More about "America's Defense Meltdown" (Updated)
This is the book
I mentioned yesterday, a very useful overview of the issues, challenges, constraints, and possibilities for America's defense policy. Two tech-related positive developments concerning this book.
- Hardcovers of the book will be available sometime soon. But if you would like to start reading it today, you can get an electronic copy, free, by requesting one from Winslow Wheeler, the book's editor. He has placed his email address on the
Center for Defense Information web site, and (with his permission) I also give it here: WinslowWheeler@msn.com .
UPDATE: free PDF download now available directly via
this link.
- If, in addition to being interested in a sustainable defense policy for America, you use a Kindle, you will find that the emailed PDF version formats itself well for Kindle reading. (Thanks to Dave Finton on this point. For info and links about how to view .DOC and .PDF files on a Kindle, check
here.)
How to avoid becoming a Kindle nerd-bore
Only one way: Just shut up when tempted to say or write anything about it. Otherwise you'll be driving people crazy with your enthusing about how useful and convenient it is, and what its potential might be, and how many elegant decisions are evident in its conception and design.
I'm talking mainly about high-level functional design: what should the whole system be able to do? What functions should be built in or omitted? Rather than the physical industrial design of the device itself -- which is quite nice but is widely recognized as Ver 1.0 of something that will go through many refinements and tweaks.
After the jump, two points about functional-design elegance, then maintaining silence on this subject for as long as I can:
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Continue reading "How to avoid becoming a Kindle nerd-bore" »
Newbie Kindle reactions (cont)
1)
Whole different way of thinking about buying books:
Sitting on the airplane at Newark airport Friday afternoon, getting ready for the 13-hour flight to Beijing. People are still trudging aboard, still OK to talk on the phone, chatting with a friend who mentions a great new book he's sure I'll want to read. While talking with him, I take out the Kindle that I got
three days earlier, search the Kindle online store, find and buy the book, have it delivered to the Kindle to read during the flight -- all within about two minutes total. Huge reduction in the gap between "thought that a book might be interesting" and "paying money for that book." Works only for books in the Kindle catalogue, of course. Implications not so good for book stores but positive for the overall industry of selling ideas / thoughts / writing, I would think.
2)
And about not buying books:
Giant supply of books for free download, in Kindle and other eBook formats,
here and
here, among other sites. They're mainly out-of-copyright classics, from
Ulysses to
War and Peace to
Huckleberry Finn to
Persuasion to
Looking Backward to
The Oregon Trail to
Anne of Green Gables to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (and many by PG Wodehouse). Plus a few new ones. Small donations solicited
here. In most cases you download to your computer and transfer to Kindle via USB cable, which is extremely easy.
3)
And about the process of reading:
Spent six or seven hours of the flight reading on the Kindle. Perfectly pleasant and legible. Only one inconvenience relative to " real" books -- harder to flip ahead or back several pages at a time. (You scroll page by page, or else go to the table of contents.) And a kind of mental-picture adjustment: it's easier to insert bookmarks or placeholders, or seach for a specific word in the text; harder to have a remembered visual image of a certain passage as it fits on a certain place on a page. Not good for books where pictures, illustrations, maps, production quality matter a lot. Very, very good for reading Word .DOC files or .PDFs that I would otherwise have to read on the computer.
My theory: television didn't eliminate radio, telephones didn't eliminate personal conversations, eBooks won't eliminate real books. People always find more ways to communicate, and this will be another way. Very good for some kinds of information, not so much for others. A welcome new addition to the mix.
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