Archive for: July, 2009

Turning books into Kindling

Jul 29 2009 Published by brian under books, technology

So here it is, a few days after my post about the Kindle/1984 fiasco, and as karma would have it, Nicholson Baker (one of my favorite writers) has a lengthy essay about the Kindle in the New Yorker. Being a lover of books and interested in the future thereof as Amazon would have it, he decided to buy one and try it out.

His impression? Generally negative. He discusses the development and evolution of the Kindle’s e-ink technology, the various iterations of the device itself, the handicaps imposed by DRM (though he doesn’t directly attack DRM by name), and, most importantly, the reading experience itself. He strives mightily to be fair, comparing Kindle editions to paper and making a point of reading an entire novel on the thing. But, generally, he seems to find the task to be most unpleasant:

I tussled with a sense of anticlimax.

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 was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?

This largely jibes with my own encounters with the Kindle. It’s usable, but that’s all. The contrast is unacceptably low, and the (non-backlit) screen is often dim and washed out. I haven’t tried to read an entire book on it, but honestly, I don’t want to.

Not to mention that anything involving graphics suffers terribly; Baker goes on about this at some length. Charts, maps, illustrations of all kinds are largely deleted; where they do exist, they’re muddled and difficult to read. This would seem to be a problem for one of Amazon’s target markets: students. Yes, textbooks are heavy and inconvenient. But if you’re going to create a device to replace them, you’d better provide functionality as good or better. Students need useful illustrations, and if the Kindle can’t provide them, it’s going to be hard for them to justify the expense.

Finally, Baker talks an awful lot about newspapers (one of his pet interests, as anyone knows who’s read his Double Fold). The Kindle, particularly the large-size DX, advertises itself as the salvation of newspapers. But according to Baker, it instead leaches out all that is enjoyable about newspapers:

It’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

Baker does admit, at the end, that after some effort he was finally able to engross himself in one book enough to read it all the way through. But it wasn’t easy for him, and I really don’t have the patience to push myself that far. Not when I could just get the damn thing on paper and save myself a lot of trouble–not to mention money, when you factor in the initial cost of the reader.

Thanks, but no thanks. Yes, books are heavy, and hard to store, and a massive pain in the ass to move. But I won’t be trading them for a Kindle anytime soon.

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Somewhere, Orwell is chuckling.

Jul 23 2009 Published by brian under books, technology

I presume that most people by now have heard about Amazon’s recent deletion of electronic copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from their Kindle ebook reader (if not, there’s a very good report on it here at io9, which I highly recommend). Apparently, a company that didn’t have the right to distribute the books started selling them at Amazon, Orwell’s publisher told Amazon to stop selling them, and Amazon not only pulled the book, but also took it back from everyone who had bought it.

I’m not a fan of ebooks. They’re very useful for research–mainly because they can be rapidly searched–but I never use them for pleasure reading. That said, I completely understand the allure of carrying thousands of books with you. But I will never use a reader, or an ebook format, that locks up my books with DRM.

Actually, DRM is a difficult topic to get people to care about until it affects them personally. Last year, I had a long talk with a passionate Kindle fan about just what is so evil about it. I had all the arguments against it in my head and was as articulate as I know how to be in person. But she just couldn’t see why any of it was a problem. Perhaps this incident will help demonstrate to people why it’s a bad idea to allow an outside entity control over your media.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote in the comments on the apology that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos posted today.

I agree, it took a lot of courage for Bezos to own up to the horrible way this was handled.

However, this just serves as a fantastic example of why I will NEVER own a Kindle, or any other e-reader that allows me less than full control over its data. When I buy a physical book, it’s MINE, to read, mark up, or give away, as I please, and nobody can take it from me without physically entering my house. I will not accept any lesser degree of control for any ebooks that I might use. The few that I have are public domain from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Google Books.

And this ought to be an object lesson in the evils of DRM in general. Your Kindle books, or your copy-protected music or movie files, are only yours as long as the company you bought them from allows you to use them. Even if you’ve followed all the rules, what happens when the company decides to stop supporting that version? Or changes hands and “upgrades” its systems? Or has a problem with the server that handles the authorizations?

Sorry, Amazon. But as far as I’m concerned, Kindle is and always has been a big fat FAIL, and this incident only reinforces that.

b.

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A very expensive piece of paper.

Jul 16 2009 Published by brian under personal

Well, looky what arrived in the mail this afternoon.

Diploma

I guess I’m now officially overeducated!

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Remember, kids, always back up everything!

Jul 15 2009 Published by brian under archives, culture, history, technology

By way of Slashdot comes word that NASA has found the lost original videotapes of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. This is amazing news.

For those who don’t know: The reason that the moon landing footage we’ve all seen looks so bad isn’t because that was the best they could do at the time, but because it had to be compressed and converted several times to be made compatible with late-1960′s commercial television standards. The final step, amazingly, was to aim a 16mm camera at a video monitor.

But the original video feed from the moon, received by the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station in Australia, was of far higher quality. The reason none of us have seen it is because, somehow, the tapes were lost almost immediately and then largely forgotten. A few years ago, a few veterans of the Apollo program went looking for them; they had little luck, but it appeared that they had disappeared from an archive outside of Washington. (Interestingly for archiving and recordkeeping geeks, it looks like NASA never even had a decent index of what they had!)

