Tinotopia

So everyone seems to be having trouble finding an appropriate bag for their iPad. I certainly haven’t yet seen anything that looks good. Bags meant for laptops are too big (and my experience is that many of them actually depend on the presence of a laptop of a certain size to hold their shape), and everything else is essentially a purse.

I imagine that this is a problem even for the ladies, because the demographic that will tend to own an iPad right now is the demographic that’s likely to be carrying a purse that’s far too small for the thing.

My solution, for now at least, is the Healthy Back Bag. Mine is actually from LL Bean, but they don’t seem to sell this particular model any more. I have the microfiber bag in black, size Small. It does not look like the iPad should fit in there, but it does, and without squeezing.

There are another four pockets outside and seven pockets inside that are good for headphones, cameras, my little folding keyboard, pens, notecards, etc., etc., etc.

Click on these pictures to see bigger ones.

The iPad itself first goes into a homemade leather sleeve that Nicole made me. This provides some minimal cushioning from some thin foam on the flat parts, and from the seams on the edges.

The Healthy Back Bag isn’t what you’d call handsome, but it’s extremely light weight (when you’re going to be carrying something that’s itself fairly light, it pays to not waste most of that savings on the bag itself). Because it’s not a purpose-built computer bag, it also has the advantage of not shouting EXPENSIVE GIZMO to everyone who sees it. This may not actually be an advantage for you, depending on your outlook.

My original plan was just to use this until some decent Official Solution came on the market, but the improvisation is working so well that any O.S. will have to be very good indeed to pry me away from this.

I’ve written about the Amazon Kindle before here, on a number of occasions. I think, but cannot be arsed to check, that I have pointed out that the Kindle is a gadget designed for long continuous use, and that a lot of its reviews — which involve a reviewer who might not necessarily be a reader poking at the thing for a few hours — reflect this.

Nicholson Baker’s recent long-form Kindle review in the New Yorker illustrates both approaches in the same article.

He starts out with nitpicking:

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This is a legitimate criticism of the Kindle; the screen isn’t white and the type isn’t black. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the fact that the device itself is white, and that the screen’s ‘white’ feels darker than it really is by contrast.

But in another way it’s not a legitimate criticism, because the Kindle’s purpose is not perfect color fidelity. The screen is perfectly readable, which is the only point. This tendency toward a Failure To See The Point is the main reason I titled my original Kindle post ‘The iPhone and the Kindle’. The iPhone, which was released a few months before the Kindle, was (and in some cases to this day is) conspicuously missing a few features that are almost universal in cheaper phones.

For example, in the US, you still can’t send or receive MMS messages with an iPhone. You can’t transfer contact information (or, really, anything else) using Bluetooth. You can’t transfer, say, contact information from one iPhone to another — which doesn’t sound like that big a deal until you need to do it. You can’t add storage to the phone by sticking in a cheap memory card. When the iPhone was first released, you were limited to only the pre-loaded Apple applications, and Apple’s strong implication at that time was that this was all that would be allowed forever. The camera sucked. Many of the initial reviews focused on these things to the exclusion of the fact that the iPhone was, at the things it did do, at least a couple orders of magnitude better than anything else.

And so it is with the Kindle. I’ve made this point before, but I’ll make it again because it’s so important. The whole point of the Kindle is the electrophoretic screen. That’s it. You can read electronic books on your computer screen (or iPhone screen) ‘for free’, but that isn’t as good as reading them on the Kindle’s screen, and with the Kindle’s impressive battery life. This fact continues to be lost on most of the reviewers, because they dink around with the thing for a little while and conclude (correctly) that the navigation controls are bad.

This is only a tiny bit less irrelevant than is pointing out that the iPhone is at best a poor hammer. The Kindle has only one important navigation control: the ‘Next Page’ button. The Kindle has only one important mode of use: reading page after page of text. Everything else it does is hung on the side, and the device isn’t optimized for it.

By the end of his New Yorker article, Baker has seen the light, at least a bit:

Then, out of a sense of duty, I forced myself to read the book on the physical Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks [compared to reading the same book on the iPhone]. But never mind: at that point, I was locked into the plot and it didn’t matter. Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would. I began walking up and down the driveway, reading in the sun. Three distant lawnmowers were going. Someone wearing a salmon-colored shirt was spraying a hose across the street. But I was in the courtroom, listening to the murderer testify. I felt the primitive clawing pressure of wanting to know how things turned out.

The Kindle disappears. There you are.

However, after almost two years of using the Kindle, I have come across a few things that I believe are genuine flaws.

1. The Kindle is too modal. The Kindle has two gross states: awake, and asleep. When the Kindle goes to sleep, the text on the screen is replaced (at a small cost in battery power) with a ‘screensaver’ image (though the screen doesn’t need to be ‘saved’ in the way old computer CRTs did) featuring, usually, some famous author. You can put the Kindle to sleep manually by frobbing the switch, or if you leave the thing alone it’ll go to sleep on its own after ten minutes. This wait-before-sleep time is not configurable by any normal means.

After long enough, this gets annoying, because it takes a couple seconds for the Kindle to wake up and put text back on the screen. Since the Kindle doesn’t consume any appreciable power while it’s just sitting there idle and waiting for you to turn the page, the whole purpose of the screen saver is to show you that the device has gone to sleep and locked the buttons. It would be far, far better to have a physical switch that locks the buttons while leaving the screen alone. The user could check the current mode by looking at the physical switch; power wouldn’t be wasted putting up a bad picture of John Steinbeck; and I wouldn’t have to wait for the thing to re-draw the screen before starting reading again.

2. The Kindle’s wireless access is too modal. You can turn the wireless service on, or you can turn it off. Leaving it on results in the batter being drained much more quickly — it dies in something like 2 days vs. a week with the wireless service off. There’s no real advantage to having it turned on while you’re just reading a book.

But if you read books on both the Kindle and an iPhone — as I have recently started to do — it is vitally important that the Kindle have the opportunity to upload your current position in the book when you put it down. When you fire up the iPhone Kindle application, it syncs your position and you can pick up where you left off. This is brilliant, and it is the entire reason for a number of Kindle book purchases I’ve made recently.

For most of my Kindle-using life, I’ve been loading it with text I have obtained elsewhere; this is easy to do, and it’s indistinguishable, for the most part, from official DRM’d Amazon Kindle Editions.

But only the official DRM’d Amazon Kindle Editions will sync your position between multiple devices. This is a hell of a feature, a real added value that helps justify the bafflingly high prices the publishers want for some of these e-books.

The problem, though, is that this adds another step that gets in my way. I keep the wireless service turned off most of the time, but I need to turn it on for a little while when I pick up the Kindle (to pick up updated positions from iPhone reading), and when I put the Kindle down (to send updated positions for the benefit of the iPhone). That’s nuts. The Kindle’s wireless service should have three states: ‘On’, ‘Off’, and ‘Off, but connect after I’ve read something and send the position, and connect when I pick up the device to read again to check for updated positions, and connect once a day or so to check for new content’. ‘On’ already approximates this — the radio isn’t turned on at full blast the whole time — but the battery life suggests that it spends a lot more time powered up than it really needs to for my purposes.

3. The Kindle needs to look better. I was a defender of the appearance of the Kindle early on, but the plasticky nature of the thing (I currently use a Kindle 2) is starting to wear on me. I still believe that the extremely mundane look of the Kindle was and is deliberate; the idea is that it shouldn’t look so gadgety. I think that my change of opinion is related to my use of the Kindle and the iPhone Kindle app together somehow; the Kindle has moved from being just a display device (where the plastic business didn’t bother me) to being a futuristic reading device out of a science-fiction novel. The problem is that the ‘white and plasticky’ part gets in the way of the ‘science fiction’ part. It’s time for the Kindle to start looking at least a bit more like the sci-fi marvel that it is.

