nerdTech


27
Jul 10

Books & eBooks

A few days ago, I tweeted an article from TechCrunch about how Amazon reports that last month, they sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. It’s a little hard to do a complete analysis from the few numbers that they reported, especially because it’s not apples-to-apples on price, titles, etc — but even directionally, this is an amazing milestone. It’s incredible to me how quickly eBooks have emerged, after languishing for so long.

For me personally, it’s acute: I don’t really even like buying books that I can’t get electronically anymore. It shows in my library — I’ve been giving away about 100-200 books a year to our public library, but still have well over 1,000 in the house. But I have more than 150 on my Kindle, after 2 1/2 years. My physical library is shrinking, my electronic one growing.

I have zero sentimentality – none – about the form of the book. I’ve noted elsewhere that what I discovered on getting my Kindle is that it isn’t particularly books that I love so much, it’s reading that I love. Novels, non-fiction works, short stories, whatever. It’s the words that I’ve always cared about, the ideas, the narratives, the characters. Not the wood pulp, the binding glue, the flashy book jackets (that often don’t have anything at all to do with the author’s intent).

But lately I’m worried that as we rush headlong into the electronic future that we’re losing something.

I think it’s pretty clear that we’re not reading as well — every reader I talk with reports that they’re not comprehending the books quite as deeply as they used to. I believe we’ll get better at reading electronically, and the format will allow better paging through and spatial memory eventually, but that’s far from obvious to me. (Most avid readers I talk with say that they can usually remember where on the page they read something — top left, lower right, in the middle, whatever — and that’s always been true for me. The reflowable digital form obviously breaks that spatial memory, and is a bit of a problem.)

But the thing I’m worried about more lately is the disappearance of books in our physical spaces. I’ve always found that when I go visit peoples’ houses that what’s on their bookshelves is a bit of a lens into their lives and their values. Almost invariably when people come over to our house for dinner, I’ll hand them a book from my shelves that they’re interested in with no expectation (or desire, actually) to get the book back.

I find it even in my own home — when I’m in the office, I’ll often notice a cluster of books about something that reminds me of a time in my life, or stokes an old curiosity, or that just makes me happy.

But now the books we have in our house don’t really represent the current me. We tend to have 3 categories: (1) kids books, (2) coffee table books, and (3) books from our past that we haven’t given away yet. I believe that will happen in most homes — and maybe it already has been, since the introduction of the television — and it makes our personal spaces much more anonymous — more screens, less deep content.

I feel the same thing as I travel around — in the airport or on airplanes, nobody can see what I’m reading. Mostly, that’s okay with me — I didn’t really want to talk to my seat neighbor about Stieg Larsson that much anyway. But it bugs me more that my wife can’t see what I’m reading — the books used to serve as an instant conversation-starter. Now the reading experience is faceless, not conversation-inviting at all.

Anyway, I’m sure we’ll replace books as a lens into our brains and lives with something else — digital picture frames? Facebook pages glowing from our walls at home?

Nevertheless, I think we’re losing something in the process. That always happens as we move from one technology to the next, but we’ve overturned a 500 year old technology in less than a decade, and it’s going to be very disorienting.

I’ve never missed reading physical books nearly as much as I miss having the physical artifacts in our world, and how so many clues to who we are are disappearing along with them.


10
May 10

Reading Books on iPad and Kindle: A Comparison

I’ve now had my iPad long enough to read a couple of books all the way through and compare to the experience of reading books on my Kindle. I’ve come to the opinion that I think for many (most?) people, the iPad will be the more compelling choice. That includes people who read just a few books each year, as well as students, as texts for school become more interactive and engaging. But for lifelong readers like myself, who read long books frequently, the Kindle is a superior reading experience for a number of reasons.

In other words, they’re different devices, and one is not the superset of the other.

I’ve gone through a few stages in coming to this conclusion — pre-iPad I was convinced the iPad wouldn’t be any good for reading at all. I was wrong. The first few weeks I had my iPad, I didn’t turn on my Kindle a single time. But the last couple of weeks I’ve been balancing out usage, and finding that I’m much happier.

The iPad is, for sure, a better experience for magazines, newspapers, and (obviously) web content. (Not to mention video and interactive stuff, which the current Kindle can’t even attempt.) It’s quite an acceptable reading experience for books, too, especially if you’re reading just a few pages at a time.

