Book Logging

Jack Baty has a post on how he logs the books he’s read. Logging books you read may be useful information to keep but it’s probably not all that interesting to others. What is interesting, though, is how he uses column view to display the information.

He collects the information as an Org file with each top-level header the title of the book. Specific information about each book—such as author, pages, rating, and other information—is kept in a PROPERTIES drawer. Since the items in the PROPERTIES drawer are tagged, it’s easy to access them to produce reports.

As Baty demonstrates, it’s easy to produce such a report using Column View. You can even perform some elementary arithmetic on the numeric entries as Baty shows by summing the total number of pages he’s read.

Of course, not everyone is a prolific reader or wants to track which books they’ve read. Still, the paradigm Baty illustrates is applicable to many situations: collect the information as tagged data in a PROPERTIES drawer and use column view to display it.

Baty doesn’t even use a capture template to record his data. He feels that the books he’s read are insufficiently numerous to make a capture template worthwhile. I disagree with that but it’s surely an individual decision. For many applications, a capture template is just what you need to ease data collection.

The post is short and worth your attention as a nice way of collecting and organizing data.

Thanks to Karl Voit for the link.

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