I fully expect the upcoming announcement or release of Apple’s now rumored-to-the-point-of-near-certainty ‘tablet’ device — which will, of course, look like something from the future — to produce a lot of ‘Kindle Killer’ type stories, which will all be written by non-readers and predicated on a misunderstanding of the screen technologies.

While complaining about the Kindle’s typography, I tried to find an example of another typeface that I knew I’d seen on the thing at some point. After failing, I figured that this was my imagination.

Almost as soon as I posted my Kindle 2 review, though, I came across the Amazon sample of Jim Kunstler’s post-apocalypse fantasy World Made By Hand. I’m no typographer, but it looks like some Century Oldstyle variant:

The text reflows when you change type sizes, too, so it’s not like they’ve cheated by making the book up out of images.

So: there is a decent typeface on the Kindle, and the thing can already display books using it. This just doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere that I’ve been able to find, and you can’t tell the Kindle to prefer this instead of the bad implementation of Caecilia.

This is actually worse, when you think about it. The hard work has been done; all that’s needed is a switch for the user to pick a preference. That this switch does not appear to be there does not reflect well on Amazon.

Addendum to the addendum: It also appears that it’s no longer possible to choose between justified text and left-aligned text, as you could with the original Kindle by hitting ‘J’ while the type size picker was displayed. You get justified text (which generally results in the distracting spacing seen in both images above), or you get nothing.

The new Kindle in a nutshell:

• It’s the same weight as the old Kindle, but it feels heavier because it’s denser
• It doesn’t come with a case; the old case made the old Kindle much easier to hold
• I’m not sure yet whether the new next/previous page buttons are better.
• The five-way controller is better than the old wheel
• The screen is much better, thanks to an improved controller; but there are still problems with the typography

The important points are the first and last ones.

First, weight. Or, rather, density. The old Kindle wasn’t all that dense, for a modern gadget. It also had a lot of strange angles to it, which were much criticized but which almost guaranteed relatively slow deceleration should you drop the thing.

The new Kindle is denser, and it has no strange angles. The front side has a very slight bit of a dome shape to it, but that’s all. The back is also made of metal, which will hold on to more deformation — i.e. it’ll dent and warp if you drop it wrong, while the old plastic case was more likely to snap back to its original shape.

The density is important, too. Go climb up on the roof of your house, and take with you two spheres of equal weight. One of these spheres should be made of styrofoam, and the other should be made of aluminum. Aluminum, for a metal, isn’t very dense — but it’s a whole lot denser than styrofoam. Your aluminum sphere should be about the size of a baseball; I haven’t done the calculations, but I think the styrofoam sphere will be at least 36 inches in diameter. When you get up on the roof, drop both spheres off over a hard surface. I’ll wait while you find the spheres and climb the ladder.

What happened to your spheres? The aluminum one now has some gouges in it (some, not one, because it bounced), and if you have access to precise measuring equipment, you’ll notice that it’s no longer even a sphere; the whole thing deformed when it hit the ground, and didn’t go back to its original shape.

The styrofoam sphere, on the other hand, is unscathed. Its surface area is so large relative to its weight that it got significant support from the air on the way down. In fact, if it’s windy where you are, you probably had to jump off the roof and go running down the street after it. And, because of the same low density, styrofoam isn’t going to bounce — so there’s only going to be one impact to worry about.

So I think that the Kindle’s increasing density and use of metal for a back plate is a step backward. The new Kindle certainly looks better, and sleeker, than the old one, but I do not think that its construction is as practical. Marketing here has triumphed over engineering; but given that most of the criticisms of the old Kindle had to do with the thing’s appearance rather than its capabilities, maybe this was unavoidable.

Second, the screen. I think that this is exactly the same screen as the old Kindle, but with a better controller. This would be like keeping your old monitor, but buying a new video card for your computer. The new controller allows the Kindle to change only certain regions of the screen much more quickly than the old one did, and it allows for greater bit depth.

The better ability to change parts of the screen — something that happens constantly on your computer’s screen, and which you take entirely for granted — allows for a more normal interface, rather than the strange LCD-mirror arrangement for selecting items that the old Kindle used.

The greater bit depth is a huge improvement. Arguably, the only serious failure of the old Kindle was that its typography was lousy (about which more below); most of this was due to the screen’s 2-bit depth.

Bit Depth Explained

Computers think in terms of bits; a bit can be equal to either 1 or 0. Those are the only values.

For a computer to count higher than 2, it needs to use more than one bit. If you take two bits and consider their value together, you can have either 00 or 01 or 10 or 11: that’s four values. If each of those values represents a color, you can have four colors. If these ‘colors’ are actually shades of gray, you can have:

Black, white, and two in between.

Every time you add a bit, you double the number of possible values. Three bits can have twice the possible values of two bits: you have all four of the two-bit values above combined with the two possible values of the third bit.

So where your four possible two bit values are:

00 01 10 11

with three bits you have:

000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111

Add another bit, and you can have sixteen distinct values:

0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 1010 1011 1100 1101 1110 1111

And so on. If you represent these as grays, you get:

That’s black, fourteen shades of gray, and white at the end.

Because of the way the eye and brain work, though, you can cleverly combine those sixteen shades of gray in such a way as to fool you into thinking that you’re seeing any shade of gray, not just the sixteen that are actually present. This strip contains nothing but the same sixteen shades of gray seen above:

There’s a bit of banding visible, but it still looks pretty smooth. Here’s a closeup of what’s actually going on there, near the middle of the strip:

All of that is well and good, but why does this matter for displaying text? Text is just black and white, right, so you shouldn’t need more than a one-bit display.

The problem is that all current displays — all the ones outside of labs, anyway — are too low-resolution for this to work well: so text on screens is anti-aliased to make it look smoother.

Here’s an example. This is a 36-point Times capital ‘T’, blown up 800%, as it would be represented on a one-bit display that can only show black and white:

You will notice that it is quite jagged.

Here is the same T, as it would be displayed on a 4-bit display that can show sixteen colors:

Looks kind of like a 3D comic without the glasses, but when it’s displayed at normal size it looks smooth:

Any digital image — like from your digital camera — is composed of individual pixels; everything is made up of little squares, each of which can only be a single color. When you take a picture of a capital A, though, for instance, the letter doesn’t come out looking like a ziggurat because the camera doesn’t resolve the boundary between the slanty lines of the A and its background perfectly; if you have a red A on a white background, you get a line of pinkish pixels between the two, and if you look at the image at normal resolutions, it looks like a sharp diagonal line.

Diagonal and curved lines in images generated by computers used to be jagged, but as computer power has decreased in price it has become common to have the computer anti-alias such things, adding intermediate fuzz to the edges in such a way that the screen displays a level of detail — as perceived by your brain, anyway — that’s greater than is, strictly speaking, possible given the screen’s absolute resolution.

This kind of thing is particularly important when you are displaying text in small sizes on the screen. The top line here is not anti-aliased, and the bottom line is what you could display with anti-aliasing on a screen capable of displaying sixteen colors:

The second line is much easier to read, despite actually being blurry. This is particularly important when you’re reading a lot of text.

That said, the improvement in the typography isn’t all that it could be. Here’s a comparison of the old and the new Kindle; the old one is on the left.