But whenever I tried to read for a longer time, I found a few problems. It’s pretty heavy to hold in one hand. The touch UI means the screen is always smudgy and needs attention (that same attention I’m trying to pay to the actual content). It’s not very comfortable to hold laying down in bed. And I found that the backlit screen tended to get me worked up as I was trying to drift off to sleep — sort of defeating the whole purpose.

There’s also an unusual psychological effect that happens. My brain tends to think of my iPad first in terms of communication — checking mail, following Twitter, whatever. And so even when I’m trying to focus on a book, I find myself hopping out of the book for just a few seconds to check up on things. With Kindle, my brain seems to understand that I’m in long-form-reading mode, and stays more still.

As I’ve read full books on both devices over the past few weeks, what I’ve found empirically is that I can read faster, and for longer, and with better understanding and recall when I’m using my Kindle than when I’m reading on my iPad. I can’t prove that to you for a certainty, but it’s very obvious in my recent reading — there’s just no comparison. So for me, the iPad can’t supersede the Kindle. They’re different devices for different purposes.

When I use the iPad, in a lot of ways, I feel like I’m living in the future. It’s an amazing device — beautiful, fun to throw data around, etc. And ultimately is an incredibly interesting split between form and function. (The form has essentially nothing that indicates what the function is — it’s perfectly plastic.)

And looking at the Kindle, it feels a lot like I’m looking at the past. It’s kind of a homely looking device. Has too many buttons in weird shapes. It’s black and white. Strange to say that about an invention that didn’t even really exist 3 years ago.

But I think it’s that in-the-past-ness of the Kindle that’s also its great strength. I find my mind more still, more focused. I find myself able to pay utmost attention to the content, and to really live in the words and ideas. In an age where I’m super-twitchy to read my tweets and mails all the time, the focusing effects of Kindle vs iPad feels like a real throwback win.

It’s pretty clear to me at this point that we’ve moving into a world where we’ll all have multiple screens around us — things we used to call “televisions,” or “phones,” or “eBooks,” or “computers.” And some of those screens will be have their own light and computing power like iPad; others will have reflective displays and mostly show content that comes from the cloud, like Kindle. I think as consumers, we’ll increasingly want all our content on whatever screen happens to fit our current circumstance. What’s around, what’s easy to hold, maybe what’s easy to share with others. It’s very clear that we’ll have screens everywhere, and content connected to all of them.

Anyway, like I said at the top: I think that for most folks who only read a little bit, the value proposition of the iPad and everything it can do will be superior.

But for a guy who for his whole life has never gone anywhere without a book in his hand, the iPad just doesn’t serve me as well as the Kindle for reading books right now. That might change; I might adjust. We’ll see. But for now, for me, my Kindle is the place for books.


23
Mar 10

Kit

I’ll explain the significance of the picture later, but for now, here’s the background: it’s me, on a Christmas morning a long time ago, in the basement of the Rome, NY house where we lived. Obviously, I’m adorable, but that’s not my point right now. The more important feature of the picture is the television at the right — it’s a Heathkit, and I’ll talk about it more below.

Ever since the iPad was announced & described, I’ve had the elements of a post swirling around in my head. My friend Ben last week wrote his, and it says a lot of the things that I was planning to say — you should go read it. I don’t necessarily think all of the same things are important, although I agree with him on most of it. For me, the essential point is that we — Americans, netizens, techies, almost any grouping that I can think of that’s meaningful — are at our best when we are makers, when we tinker, when we invent. We’re at our best when we’re taking things apart — whether it’s technology, laws, organizations — twisting them around to see how they work, tweaking them this way and that, and eventually creating something new.

Invention and entrepreneurship is at the heart of change and progress; hacking and tinkering is the thing that leads to that invention.

In a nutshell, what worries me about the trajectory of computing is not so much the emergence of tightly-controlled, non-tinkerable boxes, but the presumption that “normal people” don’t ever want to tinker, don’t want to be bothered with understanding how things work. I think it’s not true, really — certainly not for everyone — but I even think that this distinction between “normal people” and “tinkerers” or “techies” or “makers” is bogus at best, and really dangerously corrosive at worst.

