I’ve dived into digital and am doing away with book shelves; I’m a book worm and I am proudly giving up the printed page as quickly as I can. The future is liberating.

We hear a lot of talk about ebooks maturing and becoming mainstream, and I do hope we will see that soon. Sadly, publishers continue to drag their feet worse than the recording industry has and we will likely see tree and ink publishers go kicking and screaming into a better tomorrow. I decided to stop waiting, though, and have taken on the task of digitizing all of the books I have in my collection.

I began a serious purge of books last year when I moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Waterloo, Ontario. I had a lot of books and opted to sell and give away the majority of the books in my collection; I downloaded replacements for as many books as I could in digital formats. Even with a purge of many books, I moved with dozens of books that I care a great deal about and wouldn’t leave behind without a digital alternative.

In June I will be moving back to Nova Scotia and I have begun a scanning project. In late June, when I move, I will do so with no more than 5 physical books in my possession. Each other book and magazine will be scanned and passed along to someone else. I have already given to a book drive and will do the same again before I leave.

It’s a long process to digitize books; scanning each page with a cheap scanner can make each book an hours-long project. Even so, it’s better to act than to wait for publishers to catch up, so I’ve adopted a DIY attitude. I have scanned dozens of books and magazines that are not available in digital form during the past two months. I’m left with a collection of PDF files that will fit on a MicroSD card instead of filling shelves upon shelves.

As convenient as digital books are to read —I greatly prefer digital reading to paper reading—, the striking difference is in the clutter that will be in my living space. For the first time in my memory I will be without a book shelf, without a teetering stack of books and with every book I have loved in my pocket. That will feel great.

If you have the time, why not join me in being proactive in the move to digital books? A cheap scanner and a netbook would be all that is necessary to start the process. I’m very happy about the change so far.

I have been tracking aspects of my life for weeks now, as part of building an ememory, and one of the most important tools for this has been Daytum. Daytum is a website that helps users “collect, categorize and communicate [their] everyday data.” Daytum does this though a simple, elegant and extremely useful interface.

I have chosen to track the hours I spend exercising, the foods I eat, the amount time I spend sleeping and the hours I spend meditating. I’ll be adding more quantifiable bits of my life as I identify a need or desire to track them. The opportunities are endless for ways in which our lives can be tracked.

Of course, Daytum becomes most valuable when used to measure progress toward goals. In my own case I am committed to making strength training a regular part of my life. Daytum allows me to record the time I spend doing each activity and ensure my fitness is being supported by my diet and sleep habits. Over time I will be able to identify habits that provide the best lifestyle and make sure they are lasting.

If you are taking on any life changing goal, or are just curious about your present life, I highly recommend diving into Daytum.

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The data we can collect from our lives is increasing exponentially and a new lifestyle of Lifelogging is emerging. Ubiquitous recordings of many individuals’ lives are being willfully created, archiving what they see, what they hear, how they move, their relationships, their biological indicators and countless other facets of their lives. While most of this is surface data, when it is combined with blogging and other interpretive records of experiences a robust model of a person could emerge.

The value of including lifelogging in our lives has potential to be immense. Medical use alone could improve our lives greatly, allowing doctors greater access to various symptoms of pathologies. Having an aid to our natural memory would be welcome, especially to those suffering memory loss. Parsing the data could even provide us with recommendations for where to eat, reminders of friends we have been neglecting and a host of other life-enhancing features. It’s a transhumanist dream becoming a reality.

But there are negative potentials in this emerging field. The line between the private and public spheres is already blurring, and details we may not want known could spread. As we record ourselves and others record us a certain level of dishonesty and unhealthy reserve could emerge as a protection against being outed as less perfect than we’d like the world to believe. Conversely, many of us may end up using lifelogging to prop up our notions of narrow identity, just as blogging does for so many.

And just what data is valuable to us? Our natural memory parses out information that our brains deem unnecessary and this certainly helps us in our daily lives. When we can record information our brains would normally discard, how do we filter out what is useful at any given time? Much like the with internet as a whole, the navigation and organization of our life data is going to be critical in making lifelogging a seamless tool.

If we can cultivate transparency and use this technology to examine our lives well, this could be a great leap in our understanding of our selves. We could hope that it even allows us to step back and look at all we can objectify about what we think of as ourselves. Our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, all of the things we identify with are objects arising in our Self. And objects always change. We will see a record of changing objects and nothing more. We can keep pealing back the onion layers of our identities but we are always, first, foremost, and in essence, awareness. And awareness sees but is never seen.