Clicking on either of those will pop up a bigger version.

The most immediate difference in these pictures is that the old Kindle has a lot more ‘stuck’ globules, the little black specks in the background. This is not as obvious in real life, though, and in any case it may simply represent differences in quality control between the two screens.

The anti-aliasing is indeed much better on the new Kindle, but it’s hindered by the continued use of the Caecilia typeface.

While Caecilia is an attractive enough typeface, it is not a great face for body copy. When the original Kindle came out, I hypothesized that it had been chosen because of its slab serifs, which would work relatively well on a screen that’s only capable of crude anti-aliasing. Here’s what Caecilia really looks like:

Those square serifs make it easier to display accurately on a two-bit screen. With a four-bit screen, that’s not such a big consideration, and Amazon would do well to use a better typeface.

The particularly baffling thing is that the Kindle does have other typefaces in it, Neue Helvetica at least; there’s no compelling reason not to have a few more and to allow the user to make the decision about what typeface to use.

Other Things

The most baffling thing about the Kindle is that it continues to not be able to read HTML documents internally, despite obviously having an HTML renderer on board as part of the web browser. This means that for creating your own documents, you are limited to either:

1. Plain text;
2. Screwing around with all kinds of wacky opaque ‘e-book maker’ programs;
3. E-mailing your document to Amazon, where they apply #2 for you, with even more opacity and delay.

This is entirely nuts. Most of the complaints about the Kindle have been pointless; they come from people who haven’t used a Kindle and who don’t understand what it’s for, and who therefore complain about problems that are either 1) totally immaterial or 2) actually features.

The complaints about the page-turning buttons on the original Kindle are a good example of this. Yes, the buttons were easy to hit accidentally. But keep in mind that when actually using the Kindle for its intended purpose, the user will need to press these things thousands of times. Making them easy to press is a feature, not a bug.

I’ve seen some complaints about the new Kindle related to the five-way controller (i.e. joystick) and the menu system, to the effect that this is too difficult and/or complicated to use. What I don’t think these people realize is that you don’t use these things that much. 99% of the user’s interaction with the Kindle involves pushing the ‘next page’ button. The device is optimized for this at the expense, where necessary, of the more complex navigation.

I’ve also seen people vowing — swearing that they will not buy a new Kindle because it does not have the SD card slot that was present on the old one. This just, they say, makes the thing an entire non-starter for them. I’d prefer to have an SD card slot myself (I’m a big fan of not combining devices and data storage any more than is necessary), but it’s not that big a deal. If you’re transferring content every day, you’re not reading the stuff. You can fit over 700 copies of freaking War and Peace on the thing. Expandable memory would be nice just for the ability to fiddle with the contents without dealing with the Kindle itself, but the people for whom this is a huge deal are just looking for something to be indignant about.

But the one semi-legitimate complaint that you see commonly is the one about the file formats. I explained in my original Kindle review why most of these are stupid, but I’ll reiterate here.

The most common complaint is that the Kindle only supports a ‘proprietary’ file format. This is utterly ridiculous; it will read plain text files, which are about as unproprietary as you can get. People who complain that the Kindle ‘locks you in’ to any file format are either incredibly stupid, or they’re trying to spread FUD.

The Kindle will also read Mobipocket files; this is also a fairly open standard, if a bit harder to work with.

The Kindle will not read PDF files. This is kind of a shame, because everyone can create PDFs; but the complaints mainly center around some huge collection of pirated PDF e-books the complainer has, and that’s stupid. The pirate PDF editions you see are all formatted for either letter-size or A4-size paper, which just isn’t going to work on the Kindle; the screen isn’t large enough. And if you have the content in some other form — if it’s your own content, in other words — you can easily convert it to something that the Kindle will read — and the resulting file will be far smaller than a typical bloated PDF.

All of these complaints would go away if the Kindle could read HTML files (or, better yet, some kind of archive format where an HTML file and any supporting images were all stuffed into a zip file). All of the Kindle’s formatting capabilities would be accessible to anyone, using software they already have — and it would not require any actual capabilities that the Kindle doesn’t have already — just the ability for the web browser that’s already there to read HTML files from its internal storage rather than only from the network.

Mk. II Kindle Conclusions

The new Kindle is better than the old one in the most important way: the screen’s bit depth. The biggest improvement that’s still needed is entirely software: the thing needs better typefaces and the ability to read HTML files from its own storage.

Since the 2.0 firmware upgrade, it’s taking my first-gen iPhone 35 to 40 minutes to sync — with nearly all of the time taken up with iTunes performing a backup of the phone.

Here’s the process, speeded up 2400%:

The time it takes suggests that the system is backing up all the data on the phone, including movies, music, etc. — which is nuts, because after you restore an iPhone backup, you still need to separately sync all the music etc. you want on there.

It’s also nuts because the backup directory on the Mac contains 114.5 MB, which shouldn’t take anything like that long to transfer. I know the USB connection is working properly (and not falling back to a slower speed) because the transfer of media files takes place at the same speed as always.

That 114.5 MB is made up of 2,815 files, though, which could be part of the problem. If the files originate on the iPhone (rather than being split out of the stream on the Mac side), opening all those files and sending them individually could definitely account for some of the time. But 35 minutes? I doubt it.

Not everyone has this problem — Nicole doesn’t have it, and a few times my phone has synced without a lengthy backup process first — so it’s got to be something with my configuration of the phone, which means that there must be a workaround. I haven’t been able to isolate the cause myself, though, and of course there hasn’t been a peep out of Apple despite many complaints.

I don’t keep a dictionary by my side as I read things, nor do I know anyone who does. I have no idea who Levenger et al. are selling these ‘reader’s totes’ to, with room for a dictionary and a magnifying glass and so on: morons, presumably.

With the Kindle, though, and the ability to look up words just by pushing a button, I find myself doing it a lot more often. Last night, for instance, I came across the word uxoriousness. Now, I know that uxor means wife — my knowledge of Latin and French is why I don’t need a dictionary — but just because you know the root doesn’t mean that you are familiar with all the connotations in English. Wifeousness? The context — this was in Martin Amis’ The Information — was that ‘uxoriousness’ was being held up by one of the characters as a virtue.

The dictionary has uxorious as ‘excessively fond of or submissive to a wife’. So his consideration that being ‘excessively’ fond of his wife is a virtue is an important clue to the nature of his character. Kindle dictionary FTW!

So. Great. It would be nice to just be able to press Alt-L while on a line to look up the words rather than having to navigate through another menu, but as my finger is on the scroll wheel anyway, what the heck.

However, the dictionary that comes with the Kindle is, like many dictionaries, sorely lacking. I cannot think of any specific examples at the moment, but about half of the words I’ve attempted to look up haven’t been there. I have a large vocabulary, and so the words I’m going to attempt to look up are going to tend to all be fairly obscure or archaic ones; but then you’d think that in assembling a dictionary for such a purpose, you’d take that into account. You wouldn’t include a definition for dog, for instance, or cat, using that space instead for the kinds of words that people who spend $400 on a reading device are more likely to be unfamiliar with.

Ay, there’s the rub: the dictionary wasn’t compiled for this purpose. It’s just a regular dictionary, with its composition not taking into account its intended use or audience.

It would be nice to see a dictionary for the Kindle — you can add your own, which the system will use when doing these lookups — that combined a standard dictionary-for-the-educated, the Urban Dictionary, a sci-fi dictionary, a Gazetteer, etc., etc., etc.