So like Ben, I’ll get an iPad and am really excited about it from an interaction point of view (so please be clear, this is not an anti-iPad rant or an anti-Apple rant), and because it makes computing more human scale than ever — just like my Kindle has done. But I have real misgivings about it because of the controlled, closed stance that it’s starting from, and that other technology companies and technologists are adopting.

But first, a little bit of a story about my own background and evolution as an engineer, and how that happened at all.

When I was growing up, I remember my dad futzing around with everything. I remember him having a workshop in each of the houses we lived in (we moved around every few years as the Air Force stationed him in different places). I remember him working on our cars, our plumbing, and on our electrical systems in every house, on appliances, everything. I remember we seem to have built a deck for every house we ever lived in.

But I have this especially strong memory that until I was probably 10 or 11, every television we bought would come in a kit, as a box full of parts, that Dad would put together — it was always a project for him. Now, as a kid, having a Heathkit television was basically mortifying. I mean, I just wanted us to go buy a “normal” television at Sears like everyone else did. Our TV didn’t look like other folks, and being different as a kid is always a tough feeling.

And, in fact, our first computer was a Sinclair Z-80 that, you guessed it, came in a kit. Then, since there was no prepackaged software to run on it, I typed in a bunch of BASIC programs from BYTE magazine. Good times.

The upside of that awkward feeling as a kid, though, has been significant and long lasting. The upside is that I’ve never really viewed technology as something that was magic. It always had components that added up to the whole, that you could replace, that you could mix in different ways. I’ve always felt like technology (and organizations, and laws, and most everything else) comes to us in a way that we should be poking at it, thinking about how things work, wondering how to make things better, wondering what would happen if you removed certain things.

I think people will say to me: “Well, of course. You’re an engineer; you’re a tinkerer. That’s what engineers do — normal people don’t assume they can rewire their house, or swap out a power supply on their TV or change the way an operating system works.”

But I think that’s bogus. It’s not like I was born an engineer — the instinct to fiddle with things isn’t something we’re born with. I became a tinkerer because I was exposed to surfaces that allowed — that invited — it. I figured out that I liked tweaking and building and creating because I got a bunch of chances to do that stuff, from hardware to software and everything in between. I knew I could do it because Dad modeled that behavior, but also because the stuff we had around the house was inspectable and malleable.

Don’t misunderstand: I don’t think it’s a real problem that I can’t change the capacitors in my television today — I think that the most interesting surfaces for tinkering tend to evolve over time — and today the primary tinkering substrate appears to me to be the open web.

What I do think is a problem is that today, unless you buy the Apple SDK you can’t modify the software on the device that you already purchased — that jailbreaking is criminalized and actively fought against. That’s a problem not because $99 is so exorbitant, but because people who don’t know they could be tinkerers — who haven’t gotten the chances that they need — won’t ever get them in that situation. That’s a problem.

I do think there’s tremendous creativity being unleashed by the rise of the iPhone and next the iPad — that’s a great thing. And I don’t really have any problem with Apple building systems the way they want to — they create excellent products and experiences.

The thing that I’m worried about is this feeling that seems to be growing in technology communities that “normal people” — these non-tinkerers — don’t want to tweak things, shouldn’t be allowed to tweak things, can’t be trusted with technical matters. Many will choose not to, I completely agree. But we shouldn’t presume such.

We all have the potential inside us to make things. But we’re not born into the world as makers — the world around us — the people in it and the artifacts in it — help us to discover what we can be.


27
Jan 10

Reading

In the main, this isn’t a post about the iPad, although there’s a bunch of relevance there, and the conclusion mostly is about the iPad.

I’ve been experimenting with different reading form factors for digital books over the last few weeks — I’ve of course had my various Kindles (Kindlii?) for a couple of years now, and have basically come to love them. I’ve read maybe a hundred books, at least a couple of over a thousand pages, and would not trade it. It is decidedly not a perfect device, and is…what’s the word?…oh, right: ugly. But it gets a lot right for the way that I use it.