That’s how it stood for some time. But a few weeks ago, it was leaked to the UK Daily Express that the tapes had been found in a storage facility in Perth, Australia. And now, it looks like NASA will be confirming that; they’ve announced a press briefing for tomorrow “to release greatly improved video imagery” of the landing.

I can’t wait to hear the full story of this, quite apart from the pictures themselves. If the tapes were in Perth, then it sounds like they may never have left Australia at all. Wonder what caused them to be lost and forgotten all these years? There’s a nice tale here of recording technology, recordkeeping, detective work, and history, and I’m looking forward to hearing the rest.

UPDATE, the next day: So, the footage was released this morning, but it’s only a restoration and enhancement of the footage we have. NASA has admitted that the original tapes were probably erased and overwritten to save money. NPR has a good story about it here that also shows the new video. Disappointing, but still fascinating.

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A slight course correction

Jul 11 2009 Published by brian under meta

So, I’ve had this blog going for about five weeks now, and I’m rethinking my approach slightly.

I’ve blogged a number of times before, starting even before they called it blogging and I had to edit the HTML by hand. And, like many who try it, I get bored and quit after a while. A big part of why is that I pick a topic that doesn’t have enough in it to hold my interest long-term.

For instance: in the early days I mostly did politics. That got real boring real quick, mainly because there was nothing to distinguish it from the other 5.0 x 107 political blogs out there. Then I tried my own personal life, but I don’t consider myself interesting enough to write a long blog entry about everything mundane that happens to me. (And besides, nowadays there’s Twitter for that.)

This time around, since I just graduated from library school and I’m job hunting, I thought I’d try to keep it strictly professional, and only post things of interest to library people. But, guess what? One, there’s not enough of that for me to distinguish it from the many library blogs out there; and, two, the writing gets monotonous. There’s such a thing as being too professional.

So, while I’m going to keep that focus, I’m also going to be injecting more personality into this thing, and writing about more of my other obsessions, such as history, science fiction, and technology in general. In my online wanderings, I come across a lot of things I find interesting, and I haven’t been commenting because they haven’t fit. Now they will.

As always, it’s a work in progress. Maybe I should take a cue from Google and label the whole thing as a perpetual beta.

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The mechanics of isolation

Jul 03 2009 Published by brian under culture, technology, web 2.0

One other quick thought about the danah boyd talk, having to do with Twitter:

Consider the discussion of the Iranian election. If you were in certain cohorts, you couldn’t miss the green-ification of people’s profiles, the discussions of #iranelection. But, even though said conversations were massively prolific, only a small percentage of the user base was even aware of this beyond the trending topic. Those who were following 50cent and Miley Cyrus were oblivious to these conversations. And, in a matter of moments, this became visible when Michael Jackson died and captured the attention of a much broader swath of users, nearly taking Twitter down with it. In your world, Iran probably matters more than Michael Jackson. But don’t for a second think that this is universal.

It occurs to me that this is an extreme example of just the kind of willful social differentiation that we’ve seen all along with social media. Unlike the old broadcast media, the user has (a) a vast array of choices for what she can expose herself to, and (b) essentially complete control over which of those choices she will accept. Twitter is, as far as I know, the most extreme form of that. So, if her friends aren’t interested in something that’s happening, she won’t necessarily hear about it at all. The end result being that users really do end up choosing different realities to live in.

I can think of all sorts of things to say about the implications of this for society and democracy, but that’s another post.

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Keeping up with the Joneses

Jul 03 2009 Published by brian under Uncategorized, culture, technology, web 2.0

I know I wrote about Web ethnographer danah boyd not long ago, but she came out with another talk a few days ago that’s too good to pass up. “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online” is about the role that class identification plays in social networking; in particular, how race, economic status, and education influence the choices that teenagers make in creating their social spaces online.

One very interesting point she makes is that the social division between MySpace and Facebook, and the movement from the former to the latter, mirrors that between the working and educated classes, particularly where unconscious awareness of class was involved:

What happened was modern day “white flight.” Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those who deserted MySpace did so by “choice” but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.

And, also, that those in the upper class (Facebook) show a familiar condescension toward those in the lower class (MySpace), as well as a distrust of their taste and values:

The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to everyone out there. And if we think back to the language used by teens who use Facebook when talking about MySpace, we should be truly alarmed. Those who are from privileged backgrounds tend to be far more condescending towards those who are not than vice versa. Many of us in this room come from privileged worlds where we want to “help” those who are not well-off. Here is where a privilege-check is necessary. How often do our language and mannerisms reflect a problematic level of condescension? Perhaps we should look at our teens. They are certainly speaking in a manner that reveals distrust and condescension.

“Class” is a forbidden topic in the United States, so much so that most of us–at least, those of us not at the very top–are barely aware of its existence. But despite our deplorable lack of class consciousness, the classes themselves are very real, and social technologies have only enhanced our ability to wall ourselves off in our own communities. boyd uses the excellent term “homophily” to describe our instinctive drive to stick to those like ourselves. How many of us really know anyone outside of our own class? Or would have anything to say to them if we did?

I do wonder, however, what kind of role social aspiration and upward mobility might play. Do those who have migrated from MySpace to Facebook see it as a place where they can be around a better class of people?

Anyway, I think that those who are interested in creating social spaces online would be wise to take these social attitudes into account. You might think that your cool new technological playground is the perfect place for people of all kinds to work and play together–but your intended audience may not see it that way. We should always look at the assumptions of the people we’re aiming our work at–and our own assumptions most of all.

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