To the best of my knowledge, though, all these e-book dictionaries are just regular dictionaries with only the format, and not the content, adapted.

A few points have been brought up in the comments to my previous post which make me realize that I left a few things out.

DRM’d Books

First, I need to point out that I’m not too worried about Amazon’s DRM’d Kindle books; DRM is a pointless exercise, for reasons that Cory Doctorow explains here. In short, he says:

Say I sell you an encrypted DVD: the encryption on the DVD is supposed to stop you (the DVD’s owner) from copying it. In order to do that, it tries to stop you from decrypting the DVD.

Except it has to let you decrypt the DVD some of the time. If you can’t decrypt the DVD, you can’t watch it. If you can’t watch it, you won’t buy it. So your DVD player is entrusted with the keys necessary to decrypt the DVD, and the film’s creator must trust that your DVD player is so well-designed that no one will ever be able to work out the key.

This is a fool’s errand. Because the DVD player has the key, it’s always possible that it can be extracted by academics, hardened hackers — or just kids who are in it for the glory.

The argument in greater detail is available here.

I expect the Kindle DRM to be broken within six weeks, at the longest, but I think I will wait until then before spending any serious money on their locked-up books. It’s not that I have something in mind that would be specifically thwarted by DRM; it’s just that the whole notion makes me uneasy. DRM ties my data — data that I am properly licensed to use — to a specific device or piece of software. When that device or piece of software fails, I effectively lose my license to use the data: and that’s nuts.

And DRM is artificially restrictive, too. The goal is to keep me from being able to redistribute the data to someone else, which is, I suppose, fine.

Note that my assessment that this is ‘fine’ is based in large part on the fact that Amazon is willing to sell this data at about a 60% discount over what they charge for the same data on paper. This is quite different from, say, the iTunes Music Store approach, where DRM’d Pixies albums actually cost $0.02 more than you’ll pay Amazon for the same data, uncompressed and un-DRM’d, on physical CDs.

It’s also based on the fact that the author and publisher need to be paid for their work, and that this isn’t going to happen if everyone redistributes the stuff for free. The argument you often see for music — that artists should make money by playing concerts rather than by selling records (which is how most recording artists make money now anyway) — doesn’t hold water in the case of books.

But there are all kinds of things I want to to do data that doesn’t involve ripping off the author or artist but that I still can’t do in a DRM regime.

For instance, I don’t have a DVD player hooked up to my TV. This is mainly because DVDs are annoying; not only do you have to keep track of the things, and make sure they don’t get scratched, and sit through the insulting copyright threats, and then screw around with their badly-designed menus using badly-designed remote controls, but also because, for reasons I’m not sure about, the average useful life of a DVD player around here is about nine months. This has been true both of cheap and expensive DVD players; so I’m done with ‘em.

I have an Apple TV hooked up to my TV, so when I get a DVD I rip it and watch it on there. Some DVDs and DVD sets are particularly hard to use as directed, and a pain in the ass to rip, so I just download them. In particular here, I’m thinking about the Monty Python box set and the recent Simpsons DVDs; they have multiple titles per disc, and particularly annoying and time-wasting menus. I own these DVDs, but I never watch them because even after paying for them it’s easier to download the content separately because this way I can watch them the way I want to watch them.

So how does this relate to machine-readable books?

Last night I read the Kindle-store sample of Steve Martin’s autobiography, and I was struck by just how clearly his voice came through in the text, and how the same voice was readily apparent in his movie scripts. With enough Steve-Martin source material and futzing around with Perl, this voice could probably be quantified and I could build a Steve Martin robot. Or at least a Steve Martin detector. That sounds silly, but it would be interesting to build such a thing and run scripts through it, seeing whether it could differentiate between bits that were written by Martin himself and bits that were reworked by lesser writers.

That would be kind of neat, and entirely within my legal rights. Neither Steve Martin nor his publishers lose any money if I build a Steve Martin detector; I’m just not allowed to redistribute the book myself. But DRM makes this use — a use that makes Martin’s book more valuable to me — impossible or at least more difficult than it needs to be.

I realize that most people are not quite like me, though, and have neither the resources, skills, time, or inclination to build a Steve Martin detector. And I couldn’t easily do textual analysis on the non-DRM’d paper book, either.

Amazon sells the DRM’d versions of books at a substantial discount. In practice I think that Amazon is subsidizing these sales, but it seems to make a good bargain. Amazon and the publishers have lower costs because they do not have to manufacture, warehouse, and move around anything physical; but they have higher costs in that relatively few people will copy and redistribute physical books.

I, on the other hand, have greater benefit from the purchase because I can get the book delivered instantly, and I don’t have to have storage space on the shelf for it; but I have less benefit because I can’t resell the book or lend it out. And I had to spend $400 to enter into the whole ecosystem in the first place.

The idiotic thing to do would be to say that Amazon’s higher costs and my increased benefit exactly balance out my decreased benefit and their lower costs, and sell the e-book at the same price as the physical one. I don’t think this is true, and in any case the market doesn’t think it’s true; people won’t buy e-books at those prices.

At 60% off, though, I feel like Amazon is splitting the difference with me. Is the gross profit on a $10 e-book greater than the profit on a $25 physical book? Almost certainly. The manufacturing of physical books — leaving out paying the author and editor and the shareholders of the publishing company and the PR people and all that, but just counting printing and binding the thing — is a surprisingly expensive undertaking, accounting for the vast majority of the cost of the book.

So I’m getting less, but I’m paying less, too. I still don’t like DRM’d data, but it’s less insulting than the approach the record and movie companies take, which is that DRM’d data is better for me than non-DRM’d data. I believe the Texas way to express the feeling is ‘Don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.’

The Future Of Publishing

One commenter on the earlier post brought up the easy terms under which anyone can publish their own work and have it sold by Amazon on the Kindle store. I am looking forward to seeing what this produces, as some of the self-published books out there are pretty interesting if only for their eccentricity. On this very website, I have the complete text of one such: One-Sixth Of The World’s Surface, a self-published account of travels in the Soviet Union in 1931.

However, I also expected cheap and easy online distribution of music to bring on a new Golden Age Of Pop; there are no longer any gatekeepers with faulty assumptions to keep the market from making its decisions. This has not happened, largely because while the faulty filters of the record companies can no longer present an obstacle, no other filters have arisen to replace them. Satellite-programmed radio and the Road-Rules-ization of MTV seem to have killed off those venues as means of discovering new music, and people complain about Media Consolidation. However, it’s cheap and easy for anyone to set up what amounts to their own radio station these days either as a podcast or as an audio stream, chock-a-block with podsafe music. This hasn’t happened.

Why? I don’t know. Too many of the talented bands are still signing recording contracts with the major labels, I suppose. The only way I’ve discovered new music in the last few years is through TV ads and some random ‘mix tapes’ that people upload to The Pirate Bay — but because the TPB ‘mix tapes’ are of necessity pirated music, there’s a lack of continuity and comment. If it worked well, the guys who assemble these compilations would be, functionally, the equivalent of the program directors of really cool radio stations. As it is, they have to operate from the shadows, and everyone loses.

But. Publishing. I said before that the publishing houses are spectacularly inept at their gatekeeping function. Think of the giant sections of ‘Bargain Books’ near the cash registers in every Barnes & Noble. Every one of these books (almost: B&N prints up public-domain texts specifically for this section, too) represents failure on the part of their publishers. The publishers paid an advance to the author and paid the printers to manufacture the books. The books didn’t sell, and so are now remaindered.

