlighted words. The site also includes illustrations, sound effects, and music with certain stories. A demonstration is available for preview. 

One More Story currently has over 50 children’s books available. A year-long subscription costs $44, which is less than $4 per month. My wife and I didn’t hesitate to subscribe and we have enjoyed using this site with our daughter. Instead of packing up a handful of books when we travel, we simply log on to One More Story and have access to their library from any computer with internet access.

Over the course of the past few months, more electronic reading options have hit the market and we wanted to bring them to your attention.

If you have an iPhone, you may be interested in checking out the application Stanza. I’ve become a fan of this program, especially when I find myself in a line and I have forgotten to pack my earphones in my purse. I can be entertained by a book and instantly have another to begin reading if I finish one.

A book on Stanza:

If you have any type of smart mobile device, you can access more than 1.5 million books from the public domain at http://books.google.com/googlebooks/mobile/. Additionally, Google has struck deals with many publishers to provide current books and magazines to readers.

A book on Google Mobile:

Additionally, Amazon recently told The New York Times:

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

No date has been set for when Amazon will make digital books available for purchase to any smart mobile device, but we’re looking forward to it.

Please let us know in the comments of additional electronic services or applications that you’ve found useful for your mobile devices.

In late November, I signed a contract with Simon Spotlight Entertainment, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, to write an Unclutterer book. The book is slated to be released this fall and will cover home and office organizing, time management, productivity, clutter clearing, and many additional simple living issues.

The book is currently untitled, does not yet have a cover, and will spend the next two months in editing before I even turn over my first draft to my publisher. However, since things are progressing as they should, I wanted to share with you this happy news.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and inspiration. If it weren’t for you, our Unclutterer readers, this opportunity never would have arisen. You are sincerely the best readers on the internet.

Also, I want you to know that the book isn’t a reprinting of the website — it’s new content for a new medium. I want it to be useful to new and continued readers alike. That being said, however, it is definitely written in the same spirit as the website. You should expect to laugh and have a good time while reading it, as well as learning a great deal about uncluttering. There also will be an audio version of the book, but I know even fewer details about its production and release.

There shouldn’t be any service interruptions on Unclutterer.com while I finish my work on the book. My proposal writing started more than six months ago and I have been putting in long hours since to ensure that the quality content you’ve come to expect on the site continues.

Thank you, again, and I’m so glad that I can share the news of this adventure with you!

For students in college and graduate school, ZDNet concludes that a Kindle is worth the expense:

However, a more realistic scenario [of student textbook purchasing] would be a blended cost, with half new and half used [textbooks], at $366.00 per semester. If they had purchased all of the books on the Kindle, they would have spent $234.00, or a savings of $132.00 per semester. Over a period of 8 semesters, that’s $1056.00, which if you subtract the cost of the Kindle at current prices, we’re talking about a net savings of $700.86 over four years, which is not insignificant. To put this another way, if college students had the ability to buy all their textbooks on Kindles, they could wipe out the cost of a Kindle with their savings over printed books in 3 semesters, or a year and a half.

However, the the article states that for the average reader, a Kindle is not a wise economic choice:

… we took a look at twelve New York Times best sellers, and totaled up the prices, assuming mostly hardcover with some paperbacks — this came to $168.15 if we bought them on Amazon. The Kindle cost would have been $109.11. In other words, if you read one book per month, and you subtract the cost of the Kindle, your net savings per year is approximately $59.04. To wipe out the cost of the Kindle completely, you have to buy and read six books per month to wipe out the Kindle’s cost over the course of one year. That’s a pretty voracious reading schedule — and if you’re reading that many books, you’re probably spending most of your time in a library and not purchasing them on Amazon.

So it would seem that unless the convenience factor of the Kindle currently outweighs its costs, the Kindle is not a huge value proposition for your average consumer today. But if its cost were to drop approximately in half – say, between the 3 and 4 book per month level — at around $200 per unit – then we might start seeing greater e-book adoption by a larger segment of the population. At the two books per month level, it’s going to need to cost around $125.00 or $150.00 or so.

I agree that it would be nice if a Kindle reading device would be at least half its current price, but I still think that it is a good investment over the long term. Additionally, you don’t have to pay to store paper books, which shaves off a little bit more from the equation.

What do our readers who own Kindles think of the article? Is the author right about it being about convenience and not cost? Let us know your opinion in the comments.

Previously on Unclutterer:

• Amazon’s Kindle is in stock
• Kindle: Is it worth it?

The first 16 essays address issues in the home, and the next 11 essays provide tips for work. Mind, body, love, pleasure, travel, and future round out the other subject areas of the book.

