I’ve been using the Sony Reader Library via Windows 7 for a while now, and today I found a new bug: while attempting to sync to my Reader, the application would hang on a particular book.  After trying a number of different things, I found out that it was not the book which was listed that was causing the problem, but the next book in the library.

For some reason, the link to the location of the book on disk was corrupted; it showed up just fine in the Reader Library, though clicking on the book resulted in an error saying that it could not locate the file.  I removed that book from the library, added it in again from its location on disk, and then the Sync operation worked without a hitch.

I haven’t had too many problems with the Reader Library software from Sony, though clearly what they need to do in this case is to alert the user that there is a problem, and what that problem is.   Hopefully this will be fixed at some point, though the pace of updates is currently very slow.

Today, however, Amazon revealed their third version of the 6″ Kindle, with a Wi-Fi only version for $140.  Notably, too, the battery is larger, reportedly lasting up to a month; and they also are packing in a new e-ink display which is supposed to garner better contrast and faster page turns.

DRM improved?

Perhaps I’m a bit late to the party, though I did find on Amazon’s website a certain section labeled “Downloading to Multiple Devices,” which reads in part:

Content purchased from the Kindle Store can be downloaded to your Kindle, or Kindle compatible device, as long as you’ve registered the device to the Amazon.com account that purchased the Kindle content. There is no limit on the number of times a title can be downloaded to a registered device, but there may be limits on the number of devices (usually 6) that can simultaneously use a single book.

That means you can download and read your books on any Kindle device you own as long you’ve registered each device to the Amazon.com account where your Kindle Library is stored.

Personally, this sounds like a big upgrade.  A year or so ago, it was the case that certain titles would only be allowed to be downloaded a certain number of times.  That meant that with multiple devices, generations, etc., the content which you paid for would no longer be yours. Tying the purchases to the account, and having the with “no limit” to the number of downloads sounds like a great step up.

Closing remarks

I personally have no reason to want to stray from my Reader.   It serves me well, is still great for my eyes, and still does have a touch screen which the Kindle series lacks.  Even so, it seems as though Amazon is slowly getting their act together, and I can see that the case may be that they win this e-book stuff in the end, especially if they keep good hardware at such low prices; as well as a reasonable system of DRM to allow your content to actually be your own.

Having read the book in rather short order, there is admittedly not all that much to the science: it’s generally better to want to do things internally rather than to be forced or tricked into getting the particular task done.  Rewards can sometimes cheapen the goal, and thereby be a de-motivational tool.

What’s great about the book is that the author, Daniel Pink, keeps everything very simple and very organized, and never goes off the deep end.  Drive clocks in around 250 pages in the hardcover edition, though a good portion of that are in references and a variety of different summaries, re-caps, and applications of the book’s theories.  It all reads very easily and goes by rather quickly.

I’m not going to divulge any of the secrets within, though I’m sure you can get the gist easily enough from reviews online or by other sources.  Indeed, Pink doesn’t offer too much in the way of his own personal theories, rather his art is more in accessibly refactoring the science which has been available for decades from some otherwise more obscure sources.  Even so, Drive is well worth a look, and I suggest you get into it when you get a chance. It’s personally given me some hope, and some great thoughts on how to keep on pushing forward in the best ways possible.

It was a bit odd that the author described little boys being naked reasonably often throughout the narrative, though I didn’t think all that much about it; maybe he was just against future clothes, or global warming in the future took off to change our societal habits.

Then, after consulting the wisdom of Wikipedia, I found out that Orson Scott Card is just a fucking asshole. I’m not going to repeat what he believes, since you can click that link or look around for more evidence of it on the Internet.  It’s really his thoughts on homosexuality that get me really upset.

I’m writing this here so that people may read it; but, more importantly, that they won’t buy any of his works or support his writing.  I feel rather cheated, personally, and I wish I had known before I started.

What I find most surprising about reading this book is how little I gave a shit about Big Brother.  Most of the time I’ve heard the book referenced, it has to do largely with Big Brother watching over every aspect of our lives.  Since we don’t see the cameras or telescreens around us; and since we aren’t corralled and tortured for thought-crime, it seems that people look on the novel mostly as pure fantasy, some awful prediction about a future which thankfully never has been realized.

I’m sure there are countless lists of analysis of this particular text on the Internet as well as just about anywhere else.  Even so, I feel it important to re-inforce that Orwell, while drawing lines to a society which is certainly the epitome of totalitarian control, he much more importantly depicts the structure of politics and power which has played out and continues to thrive in our current society.  We do have the right to think freely; though the efforts of double-think and news-speak as it has constrained our culture and discourse is all very real.

I urge anyone who has not yet turned these pages to please do so; and that for those who may have missed the meanings the first time, to try again with closer eye to the theory and to the text.

Me and the NYT

I’ve been a bit more busy with work in the past few months, and my newspaper readership has gone down.  Not too long ago, the New York Times announced that they’re going to a pay model for their online content starting next year, 2011.  They’ll be slowly phasing out their free content by the end of the year.  Perhaps some of this is due to people practicing the type of behavior I had suggested in my previous post.  Most likely, it’s that they are running thin on their margins and they want to try and inject money into their system any way that they can.