They’re remaindered pretty quickly these days, too, thanks to the way unsold inventory is taxed; the publishers can’t profitably just rent a giant cheap warehouse somewhere, and sell the books as they are demanded. So one of their goals is to publish books for which they can predict a strong and immediate demand.

This is very, very difficult. One — and possibly the only — good way of being sure that a book will sell well is to print the words ‘by Tom Clancy’ on the cover. Or ‘by Stephen King’. Or ‘by John Grisham’. Or something similar. These books are profitable.

The trouble is that they’re not profitable for the publishers. What do publishers do? Edit, Manufacture, and Promote. When Tom Clancy walks into the Putnam’s offices, he’s going to drive as hard a bargain as he likes. If he wanted to, he can hire his own editor (for all I know, he’s already done this). His books don’t really need promotion other than a notice to the public that a new Tom Clancy book is available.

There’s no risk in publishing a Tom Clancy novel; all the publishers do for Clancy is arrange for the manufacture and distribution of his books — and I’m sure that they get only enough margin to allow them to not lose too much money on the deal.

The movie business is in a similar situation. Sure, putting Tom Hanks’ name on the poster will guarantee you’ll sell a whole lot of tickets; but Tom Hanks gets paid so much that all those tickets make very little for the producers. (This is why movies with Tom Hanks in them these days generally are Produced By Tom Hanks.) The blockbuster is a terrible bargain for the publisher, no matter what the medium.

The money comes from the mid-list and the unexpected runaway first-novel. The ideal situation, for a publisher, is to sign up an unknown author on favorable terms, and then to have that author’s book picked for the Oprah Book Club. This does not happen very often.

So what’s going to happen? Presumably, some of these unknown novelists will choose to not take the small advance from the publishers and will instead self-publish as a Kindle book on Amazon. Some of these novels will be very good.

But they’ll be lost among all the trash, the modern-day equivalents of One-Sixth Of The World’s Surface, things that make reasonably good websites — the vanity-publishing business has got to have taken a big hit from the rise of the web — but not very good books. Where’s the filter? I’m not going to read the first chapter of all of these things to figure out which ones are good and which ones are yet another internal monologue of a lower-middle-class college girl insecure about her looks and position in society.

As self-publishing rises in volume and diminishes in stigma, the imprimatur of a publishing house will count for more and more. It could be that self-publishing (or its effective equivalent, anyway) is just what the publishers need.

Network Capabilites

I only touched on this in the earlier post, and I think that that was a mistake. As an e-book reader, the Kindle doesn’t have any serious flaws that are not purely the result of the state of the available technology (That is: an e-book reader needs a bigger, higher-contrast, higher-resolution, color-capable screen before it’s no-excuses mainstream acceptance. These don’t exist as production models yet).

The most important thing about the Kindle, by far, is that it has a self-contained Internet connection that is totally transparent to the user. By ‘totally transparent’, I mean totally. Setting up EVDO on my Macbook Pro is pretty easy: it only involves plugging in the EVDO gadget and paying a monthly bill. That’s all. Apple has made this very simple by including all the necessary software in the base OS install.

But it’s not totally transparent; I still have to buy the EVDO thingummy and plug it in; it’s a capability that I add to the computer, and that I pay for when the bill comes every month. It’s easy, but not invisible, and software cannot be written that counts on that network connection always being there the way that software for, say, the iPhone can generally assume that there’s a network connection. The iPhone’s whole purpose is as a communications device, though, and it comes with a monthly bill.

The Kindle’s network connection is totally invisible, and peripheral to the device’s main purpose. The device itself is a bit more expensive than it would otherwise be, and it’s tied into a service that tries to produce an ongoing revenue stream, and it’s produced by a company with very deep pockets. But I think it has huge potential for the future of gadgets; until now, using a gadget that did anything at all over the Internet required that you already have a home network. It’s easy to forget this at Tino Manor, but most people don’t have a home network.

Imagine what this makes possible:

• A camera sold by Flickr (or someone similar; an online photo service in any case) that automatically uploads all of your photos to the website immediately. To make them public, you just press a button on the back of the camera. Press another button on the camera, and a printed copy shows up in the mail. My dad cannot figure out how to use his computer, and so his digital camera largely gathers dust. Pushing buttons on a specialized device, though, he can do.

• A computer that’s accessible for remote administration no matter the state of the network it’s plugged into. This would help me out a lot when my dad does poke at the computer and screws something up. This would be something like Back To My Mac, but because the manufacturer could control the network, it would actually work.

• Tivo. Currently, if you have your TiVo hooked up right, you can program it remotely. Hooking the thing up right is a pain in the ass for most people, so this is a marginal feature. With self-contained EVDO, though, every single TiVo in the world would do this.

• HVAC. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to set your thermostat remotely, or to be able to program different behaviors for different times without fiddling around in the ill-lit hallway with those tiny buttons? You can, for about $600 and a lot of screwing around. Or Carrier could start to build a self-contained network connection into their furnaces: as an added benefit, it would alert them when something was wrong with the system, so they could send out a repairman. You’d probably be able to save enough in heating and cooling costs to pay for any increased cost.

There are a million other possibilities. The important distinction is that these connections would be an integral part of the device rather than an added and optional service. There would be nothing to manage, and no bills to pay: the bills would be paid by the manufacturer, as part of the cost of producing the product in the first place. Since most devices would use the network connection only sporadically, and would transmit only very small amounts of data (EVDO is lousy for upstream traffic; you couldn’t stream your TiVo’s content over such a connection, for instance), the cost would be minimal. We tend to think of wide-area connectivity as something that’s added on, and that has to be managed by the user. If that’s not the case — and the Kindle shows that it doesn’t need to be — there are a lot of new possibilities.

Most of what you think you know about the Amazon Kindle is probably wrong. It’s been subject to a strange process whereby people who have not seen, or touched, or used the thing themselves are foaming at the mouth online in their eagerness to tell everyone else how awful it is.

This is particularly interesting when you recall all the commentary on the iPhone earlier this year. Steve Ballmer famously said that it was the ‘most expensive phone in history’; it’s not even close, but this didn’t stop this from being repeated all over the place. Ballmer is CEO of Microsoft, though, so at least you can get a sense of his underlying motivation: he’s spreading FUD because he hopes that that will lead to increased revenue for Microsoft.

Much of the anti-iPhone FUD was harder to figure out; a lot of it came from journalists who are suspiciously critical of everything Apple does, and who are widely assumed to somehow benefit from the gains of Apple’s competitors. One of them, John C. Dvorak, has admitted that he writes ridiculous things (particularly about Apple) because this gets him more attention, and thus more fame, and more money.

Brett Arends of TheStreet.com wrote a column on July 5 that said that an iPhone ‘cost’ $17,670. What the hell? Turns out that he was calculating the amount of money a person in the 25% income-tax bracket would have to earn to pay the roughly $2,000 total cost of ownership over two years, and then figuring what that money would earn over 25 years if it were invested in a 401(k) retirement account.

Now, this is nuts, but it’s at least roughly true. Compound interest is a marvelous thing; but compound interest acts the same on money not spent on a Blackberry as it does on money not spent on an iPhone.

And do not forget that a lot of the FUD came from random bloggers who had, presumably, nothing at all to gain from their criticism. Still they criticized, usually without ever having used an iPhone.

Is the iPhone perfect? Not at all. Its e-mail client is adequate but nothing more; the iPod functions add some capabilities over the classic iPod, but lose some as well; the much-touted YouTube capabilities are hamstrung by the fact that YouTube hasn’t been converting their videos quickly enough; it lacks a lot of basic Bluetooth capabilities; it doesn’t have enough storage; and the camera is strictly average, at best.

