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Maybe Amazon and Visa should talk?
Packing for an airline trip. My wife online booking the next family trip. Keeps trying to confirm and pay for the tickets -- cheap advance purchase deal! System keeps rejecting the Visa card number she feeds it. Hmmmm. Am I going to have trouble using the card on the upcoming trip?
I continue to pack. She holds on the phone with Visa. Suddenly the answer is there: card has been frozen because of suspicious tiny transactions. One for thirty cents, one for forty-five. Just the kind of "probing" charge that credit card thieves attempt to see if a card number is good -- and that, for the same reasons, credit card companies block.
But wait a minute. These charges -- shown below -- were for the fifteen-cent conversion fees that Amazon charges when you mail it a .PDF or .DOC file to be sent to your Kindle. I was sending several files so I could read them on the plane. (The $1.25 charge is for my monthly Kindle version of the world's finest magazine -- better on paper, but this is a nice backup.) You can get files converted for the Kindle for free, but it means manually transferring them via your computer. I thought it was worth the seventy-five cents to skip that phase.
I can't be the first person to use a credit card for tiny Kindle charges. Maybe a little coordination to be worked out here, guys? Another opportunity for the Nook?
New meta-theme: design!
The chart below, from David Wolf's
Silicon Hutong site, is not meant to be taken in 100% straight-faced earnest -- I think. It's a flow chart for deciding whether to buy a book as a new hard cover, a used hard cover, or a Kindle-style ebook, including the complication that Wolf is based Beijing and can find only so much in the local shops. (I say: choose whatever form you want, but just buy the damned book!!!)
It's connected to a more earnest but quite interesting
discussion by Wolf of the role of physical books in a personal library, even when ebooks are available. And I'll use it as an intro to the next running meta-theme here: various aspects of design.
I realize that many of the leads and items I am interested in discussing and thinking about -- once the
art course is over and the
flu has passed and I'm caught up with, ahem, my "real" work -- really concern design in several aspects.
- Design of cities, including the ones springing up all over China, as hinted at in this introductory Beijing-vs-Shanghai post several weeks back.
- Design of "tools for thinking," which generally includes software and which I find particularly provocative and rich in the emerging (for me) intersection of straight text and graphics. I don't mean photo illustrations; I mean "mapping" and "visualization" programs of several sorts that I, as a pure-text guy from way back, find increasingly useful.
- Design of hardware for thinking and learning, not excluding the familiar Kindle and the even more familiar PC and Mac.
- Design of the working environment, the reduce the threat posed by the Number One Killer of Modern-day Thought, non-stop distraction.
More on all of that later. This is fair warning. Now, real work again for a while.
"It could have been the Kindle..."
My wife's consoling comment the other day -- that I
had lost all my credit cards and cash, but at least I still had my own Electronic Reading Device -- brings up two relevant updates. One is about the evolution of the device; the other, about the ergonomics of reading.
First,
Kindle 1 versus Kindle 2. Below, a compare and contrast from the Kindle labs here at the Beijing HQ. On the right, in brown, the original, time-tested Kindle Classic, with an add-on leather cover from M-Edge. On the left, in black, the updated Kindle 2, in the standard-issue Amazon-logo'd leatherlike cover (though it doesn't come standard with the Kindle -- you have to buy it separately. I now have an even fancier add-on cover):
Same two items, in opened-and-readable view. Each shows the screen saver that comes on if you haven't been turning pages for a few minutes. Old on the bottom, new at the top, ever-handy Chinese-English dictionary in the upper left just for a color highlight:
What's the difference between old and new? Screen slightly brighter on new version, but old is plenty clear. Battery life also somewhat better, but plenty long in original version -- days and days. New has easier navigation; NextPage/PreviousPage keys better designed to avoid accidental pressing of keys; and a much svelter look and feel (below):
All in all the new Kindle seemed the ideal machine for ... my wife!, who initially scoffed but now is a devotee. Plus, sticking with the doughty Kindle Classic shores up my credentials as an outstanding husband. It's probably worth noting that the K1/K2 contrast is of purely antiquarian interest, since the original models are no longer sold.
Next,
future of books. My friend Jacob Weisberg, of Slate, has rashly ignored my advice on how to avoid
becoming a Kindle bore and published his paean to the device several weeks ago,
here. I'll solidify my non-bore status by mildly dissenting from his view. Jacob tells us that:
The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and
printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.
I say: sort of.
Continue reading ""It could have been the Kindle..."" »
Kids and Kindle
My wife is only days away from receiving her exciting
new new-to-her Kindle, which is to say that I expect soon to get my hands on a Kindle 2. Meanwhile this note from a good friend about the machine's effect in his household:
An (unreported?) Kindle phenomenon: 11-year old girl, drove parents crazy by not reading books because totally addicted to electronics, has now transferred total addiction to Kindle 2 - and now does nothing, ever, but read books, one after another. In bed, in the car, while eating - while crossing streets!
[My wife] says, "Let's buy Amazon stock. In six months, the world will have discovered this particular phenomenon." (She is the one who had the sudden insight that this might work for [our daughter].)
Ah, this explains the trajectory of my financial life. On hearing the story, my first instinct was not, "Hey, let's act on the potential market-moving nature of this news" but rather "Hey, maybe this is a new answer to all those old laments about American kids refusing to read." Either way, good news for Amazon, good news for the family in question -- and not even bad news for those who have most reason to fear the coming of Kindle, book-store owners, since it sounds as if this new enthusiast was not spending that much time in book stores anyway.
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:
____________
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.