I have since also cut out my use of the calibre software to aggregate news content, as I did before.  The Sony Reader Store currently offers the New York Times for $14/month, or $0.75/issue.  I’ve tried this out, and the formatting and general experience is quite great.  I get enough online and through the wire that I don’t feel an urge to grab onto the full subscription, though daily issues when I want to catch up are a great option.

Podcasts

I did, for a time, subscribe to a number of technology podcasts from a variety of sources.  Especially when commuting, it’s a great source of information.  I’ve now moved on to audiobooks provided by OverDrive at my local library, and have since cut out all but three staples: “On Science” and “Technology” from NPR, and then the Phones Show Chat.  These are enough to break up whatever book I’m listening to at the moment.

Internet news

I’ve been toning down the number of feeds from Google Reader, and I’ve been putting more into Twitter.  You can see my current structure on this at my Twitter lists page. Google Reader then picks up the Ars Technica feed, Digg’s Technology section, and other random sites of friends, etc.

More books, less Internet

Fundamentally, I’ve made it more and more of a point to spend less time reading crap on the Internet, and more time reading books.  The definition of the word “reading” has in some ways taken different steps in the tract of where technology and blogs and the Internet has taken it.  In reading a book, where certain themes follow for hundreds of pages rather than two or five, there’s fundamentally a different way that our mind is processing information.  I’m saying this, of course, on the Internet and not a book; and I feel that I’m writing it for a reason; so I don’t mean to imply that one is necessarily more valuable than another.  With that said, though, what I’ve been tending towards with the above processes has lent me more time to get through books, gaining back some sense of worth in the time that slips through my hands over the course of a given day.  Audiobooks, too, have been adding up my hours; while cooking or eating or doing other tasks that require some degree of movement, I’m getting something into my ears which has been both enjoyable and educational.

Well, that’s where I’m at today, anyway; who knows what’s in store next.

Steiner is not the best writer out there; yet I can certainly relate to his approach and appreciate his perspective.  He’s an engineer, and he’s fascinated with what good will come of the world once we start to drip away our American addiction to oil.  $20 Per Gallon is set into chapters with sequential consequences from increments of the price of gasoline: $4 introduction, followed by a $6 chapter, etc.

Obviously, then, the book is largely speculation.  We don’t have a world where gas costs $20 a gallon in America, and so it’s a silly attempt to figure out what exactly is going to happen at that point in time.  If you’re looking for hard data or absolute proof, then these pages may not satisfy you; but I’d then argue that the same goal was silly at the start.  With that said, Steiner has thought out a whole lot of consequences stemming from massive increases in the cost of fuel: food production, transportation, globalization, and a variety of other topics are dissected and plotted out in the eventual patterns which we most likely will see.

What I like most about the book is the amount of positivity that the author sees for our future.  It is rather easy to see doom in the face of increased consumer cost of just about anything; though in terms of energy, the base component of how we live our lives, a higher ticket price does not mean we will waste away.

On the contrary, Steiner argues largely that we will adapt quite well, and that we will just have to structure ourselves differently than we have in the past forty or fifty years.  Cheap oil has allowed us to be lazy; it’s allowed our food to go to shit; it’s tied us inescapably to cars, in countless numbers, and it’s also allowed us to move our economy away from the borders of the country, taking away our jobs and investments in the same movement.

It may help that I see certain parts of science-fiction in this book.  A big part of what moves us forward as a society is some kind of conflation of what is now fiction and what can be reality in our future.  Steiner seems to understand this, and my only hope is that there are enough people out there who see such signs as opportunities rather than omens of doom.

Now that I’m finished with the book, I see that it’s listed under “juvenile fiction” sections; I hadn’t a clue about that, previously, and even after finishing it I was a bit confused by the listing.  In many ways, it makes sense: there’s nothing in the pages that are all that offensive, and the main character is a boy who is at all times less than 16 years old.  With that said, I found it to be a great read, very well written with a solid story that was strictly entertaining.

Without giving too much away, the chapters are rather self contained, almost to the effect that they are a series of short stories that are loosely coupled.  In many ways, though, the variety adds to the depth of the story, and also makes for a quick read.  I’ve heard that there are strong followings to Gaiman’s novels, and I can certainly see why.

I live close to a very large cemetery, which I’d heard was beautiful from a variety of sources.  Since I’ve never been that much of a goth, nor have I had that much interest in graveyards in general, I didn’t give it much thought.  Reading this book, though, made me a bit curious, and this past weekend I spent an hour or two walking through the cemetery paths.  It really was pretty incredible, and got my mind going a bit about burial and legacy; which for me was an unexpected twist. Respect to that, and to the book.

The Tipping Point, as I took it, is largely about the workings of fast moving social dynamics.  Wearing my mathematician’s hat, this book touches the most upon equations without getting a single bit of math language into the mix.  Perhaps this is part of what makes the style work for so many people, since math is generally a “yucky” subject, best left to geeks and nerds.