But the iPhone does have strengths that, for many people, make it the best smartphone available. Is it for everyone? No, but then nothing is.

The point I’m trying to make here, and the reason I’ve been talking about the iPhone for several hundred words at the beginning of what is ostensibly a review of Amazon’s Kindle book-reader thing, is that technology reviews are, by and large, awful. The professional reviews are awful, and the amateur reviews are awful. Most of the people — even the professional journalists — who review things seem to come into the exercise with their opinions already formed, and with their expectations based solely on their desires and not on reality, so that you generally cannot trust what they say.

Doom-mongering is a favorite pastime of all technology reviewers. Most technological gadgets do what they say, and work reasonably well. After all, their designers and manufacturers put considerable effort into making sure that this is true. This makes for boring copy, though, just like in regular news.

The news media love pronouncements of doom, and they go out of their way to frame stories in such a way as to make everything seem worse than it is. You might have recently seen stories about new statistics that show that about 25% of homeless people in the U.S. are military veterans. This was the subject of bold headlines, pointing out that this was wildly disproportionate to veterans’ representation (about 11%) in U.S. society as a whole.

What nobody in the media bothered to do was note that:

1. Chronically homeless women are almost nonexistent, for a variety of reasons, and
2. 22% of American males are military veterans.

Which means that veterans are slightly over-represented among the homeless; which shouldn’t be too surprising, given that ‘the military’ is an enormous organization which draws a lot of people who have few skills or abilities. There are undoubtedly very few Ivy-League graduates among the homeless; but this is because the people who are most likely to become homeless are not admitted to the Ivies in the first place. Apparently people who join the military are very slightly more likely to become homeless than is the general population.

But ‘Veterans Very Slightly Over-Represented Among Homeless’ is not an interesting story, so it doesn’t get written.

So it goes with everything. If you lived in a cave and only knew of the world through newspapers, you’d certainly be amazed that the world hadn’t collapsed yet, given that everything was always terrible. When housing prices were rising in the U.S., the papers reported about the ‘housing crisis’ that this caused in that people were being priced out of the market. Now that housing prices are falling somewhat, the papers are full of stories about how bad this is.

The point is that the media — which for my purposes here include weblogs — lives on a steady diet of crisis and catastrophe, and that they will seek out the negative in anything. And this is before you take into account the considerable publicity benefits in naysaying: the headline ‘Gadget Performs As Advertised’ does not get Dugg.

Which brings me to the Kindle.

Here’s the executive summary: The Kindle does what it says; it does not lock you in to any scheme of Amazon’s in any serious way; it’s easy to use; the screen is pretty good; it’s not ugly; it appears to be fairly hardy.

The Kindle’s Appearance

A lot of hay has been made of the appearance of the Kindle. It’s got a strange shape, and it’s made of matte-finish white plastic. A lot of allegedly smart people have complained that they would ‘never buy one’ because it’s so ‘ugly’. Many of these are the same ones who complained about the iPhone being a ‘toy’ because it wasn’t ugly; there’s just no pleasing some people.

FUD point #1: What other consumer-electronics product in the last five years has been criticized for its looks? I can’t think of one.

I use Apple computers, and I have an iPhone. All of these things are very nicely designed, and very beautiful; Apple products come in for a lot of criticism, but not on the basis of their looks. What you don’t hear about, because the reviewers by and large don’t use these things for very long, is that all of this Apple gear is very delicate. My laptop and iPhone are covered with tiny scratches, because those nice finishes are pretty susceptible to damage; they’re selected for their looks first, and their durability second. I dropped my iPhone a while back, for instance, and it’s very slightly bent. You can’t see this at all, but the chrome bezel is very, very slightly out of alignment with the metal back of the phone. If you can’t see it, what’s the problem? I’ll tell you what the problem is: the gap is just wide enough for hairs to get into, and get caught. When I take the phone away from my ear, about 20% of the time it yanks on my hair.

Most non-Apple laptop computers and mobile phones, on the other hand, are made out of plastic and have finishes which are chosen for durability first and looks second.

A lot about the Kindle’s appearance seems to be about this kind of durability. White plastic won’t show scratches; and if you drop the thing, its relative lack of right angles will tend to cause the deceleration it experiences upon hitting an Immovable Object to be relatively gradual. Its number of planes helps to ensure that nearly anything will be a glancing blow.

But there’s another point to the Kindle’s relatively dowdy appearance: it’s a non-gadget gadget. One of the main features of the Kindle, and one which hasn’t been discussed too much, is that you never need to plug it into a computer. You don’t even need to have a computer to use the Kindle effectively.

Amazon’s target market for the Kindle is not Gadget Freaks, but Book Readers. A lot of people — and a greater proportion of hard-core Book Readers — are opposed to gadgets on first principles. Gadgets are frivolous, and they grow rapidly obsolete. This doesn’t particularly bother me, but both of these characteristics run directly counter to the values of a lot of people who buy a lot of books. The fact that the Kindle looks not entirely unlike something from 1988 is potentially a selling point for a lot of its intended market. The white plastic suggests that the Kindle is explicitly not about fashion, but about function, which is likely to reassure the elbow-patch community.

Holding the Kindle

Some of the complaints about the page-turning buttons are justified. Both sides of the Kindle consist mainly of buttons. It’s hard for me to hold the thing in a comfortable position without hitting one of them. When I hold the device in my left hand, the ‘next page’ button falls nicely under my thumb, which must be just as it was intended. The problem is that there’s nowhere to rest my thumb in between page-turns except on the screen.

I find that I need to hold it a bit higher up in my hand that feels natural, and position my thumb at rest on the logo under the screen. This causes a little bit of strain after a while, and I find that I need to move my hands around a lot.

It would be nice to be able to turn off either the left-hand or the right-hand page-turning buttons somehow.

The buttons on the little keyboard have a stiff enough action that you don’t accidentally press them while reading; and they don’t seem to do anything anyway while you’re in reading mode.

Ways In Which The Kindle Is Superior To Actual Books

The Kindle does not flop closed if you’re reading it while eating. This means that you do not have to invest in a leather-upholstered cosh to use as a book weight.

Right now, I have 37 books loaded onto my Kindle, but it still only weighs 287 grams. Since all of the books I have on there right now are ones that I own on paper, I took the trouble to weigh them all: over 18 kg.

Actual books do not have wireless network connections that can download new books. Or magazines. Or newspapers. Or websites.

With the Kindle, you buy the infrastructure once (or once every such-and-such a period, anyway), and then the content as you go along. If you read a lot, this can represent a big savings.

Actual books do not allow you to search their contents except by riffling through the pages. The Kindle builds an index of anything you load into it.

Electronic books do not present a storage problem.

Ways in Which Actual Books Are Superior To The Kindle

Actual books don’t have batteries that need charging.

With actual books, you purchase the infrastructure (paper) along with the content (words); thus this cost is spread out over time.

With actual books, the infrastructure is redundant. If you drop your copy of Swann’s Way in the toilet, you can still read other books.

Actual books look better. The Kindle’s screen is pretty good — arrestingly good, actually, if you haven’t seen an electrophoretic display before — but it’s still not as good as ink on paper.