But I’ve also been experimenting with reading on my iPhone (via the Kindle app) and on my laptop (again, via the Kindle app) — and I’ve written about some of my early experience in that mode. And when I say “experimenting,” what I mean is that I’ve been reading whole, long form books on it. When I went to Austin a couple of weeks ago, I intentionally didn’t bring my Kindle, preferring to try traveling without it.

And I’ve been trying to read longer chapters and parts of books on my laptop, through the Kindle application for Windows.

So the first conclusion is one that I’ve made before: it’s having your book content in the cloud that really makes the big difference. Being able to read your books on any screen that you happen to have with you is the thing that matters.

But beyond that, I’m finding that I’m a more capable and thoughtful reader when I use the Kindle, as opposed to the other devices. It’s a little hard to explain, but I can maintain a certain stillness and focus when I’m using the Kindle that I haven’t been able to achieve when reading on the iPhone or laptop — I find that on those 2 devices, I’m a little fidgety, and my mind tends to wander towards all the other things I can do on them. My retention isn’t as good as it is when I’m reading on the Kindle itself, and my attention span isn’t as long.

I think there are a few factors here:

  • The backlit LED screens just really are not as good for your eyes for reading text. There’s a dynamism to the letters from the lighting, I think, that makes it a little harder for me to focus on the letterforms. And I have this feeling that my eyes get fatigued much more quickly with backlit screens.
  • For the iPhone, the screen is just too small to read books without feeling like they have a million pages. So every book feels super long. It’s sort of like reading e-mail on your phone — you always find yourself thinking “holy cow, this is a long note” and then when you look at it on your laptop, you discover it was only a couple of lines.
  • For both the iPhone and laptop, I think I have different mental associations about what I do with them — so I found myself switching back and forth between apps quite a lot — which of course took me out of the flow of the book.
  • The laptop sucks in all sorts of ways for long form reading. There’s a keyboard between me & the screen, for example. The pixel density isn’t all that great. Just to name a couple.
  • The screen on my Kindle is clean. I am pretty fanatical about keeping my Kindle screen free of gunk — I really don’t touch it at all, and am careful about wiping it off when I need to. I’m also a little neurotic (shocking, I know), about keeping my phone (whether iPhone or Nexus One) clean, but there’s always a layer of grime on there, just because I manipulate the UI with my fingers constantly. [New learning: this is doubly gross when you’re home sick. Gah.] Even with the extremely cool oleophobic screens that Apple has created, my iPhone is just grimy.
  • The last thing is the battery life — I usually don’t leave the wireless on for my Kindle, which results in something like 3 weeks of actual use in battery life. I just don’t ever worry about whether it’ll run out or not. With the iPhone, I can’t usually get more than about 13 hours — so when I fly, I’m jealous about how I use it, and I’ve got battery meters running in my head regarding how to keep it charged.

I’m the first to recognize that I’m not all that typical a reader — the volume of text I consume, whether long form like text, micro form like twitter, or article length like the web, is pretty high. And I read as much for pleasure as I do for work.

But for me, the Kindle is the must-have device for reading, with the iPhone app a very nice-to-have that I use sometimes, and the laptop really as an only occasional use device — it’ll get better when they introduce searching and cataloging, but won’t ever be primary.

Now, I don’t know how that will change, for me, with the advent of the iPad. First off, I’ll very likely get one — this isn’t about that, it’s about whether I’ll read most books on it. I think they’ve done a number of very nice things in the user experience on it, and it looks like a more intimate media device than I’ve ever seen, really.

[As an aside, I noticed a ton of UI elements that seemed bizarre. A wood grain bookshelf actually in the graphics? Showing the pages and the bindings of the books? The spiral tab in the date book? Weird throwbacks to already out-of-date physical forms — I guess intended to be for the metaphor bridge for the mass market, but still weird.]

It’s a little hard to tell until I get to read longer books on an iPad, but I don’t think it’s going to be the book-reading device for me.

I think it will be exceptional for many other things, and for people who don’t read as many books, or mostly read shorter form material, it’s going to be very worth paying the additional money to get the functionality over the Kindle. In other words, for people for whom reading is an occasional activity, or for just a few minutes a day, I think the iPad and devices like it will be fine.

I have a nagging suspicion that it will continue the erosion of our ability to read long form books, and actually to make long form arguments — with our politics and our marketing and everything else turning into snippets, I think that’s not such a great thing. But I recognize that’s a curmudgeony attitude.