Gladwell’s general premise is that there are certain systems, focusing largely on social dynamics, by which seeds of popularity “tip” from one linear mode of behavior into something more daring such as an exponential or another general higher order system.  To most people, the pages do not read anything remotely like what I am describing; though underlying the arguments of The Tipping Point is essentially not much more complicated than that: we pass a threshold, and the numbers start to drastically change.

In terms of social patterns, there are a few fundamental threshold points which Gladwell outlines.  A lot of it does have to do with marketing, though his applications and examples are rather varied.  Essentially, an idea or pattern of behavior suddenly “blows up,” or “tips” towards mass appeal / recognition.  There are Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen and all sorts of analysis of “epidemics”; and its in this social analysis that the same kind of phenomenon is analyzed in a wide variety of different contexts.  The true worth, then, is in the melding between the math and the many ways in which its forms appear.

The first third of Outliers was rather exciting.  I’m not so much a fan of hockey, though I do work in computers; and in the computing world, when you’re born certainly can have a big influence on whether you’re behind or ahead of the curve.  Gladwell goes through both youth hockey leagues and innovators in computing to find what it is that sets certain people apart from the crowd.  For hockey players, being born near a cutoff date is most important.  For computing, being born early enough to predate the tech booms and having ample access to programming workstations before anyone else allowed Bill Gates and others to spearhead their own computing revolutions.  The law of 10,000 hours is likewise very intriguing; I won’t give any more of it away, since you can most likely find more information on Google or Wikipedia.

Where Outliers takes a wrong turn, in my opinion, is when Gladwell moves on from hockey and computers and starts to analyze cultural differences and sociological differences.  There is a short sentence or two which marks the beginning of this analysis,whereby Gladwell tersely notes that it can potentially be dangerous to speak in terms of cultural generalities, and that this kind of thinking can easily turn towards racism and stereotyping.  He does not come back to this point, as though a few words are enough to stem the tides of how popular opinion will look upon these words.

The reality is that it just isn’t realistic to talk for pages on end about what makes people from the South violent; or why Asians have trouble asserting themselves, all under the guise that no one is going to use these studies, framed as scientific fact, for less than noble purposes.  In a certain context some of his analysis would be OK: framed with great caution and repeated understanding that generalities about culture do not necessarily describe the people who fall into these categories, we may be able to get away without more bad stereotypes or distaste of the other.  In a mass market book, however, without adequate framing, I feel that it’s a wrong step to jump into such a discussion.  Perhaps in the future we can deal with these kinds of issues in a more conscious manner, though sweeping racism under the rug as a theoretical detail is not what I consider to be responsible.

At this point I can’t say that I’m all that much more advanced.  I do, however, have a desire to keep up on what’s happening, with a limited amount of time to do so.  Computer work, sound work, media, and other forms of reading seem to seep away the time, though I’ve been making roads towards something like awareness.

Since I picked up my Sony Reader Touch, I’ve been using the wonderful calibre software by Kovid Goyal.  One great feature of this software is that it allows for automated download of the daily web version of the New York Times which then can be sent over to the Reader.  While the free web version is a cut down version, the Sunday editions easily gross over 1,000 pages in the electronic format.  Weekday editions are about half that size, on average.  As much time as I like to dedicate to seeding my head with the various articles, there’s just been too much to take in, even over the course of the day.

Previously, I tried out CNN via Google Reader to do about the same job.   The Times, however, has some amazing writers and editors, and I haven’t found any source to be quite as good in that regard.  I have tried out other sites from time to time, though I keep coming back to them and have never been disappointed.  Moreover, being able to have that content in quasi-paper form on my Reader is incredibly useful, especially for longer articles which are a bit tougher to get through via computer monitor.

Freeloading and subscriptions

The reality of newspapers is that they’re having a lot of financial trouble.  Especially outlets which still have an actual print version, such as the Times and the Boston Globe, it has been increasingly hard for them to compete with other free sources of information online.

The Times does currently have a subscription model via an Adobe Air application called the Times Reader.  For $3.50/week, you can get the same content as I’m getting now with calibre, but in a desktop-only client.  You can, from within the application, print each article to a PDF; though they are images, not text, which drives the filesize way up.  Compared to having the content in EPUB or LRF or PDF in one step, it’s certainly a step backward, and is certainly not adding any lasting value for me.

Effectively, the cost of the Times Reader is there to stave off the cost of the missing ads from the free the web version; to most web users, however, it is easy enough to ignore the ads without any real cost.  This is a fundamental problem with most newspapers in this digital age, and I hope that in the future there are more options out there which allow for cheap yet not-free access to good content.

I don’t personally own a Kindle, though my understanding is that this is the closest thing to a reasonable subscription model for newspapers.  Sony will release their Reader Daily Edition in the next few months, too, which has wireless access and, hopefully, some reasonable subscription options.  As always, this is also a spot for DRM to rear its ugly head; however, with wireless delivery to the device alone, and the inability to draw the articles back off the device via USB, etc., this seems like a reasonable compromise.