The Kindle’s Screen

I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. On the screen at once right now, I have 174 words from part one:

parents, who hoped that in this way they could keep mud and vegetable debris off her skirts. The strategy had not been completely successful, but with a quick brush, John and Gwendolyn were able to transfer most of the dirt onto their white gloves. From there it went straight into the air. Most gentlemen’s and ladies’ gloves nowadays were constructed of infinitesimal fabricules that knew how to eject dirt; you could thrust your gloved hand into mud, and it would be white a few seconds later.

The hierarchy of staterooms on Aether matched the status of its passengers perfectly, as these parts of the ship could be decompiled and remade between voyages. For Lord Finkle-McGraw, his three children and their spouses, and Elizabeth (his first and only grandchild so far), the airship lowered a private escalator that carried them up into the suite at the very prow, with its nearly 180-degree forward view.

Aft of the Finkle-McGraws were a dozen or so other Equity Lords, merely earl- or baron-level, mostly

In the hardcover first edition of the book, this text is split between pages 9 and 10; page 10 contains 468 words. If I turn the font size on the Kindle all the way down, it fits 240 words on a page.

The screen is pretty good, when you’re displaying text. The contrast could be better; the blank areas are a bit gray, like very cheap recycled paper. The screen isn’t white to begin with, and e-ink displays always seem to have a bunch of stuck e-ink globules that make it darker:

Click on the image for a bigger version.

Still, it’s not bad; the overall impression is of looking at black text on slightly gray paper. The bigger problem with the display is the typeface; it winds up looking distinctly like Apple’s old New York typeface printed on an Imagewriter. This is something that needs attention; there’s no reason why the text should look so bad at 167 ppi, even on a 2-bit screen (i.e. it can display ‘white’, black, and two shades in between). It’s not really the anti-aliasing that’s the problem; it’s the fact that the typeface seems not to be the optimal one for this display.

The typeface is PMN Caecilia, which I think was chosen because it has slab serifs — that is, the little hookuses on the ends of the letters are pretty square, as you can see in this sample from the Veer website:

It’s not an ugly typeface by any means: but the Kindle seems to render the serifs a bit too heavily, and the letters wind up looking a bit unbalanced. (Compare the lowercase a in the type specimen with the one on the screen to see how the Kindle winds up distorting things.) This is something that can be pretty easily fixed in software, so I’m not too worried about it.

Another Way The Kindle Is Superior

The efforts of the copyright industries and the U.S. Congress to sew up perpetual copyright has resulted in there being a relative paucity of audio and video available in the public domain — and what little there is is usually technically pretty bad, coming as it does from the infancy of those technologies.

The written word, on the other hand, hasn’t changed all that much in hundreds of years. Much of the very best literature in English is in the public domain, but the manufacturing costs of books are such that you’re still paying $10 for Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, even though nobody’s paying any royalties to Charles Dickens.

You can buy a Kindle version of Martin Chuzzlewit for $5.99 from Amazon. Or you can get it for free from the Gutenberg Project. Or download a nicely-formatted version for free from Mobipocket, which is run by Amazon.

There are a lot of out-of-copyright books which are out of print, too. If you want to read one of these, you generally need either to have privileges at a large university library, or a lot of money to spend on Alibris.

Content

There has been an enormous amount of FUD about the Kindle’s file-format support.

The Kindle supports, natively:

1. The proprietary Kindle .azw format, which appears to be the same as the Mobitext format with DRM added
2. Un-DRM’d Mobitext e-books
3. Text files.

Most of the FUD centers around two points:

1. Amazon charges you $0.10 to put files on the device
2. The Kindle does not support PDF.

Point #1 is simply false. Amazon charges you $0.10 to deliver files to the device over the EVDO connection — the EVDO connection for which you pay nothing otherwise. If you convert your content into a compatible format yourself and transfer them onto the thing with the USB cable, there’s no charge. And Amazon will even convert the files for you, for free, and send them back to you, for free, if you send files to name@free.kindle.com. Sending them to just name@kindle.com will get them delivered to the Kindle for $0.10 each. This kind of charge is unusual, but then so is the network connection that Amazon pays for.

Point #2 is sort of true, and it’s something of a bummer as PDFs are a pretty widely-used format for e-books; but if you think about it for more than about ten seconds, it makes sense. The whole point of a PDF file is that it should look a certain way, and be a certain size, no matter where it’s displayed. The page size is determined when the PDF is written, and this page size is nearly always either A4 or 8.5×11 inches. The Kindle’s screen isn’t that big, and it doesn’t refresh quickly enough to allow you to pan around the page as you can on a laptop with a small screen, or on an iPhone. Ergo PDFs wouldn’t work well on the Kindle even if the software supported them.

To put a PDF on the Kindle, you have to have it converted by Amazon’s e-mail service. My experience with this has been that conversions of text PDFs works well enough. If I wanted to do a lot of reading of text PDFs on the thing, though, I’d convert them to text files and then load those.

The Kindle supports garden-variety text files quite nicely; anyone who says that Amazon is attempting to lock people in by means of their proprietary files is simply and thoroughly wrong. Project Gutenberg files require a little massaging for best results, but the Kindle will display them without any tweaking whatsoever.

And of course it supports Kindle books that you buy from Amazon — about 90,000 of them right now, most of them priced fairly reasonably. You can’t do as much with them as you can with paper books (you can’t resell them, for instance), but then they’re cheaper than paper books.

Not long ago, most e-books were priced higher than their paper counterparts, on the theory that the e- nature of these books imbued them with special value that the paper versions didn’t have. That’s certainly true, but the publishers then conveniently ignored that the e-books were also lacking value that you got with the paper book, and that there was no need to manufacture and store the e-book version. And so nobody bought any e-books at $50 and the publishers proclaimed the whole thing a failure.

Another Way The Kindle Is Superior

The iPod is a success not because of the iTunes Music Store, but because you can easily (and quite legally, no matter what the record companies say) convert all your CDs to mp3s, which you can then carry around and play on the iPod.

What about books? Most people don’t have book scanners at home; and even if they did, operating a book scanner is a pain in the ass.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to scan books. The first involves guillotining the binding off, and then feeding the pages through a sheet scanner and OCRing the output. This is a pain in the ass.

The second method is even more of a pain in the ass, because it involves possessing a highly specialized piece of equipment that essentially photographs each page in the book. And then you have to have an undergraduate on a work-study program turn the pages, or monitor an extremely complicated automated system that turns the pages automatically. And none of this works very well.

So, what’s the solution? Usenet and Bittorrent, as always. Though it was diminished significantly by the recent disappearance of the excellent Demonoid website, there’s a thriving pirate e-book community out there. Really obscure things are, as usual, obscure. But if you want to read your Tom Clancy novels without lugging those things around, there’s no need to pay again for content you’ve already paid for: anything that’s at all popular is quite readily available.

The pirate e-book scene isn’t anything like as large as the pirate music or movie scenes, in large part because until very recently these things weren’t all that easy to use. You can read books on your computer screen, or on your Treo, but by and large people don’t want to. With e-book readers on the radar thanks to all the publicity the Kindle has received, this might change.

This is likely to transform the publishing industry. It’s going to be largely destroyed by e-books, I think, in the same way that the music industry is being destroyed already by mp3s. This might not happen right away, but sometime soon the displays will mature to the point where you can see two pages side-by-side, with resolution and color capabilities similar enough to the printed page as to make a reasonable substitute for a lot of people. Even this won’t kill off real books entirely, any more than television has killed off movies or the CD has killed off vinyl records. But it will make a very, very significant difference. Real books will, like vinyl records, be sold for nostalgia purposes or where their physical nature adds some specific value. Actual printed paper books will never die off to the extent that vinyl records have, if for no other reason than that no special equipment is needed to use a paper book. Books will perish to the degree that they are inconvenient, and survive to the degree that they are convenient.

