Tinotopia

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.