I just get the feeling that the ability to watch movies and listen to music and swipe pictures around, etc etc, on a device that is people’s primary way to also consume books, will mean that the relative time spent reading will go down.

Some other random thoughts:

  • It’s good to have more readers in the market — I think that will help everyone.
  • I’m very glad they chose a relatively standard format — ePub — that’s a great thing, even though it includes DRM. But I trust the DRM will go away over time.
  • Having said that, the extent of a book catalog shows itself very quickly. There’s a huge difference, for real readers, between catalogs that have the bestsellers and more comprehensive ones. The Amazon Kindle catalog is quite comprehensive at this point — I only run into about 1 in every 5 books that I want that I can’t get.
  • Pretty disappointed in the connectors on the iPad — am really tired of the iPhone connector, and wish they would move to micro USB like everyone else on the planet.
  • I can’t figure out why the early hands-on reviewers thought the virtual keyboard was going to feel great — totally flat keyboards have never felt great. That may not matter, but I thought it was a weird expectation.

Over time, I’d expect the technology in both the Kindle and the iPad to get a lot cheaper — I have a feeling that we may carry around more than one, since they’ll be pretty slim and easy to throw into a bag. But we’ll see.

For now, for me, I’ll keep reading on my Kindle for the foreseeable future, even while swiping around on the iPad for more dynamic content.


17
Jan 10

iPhone & Android

I’ve had a Nexus One for a couple of weeks now, and think that with Android 2.1, it’s a good advance. Right at the moment, I’m having issues with the battery — can’t hold a charge for more than about 5 minutes, even after multiple varieties of soft & hard resets. But setting that aside, I think it’s a good device with a good operating system.

A few thoughts on the comparisons — I think I’m not adding much here that hasn’t already been written:

  • The fit & finish of the hardware I like on the Nexus One a little better than on my iPhone — but you should take that with a grain of salt, since my iPhone is more than a year old.
  • Nexus One is much faster than my 3G iPhone, which is getting slower and slower with higher latency all the time.
  • The web is a much more legitimate first class citizen on Android than on the iPhone — should be no surprise. It’s just more integrated in dozens of ways. Not as totally web native as Palm, but still really good.
  • Notifications on Android, and background processes that can fetch data and fire notifications, are much, much better than anything on iPhone. (Except for the inability to have app badges — seems like they should add those soon.)
  • And I really like that there are indicator lights — the trackball and the charging light — on the Nexus One to tell you things without needing to unlock the phone.
  • The virtual keyboard on Android has some good advances, but ultimately doesn’t enable the quick accuracy of the iPhone — I think the iPhone is messing with hit targets as you type, depending on the likelihood for each letter — and it helps tremendously.
  • I’m no longer really worried about the lack of applications on Android — it seems very clear that everyone will start writing apps for both iPhone and Android as first tier platforms — but I am a little concerned about the quality of the app experience on Android — the apps just don’t feel like they’re put together nearly as well. It seems like they can access more of the operating system than iPhone apps can, so they should ultimately be more compelling, but the user experience just is very inconsistent at best, and really awful at worst. This is clearly due to the SDK for each OS — Apple’s SDK just seems to allow developers to put together applications that feel better overall. This is just one area where the battle feels a lot like we’re repeating history with an Apple platform versus a more open platform.
  • Google Voice on the Nexus one is a fantastic experience. It’s very clear that traditional telephony is walking dead.

At the end of the day, though, my iPhone experience is just more intimate than my Android experience — it feels more like it has my life on it, while the Android just feels like a very good phone and mobile web device. It’s just easier to get more of what I care about — my pictures, my music, my movies, games I like, and all my books (via the Kindle app) on my iPhone. So it feels more like an integrated part of my life than the Android. As frustrated as I am with my current iPhone 3G because of battery life & sluggishness & general physical-falling-apart, I still feel better when I have it than an Android.

So I’m encouraged by the advances of Android & the Nexus One — and fully expect that the huge array of players in the ecosystem will push things forward more quickly now — ultimately, we as consumers really need a platform for our mobile lives that’s an alternative to Cupertino — not because of what Apple is per se, but because multiple choices means that everyone has to get better.