What value do publishers add to the process? Mainly, they have the capital to lay out to cause books to be manufactured and distributed. With usable electronic book readers, the cost of both of those things has fallen to something very close to zero. Editors don’t need to work for publishing houses, and the only other thing publishers do — gatekeeping — they do spectacularly badly. Publishing houses are always going on about how some huge percentage of the books they publish do not earn back their advances. This would suggest that the publishers are either paying advances that are too large, or selecting the wrong manuscripts, or both.

Kindle Summary

It’s too soon yet for me to tell whether the Kindle is any good or not; it requires use to tell. The main issues are going to be eyestrain and hand-strain from holding it, and those require more evaluation. One other issue might be the fact that there is less text to view at a time than in a regular book. Possibly because of the way I read, I already find myself, not infrequently, at a new page wondering whether I’ve managed to skip a page somehow. This often happens to me with paper books, too, but because there are two pages to view at a time in a paper book, it can only happen 50% as often; and it’s quicker to flip back a page in a paper book to re-read the last line.

Overall, though, so far the Kindle isn’t bad. It performs as advertised as far as reading books goes.

I’m not sure how well the web browser will work, yet. If a page is formatted properly, it’s potentially excellent. Unfortunately, few web pages are formatted in such a way as to work well with the Kindle. Since few people have ever made the adaptations needed to make their sites work well on PDAs, I don’t think we can count on them making changes for something like the Kindle. However, I think that the sites most likely to appeal to Kindle users — Project Gutenberg, for instance, and anyone else distributing large text documents — will probably find it worth their while.

Because the special feature of the Kindle isn’t its text-displaying capabilities; Sony has had something that’s almost the same size with almost the same capabilities for a couple of years now. The Kindle’s special feature, and the thing for which it will be remembered in twenty years, is the network connection. Just as the iPhone turned the mobile-phone subsidy on its head by spreading it out over the two-year period of the contract, the Kindle has turned the gadget-with-network-subscription model on its head by building the cost into the initial price. Sony’s e-book reader costs about $300, so figure the cost of the network hardware and subscription is $100 plus whatever Amazon figures your impulse purchases are worth to them.

Amazon has long been battling against the fact that, while they usually have the best prices on everything they sell, they have the disadvantage of being separated by their customers by UPS or FedEx. My last post was on how it was going to take eight days from order to receipt of my Kindle, even though I paid for good shipping, because UPS doesn’t work on weekends or holidays. If it was anything that I needed urgently, or that could be obtained elsewhere, Amazon would likely have lost the sale.

Some time ago, Amazon launched their Amazon Prime program, where you pay $70 once a year to cover two-day shipping on all your orders. Since only people who order a lot, and who expect to order a lot, will sign up, and since once you’ve signed up it’s in your interest to order as much as possible from Amazon, I would imagine that this results in Amazon effectively subsidizing the shipping of a lot of their Prime customers’ orders.

This works out for them, though, because the shipping delays are such a big problem for them, and one that, by and large, they can’t do anything about.

Except with the Kindle. In one fell swoop, for everyone who buys one, Amazon will go from being the bookstore with the lowest price but the longest delay, to being the bookstore with the lowest price and the quickest service.

I must preface this by saying that I really do like the iPhone; it’s the best phone I’ve ever had, and, when one discounts the iPhone’s advantages of connectivity and size, the second-best PDA I’ve ever had, after the Newton.

That said, the thing continues to piss me off. Today’s chief annoyance comes from the headphone jack. As you may have read, the iPhone uses a standard headphone jack, which means that any normal mini-headphone plug will fit.

That is, any mini-headphone plug that has an extraordinarily slim shank. will fit. The headphone jack itself is pretty standard, but it’s recessed into the body of the phone:

When I try to plug my very nice and fairly expensive Shure headphones into it, this is what happens:

Similarly, I can’t plug in my car cassette adapter or anything else. (And the car adapter that plugs into the iPod dock connector on the bottom will charge the iPhone, but will not get sound out of the thing without shutting off the phone functions; the iPhone refuses to work except with new, specially-shielded car RF-modulator adapters. Which, of course, don’t exist yet.)

I can listen to the iPhone using the tinny built-in speaker, or using the Apple-supplied headphones, or not at all. And the Apple-supplied headphones are not a particularly good choice as they seem to block no outside noise whatsoever.

According to Apple, the reason for this design idiocy is to anchor the plug, so that it’s impossible (or at least more difficult) to snap it off in there. Fair enough; I’ve done this only about twice in my life, but let’s allow that the iPhone’s headphone jack is very delicate and must be protected.

Why, then, did Apple not supply an adapter with the thing? And if getting one free is too much to ask, why is it impossible to buy these adapters? AT&T stores, unsurprisingly, have never heard of the thing. Apple stores report that the sell out of the adapters as soon as they get them in.

Of course they sell out of them, because you can’t use decent headphones, or listen to the thing in the car, without one. If they’ve sold a million iPhones so far, I’d figure that there’s a market for about… a million adapters. Maybe more, if people want to leave them on the end of their headphones, car adapters, etc. rather than carry them around with their phones.

And yet they are effectively unavailable. Amazon lists them as ‘Usually ships within 4 to 6 weeks’. Apple will sell me a Belkin adapter and ship it in ’5-7 business days’, or one of the Apple-branded adapters for twice the price in ’2-4 weeks’.

What. The. Fuck. There’s a failure here in that Apple decided that the iPhone should have a non-standard headphone jack — because that’s what it is, ultimately — in the first place. But presumably there’s a reason for this.

The more serious failure here is in the fact that Apple cannot supply this adapter that they alone created a need for. I didn’t buy one when I bought the iPhone because I didn’t realize just how tight the fit was for the headphone jack; I thought that I might be able to fit at least some of my headphones in there (and one Sony pair does fit, but only barely, and after removing the strain relief on the cable, and the right ear tends to cut out because the plug isn’t really in there all the way), and because I plan to buy a pair of good iPhone-optimized headphones, with the microphone and everything, and didn’t want to buy an adapter I wouldn’t need. Apple, on the other hand, had to be in possession of the knowledge that nearly all headphones wouldn’t fit, and chose to just ignore this fact. Eh, Steve!

I like the iPhone, I really do. It’s great. But as I use it, I keep coming across these things that suggest that there was no, or nearly no, actual user testing of the thing.

When you play videos in the iPod or YouTube apps, they play sideways; that is, the bottom of the movie is on what is normally the left side of the display. You have to turn the iPhone 90 degrees.

This is better illustrated with pictures. The iPhone is normally used like this:

When watching a movie, you turn it 90 degrees counterclockwise, like this:

You’re not given a choice; the video only plays sideways, no matter which way you hold the phone.

This isn’t the problem. The problem is that the video is upright only when the phone is rotated counterclockwise. If you look at the sideways picture (clicking on it pops up a bigger one), you’ll note that holding the phone like this means that your left hand gets in the way of the headphone wire.

It would be better if it played the video rotated 90 degrees the other way. When you hold the phone this way, the headphone cable is above your right index finger, and behind your right thumb. It’s not in the way at all:

In fact, it’s easier to hold the thing this way than with no headphones, because the headphone plug takes some of the weight of the phone.

This can be fixed pretty easily in software, but it’s still kind of surprising that Apple didn’t spot this in the first place. Any user testing at all of video playing with headphones on would have turned this up in about ten seconds.