Findings Blog

As part of our effort to bridge the physical and digital print worlds, we are proud to announce our newest and most-requested feature…manual clip entry for printed books!

When you go to your Findings page (click the “Findings” link at the top when you’re logged in), you’ll now see a button next to your name labelled “Enter a clip”.  Clicking this will walk you through the two-step process:

1.  In order to save you time and effort of typing all the book information (and to increase accuracy), we simply ask for the 10- or 13- digit ISBN number for your book.  This number can be found on the back of the book’s title page, or on the back cover.

2.  After entering the ISBN, we will retrieve information about your book and present you with a form to enter the quote as well as a note and page number.  When you submit a clip, the clip entry field will reset and you can go ahead and keep typing to more.  As with all findings, you can choose to make your manually-entered quotes private.  Just check the “Make Private” box.

As part of this change we now display the medium from which a quote is saved…web, paper, ebook, and soon…applications using our API.  Stay tuned!

Even though Findings is focused on digital text, we recognize that print is still a rich and valid medium that will be with us for some time.  We are working on a number of features to help bridge the print and digital worlds, and we just released the first such tool.

In the “Read” menu under each book quotation, you will now see an additional option, “Find in a local library”.  This will take you directly to a WorldCat library search.  Whenever we can, we will supply WorldCat with an ISBN or other identifier to bring you straight to a book…but sometimes you will see a number of search results based on an author and Title.  We would like this to be as seamless as possible, but the world of book publishing metadata is riddled with information gaps and geographic thorns.

We believe that libraries are as important as ever.  Libraries act as both a gateway to and the custodians of our culture.  We encourage you to use this feature to borrow a book…whether it’s a paper copy, an audiobook, or even an e-book…at your local library!

We just released our newest feature, the “Read” link.  Below every quotation you’ll now see a “Read” link that opens a menu.  If the quotation is from the web you can jump to the original page, add the original article to Instapaper, or read the article on Readability.  If the quotation is from a book from which you clipped, you can open the book directly to the quotation in the Kindle Reader desktop app.  (But first make sure you have it installed!)  If the quotation is from someone else, you can jump to the Amazon Kindle store to purchase it.   You can also navigate directly to a Google Books Search to find out more about the book.

As always, we’d love your feedback, so be sure to use the Feedback on Findings.com to let us know what you think, or if you have any problems.  Happy reading!