The following are some of my favorite essays and a tip or two from their content:

• “Do Laundry” by Lucinda Ottusch: “Make laundry more tolerable by transforming your laundry room into a livable, productive workspace.” (pg. 25)
• “Organize Your Closet” by John Trosko: “Successful closet organizing requires tough choices about what flatters your best assets and what doesn’t. Forecast what your life will hold for you in the next year. Everything in your closet should have a purpose for today and tomorrow, not yesterday.” (pg. 33)
• “Sort Mail” by Peter Walsh: “Decrease the amount of mail coming into your home by getting your name off junk-mail lists. Phone 1-888-5OPT OUT (1-888-567-8688) to have your name removed from lists that send those annoying credit card offers. Likewise, log onto www.catalogchoice.org to remove your name from lists that stuff your mailbox with unwanted catalogs.” (pg. 37)
• “Find a Lost Object” by Michael Solomon: “IT’S NOT LOST — YOU ARE. Accept that the problem is not with the object — it’s with you! For there are no lost objects — only unsystematic searchers.” (pg. 55).
• “Bake a Cake” by Warren Brown: His advice is good, but the best part of this essay is that he includes his recipe for vanilla cake with chocolate glaze icing. Yum! (pg. 251)
• “Holiday Shop” by Paco Underhill: “Make a list of people to buy for. Jot ideas or specific gifts on your list for easy reference. Don’t buy for anyone who isn’t on your list — there must be a reason why he or she didn’t make it on the first time.” (pg. 264)

I recommend checking out the book if you’re interested in reading something fun on efficiency. I certainly enjoyed this book.

In a way, I think of these books as reference materials. If a person I don’t remember makes a request to connect to me on Facebook or LinkedIn, and the request states that I went to school with the person, I’ll head to my yearbooks hoping that a picture of the person will spark my memory. I also look through the portraits before heading to class reunions, but those are pretty much the only times I look at them.

However, the idea of getting rid of them sort of makes me nauseated. Maybe a part of me is fearful that one day I’ll lose my memory and need them to recreate my past? Maybe I hope that my children will be interested in them and want to better understand who I was when I was their age? Even though I can’t exactly identify why I keep them, I have carved out a place for them in my home.

My advice is that if you want to keep them, then it’s okay to keep them. Store them in a place that is safe (not in a cardboard box in a mildewy basement) and scan any pages that you would be crushed to lose if your home were destroyed by a natural disaster. Remember to backup your hard drive at an off-site location so that you won’t lose your data in an emergency.

If you don’t have any desire to keep them, then scan individual pages you want to keep digitally and recycle the books. You might e-mail your former classmates and see if any of them are interested in the books if you don’t want to toss them straight into the recycling bin. You also could contact your school’s historical society and see if they would want them, or if a current journalism teacher at the school might have use for them.

How have you handled your yearbooks? Do you have additional advice for what to do with yearbooks? Your ideas are welcome in the comments.

How do you stop phone books from showing up at your door? I don’t need a new phone book every year. I hardly use the one I have. What a waste of paper!

Oh, Alisa, I understand your frustration. Just last week I picked up one of the three delivered to my home in a year and tossed it straight into the recycling bin.

Unfortunately, I have no good news for you. Despite all of my efforts over the past couple years, I have been unsuccessful at getting any of the three to stop bringing them to me. I have called customer service agents at the publishing companies, been told that I have been removed from a list, only to find it delivered again 12 months later. In all cases, the phone books are thrown onto our front porch by a person in a van who has no distribution list. Everyone gets one. Period.

There are a number of petition sites online that promise to pass your loathing along to the publishing companies that produce these books, but most of them appear to be ways to obtain your e-mail address for spamming purposes. So, I have no hope to offer you.

I want to open up the comments, however, to our readership who may have some sort of special knowledge about how to get off the lists. Or, maybe our readers have fantastic ideas for what to do with the pages to not make it a complete travesty of wasted paper. Let us know what you know in the comments!

The three ebook formats available are EPUB, PDF, and Mobipocket, and these formats are compatible with Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle, Blackberries, and Sony Reader.

The electronic titles aren’t just about writing programming code, like so many great O’Reilly books are. Subject to Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World covers strategic planning and Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management discusses project management strategies. Mind Performance Hacks includes strategies for improving your analytical reasoning and focus. There also are guides for using Wikipedia and Facebook, and a book on transforming your home into a smart house.

The fewer books taking up space on your bookshelves, the easier it is to keep your bookshelves in order. Thank you, O’Reilly, for embracing the ebook market!

Money has not yet started to grow on the trees in my yard, so I don’t have the luxury of having a dedicated room for a home library. Until then, I have had to accept that I cannot keep every book I’ve ever read or hope to read. So, how do I decide which books stay and which books go? I follow these simple rules:

1. Don’t keep more books than you can fit on available bookshelf space. If a book doesn’t have a safe place to live, you’re not treating it with the respect it deserves.
2. Don’t keep books for the sole purpose of impressing other people. This rings true in business offices, too. Unless you’re a British literature professor, there is no reason to have the complete works of Shakespeare on your office bookshelves. Potential clients will wonder why you’re spending your time reading Macbeth instead of focusing on their case.
3. Get rid of any book you’ve read, don’t plan on reading or referencing again, is in the public domain, and can be found in its entirety online. That’s right, I’m talking about ditching your Dover copy of The Scarlet Letter.
4. If you live near a public library or a used bookstore, try to think of these places as an extension of your personal collection. Also, now that so many libraries have free audio books to download, using the library is in some ways more convenient than a personal collection.

Beyond these rules, I’ve found that books are best evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes, if a book is in bad shape, I’ll recycle it. If I’m on the fence about getting rid of a book, I’ll go online and find out how much it’s selling for on Powell’s — if it’s selling for less than $5, I’ll get rid of it — if it’s selling for more than $15, I will usually hold onto it. I also have found that I have difficulty parting with books that have beautiful bindings, so these books I have to scrutinize more diligently. And, don’t forget to ask yourself these vital questions each time you finish reading a book.

After deciding which books should go, there are many resources available to you. I’ve used or read positive reviews about the following services: Powell’s, my local used bookstore, half.com, PaperBackSwap.com, donating to the local library used book sale, BookMooch.com, BookScouter.com, and donating to charities that want specific types of books (nursing homes, literacy programs, etc.).

Good luck sorting through your books, and stay tuned for next week when I’ll discuss how to organize the books you’ve chosen to keep.

The downloading digital book program isn’t available at every library, but it is definitely worth exploring if it is. To learn if your library offers this service, you can search here for locations in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Mexico, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore and the U.K. There are a few libraries not listed on this search engine, so if it comes up empty be sure to double check with a visit to your local library’s website.

When my schedule or finances don’t allow me to follow through on these daydreams, I recreate them in my kitchen. I’m not a loyal-to-every-detail recipe follower, but I do look to recipes for inspiration when I’m cooking. As a result, I have to make a conscious effort to keep my cookbook and recipe collections under control.

In a recent pursuit to find order in my kitchen, I began by making a decision to get rid of 90 percent of my cookbook collection. I wanted to have only the number of cookbooks that could fit on a single shelf in my kitchen cabinet. (I strongly believe that cookbooks should be stored in the kitchen, seeing as that is where they are used. And, my kitchen is tiny, so one shelf is all that I can realistically dedicate to this purpose.)

When deciding which cookbooks to keep and which to get rid of, I made three piles: books I use at least once a week, books I use at least once a month, and books I rarely or never open.

The pile of books that I use once a week was few in number, so I pulled those five aside into a “keep” stack. Next, I put two celebration-based books from the rarely or never used pile into the keep stack, and then put the remainder in boxes to sell to a used bookstore. Finally, I tackled the pile of books I use once a month.

The once-a-month pile was much more difficult to weed through than the other two. I decided to separate the books into piles by type and occasion: baking, slow cookers, general, grilling/bbq, Thai, French, southern, desserts, etc. I immediately discarded any book that was vastly inferior to the others in its category. This process yielded me smaller piles, but there was still no way all of the books could fit on my bookshelf.

My second pass through these books related to recipe numbers. If the book had five or more recipes I fancied, it went into one stack — five or fewer, went into another stack. I made photocopies of the recipes from the five or fewer per book stack, and then put those books into the sell box. My cookbooks were now able to fit on my single shelf!

I put the photocopies I had made into my recipe notebook (which I will discuss in detail in my next post on recipe organization), and then headed to my local used bookstore. The few books the store decided not to buy I dropped off at my local public library for their annual fundraising book sale. I was paid for my books at the bookstore (close to $75), and received a receipt for tax purposes at the library. At last, my cookbooks were under control.

If you decide to clear the clutter from your cookbook collection, keep in mind these tips:

• Store your cookbooks in your kitchen (behind a door, if possible, to avoid grease and spills)
• Set a reasonable limit on how many cookbooks you can store (I suggest one shelf)
• Rid your collection of any book that you haven’t opened since its purchase
• Keep books that contain recipes you use that are full of valuable information
• If you buy a new cookbook, get rid of an old cookbook (one in, one out)
• Purchase new cookbooks to increase the quality of your collection, not its quantity

If you’re curious, here are the books that I kept:

All-new Complete Cooking Light Cookbook, Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for the Food, Betty Crocker’s Best of Baking, The Complete Guide to Country Cooking, Cook’s Illustrated’s Guide to Grilling and Barbecue, Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, The Essential Guide to Cake Decorating, Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Mangoes and Curry Leaves, Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, King Arthur Flour’s Whole Grain Baking, Linda Gassenheimer’s Low-carb Meals in Minutes, Martha Stewart’s Holiday Cookies magazine, Matt Lewis Thorne’s Outlaw Cook, a rural North Carolina church’s cookbook compiled for a fundraiser, Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise, Stephen Bruce’s Sweet Serendipity, Victor Sodsook’s True Thai, and Weight Watchers’ New Complete Cookbook.