Archive for the “reading & writing” Category

Getting information in three languages you can’t speak is much more informative than getting it in just one.

Last week, we took Book Club to a new level with a guest appearance by the author – Belmont’s own Toby Lester – of our chosen book, The Fourth Part of the World.  I had worried that such an august presence would impede the club’s traditional focus on wine, gossip and whingeing about our jobs, but we had plenty of time for all four parts.

Lester’s book is a vivd and polymathematical ramble across a few centuries of history leading up to the European “age of discovery” largely seen through the prism of mapmakers, especially a certain Waldseemüller, who in 1507 first printed “America” on a map of the hemisphere from which I am now writing.  We got a fresh look at some familiar figures like Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus and some wonderfully-told new (to most of us) stories.  Have you heard of Prester John?

The Fourth Part of the World reminds us that Columbus was nowhere near the first to conceive of the world as round, and it tells the story of many approximations close and not so close of the actual size of the globe, and the gradual discovery by Europeans of the true arrangement of the continents and their contents.  Looking at the beautiful plates I was reminded that while today’s schoolchildren are pretty clear on the roundness of the earth, they might not be as clear on the arrangement or content of the lands upon it.

Perhaps you remember last Fall’s grumbling about non-educational globes for sale at Target?  Well, a quick scan of DonorsChoose shows over 100 classrooms in the US in need of globes and maps.  So, as if you haven’t been harangued enough on this blog to do some good in the world, I urge you to consider giving some of your holiday charity budget to one of these worthy projects – our children need the best understanding of the shape of the world and its different people that they can get.

And so, midway through the journey of  life, I found myself printing out a dark forest’s worth of marketing emails so that they could then be scanned and the resulting file burned on a CD to be sent probably via FedEx.  Indeed, I had strayed.

The task was irritating enough as I started at the present and began working backwards, but when I starting finding material that predated my joining the company, it got a little more interesting.  And then, just before the end – or rather, the beginning – I found this.

This is the sort of stuff that drives me mad.  it sets my teath on edge.  No, I’m not complaining that “A sneak-peak at what’s inside” is not a sentence.  I’m pretty much at peace with the use of pieces and fragments in headlines and email subject lines.  It’s the simple error of using “peak” instead of “peek” that gets me. I’ll take a couple of extra irritation points for gratuitous-hyphenation, too.

As deftly explained by Paul Brians with some handy mnemonics, a peak is the top of a mountain, a peek is a glimpse, and pique is irritation or excitement.  For extra credit, we can also find that pique is a type of polo shirt, and a peke is an ugly little dog also known as Pekingese.

Anyway, that message would never have gone out like that on my watch.  It made me think of the time I had to correct “security breeches” to “security breaches” in a press release at a company selling software that helped prevent data theft, not a company selling adult diapers.  Sure, it’s not exactly the decline and fall of Western civilization, but please folks, proofread with your brain, not just your eyes or your computer.

In book club (Halloween edition) – Stephen King’s The Shining.  Hard to read without memories of the film haunting you, but a page-turner nevertheless.  Hard to say if this sort of thing can ever be as scary as it was the first time around.

Picked up in the wake of a reading and book signing – Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon.  Vintage work riffing on assorted post-apocalyptic memes.  Lethem read from Chronic City at the Coolidge (sponsored by Booksmith) and I’ll buy that eventually, especially because he mentioned the spherical hamburgers of Jackson Hole in the first chapter.

From the remainder pile – The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester.  It took me a chapter to realize what was going on, but after that I laughed out loud more than once.

Picked up at the PRC’s lecture – Keith Carter Photographs, a 25-year retrospective.  A lot of people call photographs (and other things) magical, mystical, lyrical, etc., This guy is the real deal.

I watched with interest as Barnes & Noble released the Nook, an electronic book reading thing that’s pretty similar to Amazon’s Kindle.  I immediately thought of Microsoft’s Zune music player, released well after Apple’s iPod had pretty much conquered the world.  There are some interesting similarities and also some differences.

Dominant Design

There are several models of iPod, ranging from the no-screen Shuffle to the all-screen Touch.  As with mobile phones, each of these styles is pretty well-established and I think it’s safe to say that the last time either category got real innovation was when Apple delivered the iPhone and then the iPod Touch.

The dominant design of an ebook reader seems to have crystalized with the Kindle and to a lesser extent, Sony’s reader products.  Black and white e-ink screen, super-long battery life, small or absent keyboard, book-like leather covers optional, and so forth.  In this respect, the Nook, like the Zune, adds maybe some incremental improvement, but little of substance or lasting advantage.

Complementary Assets

Most people agree that the first iPods were not that great as devices, but that it was the iTunes store and the integration of the two that won the day for Apple.  This comparison is more interesting for the book readers.  By the time Microsoft released the Zune, the iTunes store was huge and dominant, and Apple computers were gaining share against Windows boxes on the back of iPod and iPhone sales.

In the book world, Amazon and Barnes and Noble have pretty much the same assets.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a new book exclusive to either store, at least not with paper books.  Ebooks might turn out different, but at least for starters, it seems the two companies have the opportunity to offer the same media selection to their ebook reader customers.  Amazon’s store carries far more than books and music, and that might turn out to be important as they put more Amazon-dedication shopping machines into consumers’ hands.

Network Effect

If you can build a network effect into a product, you have a good chance at getting your users to do some serious marketing for you.  Social networks thrive on invitations, and they’re more useful as more of your friends join them.  Reading and listening to music are somewhat solitary pursuits (I would argue that the iPod and before that the walkman made music solitary when it had been quite social and that greedy music execs have prevented any device I know of having a second headphone jack) so it’s an interesting question how or if ebook readers can go viral.

Both Microsoft and Barnes and Noble tried making their challenger devices more social.  Microsoft’s “squirting” allowed you to send songs via wifi from your Zune to a friend’s Zune for three plays.  The songs you squirt are still available to you to listen to while they’re squirted and it seems you can squirt as many songs to as many friends as you like.  That seemed to have been too little too late.  Apple was allowing DRM-free downloads of some music, and three plays (with a three day time limit) seemed stingy.  Plus, with the wifi sending method (as cool as that might be) you have to be physically near your friend to squirt. And let’s not get into the wisdom of calling this “squirting.”

I speculate that Barnes and Noble did some focus research on heavy readers (like book clubbers, for example) and came up with a sharing feature that’s more like what we do with paper books.  As I’ve blogged before, I think lending and sharing paper books is a viral part of both reading and friendship.  With a Nook, you (the Nooker?) can loan an ebook to a fellow Nook owner (The Nookee?) for two weeks, during which time it is unavailable to you to read.  Seems pretty fair and similar to the reality of paper.  But then I read that Nook loans can be disabled on a book-by-book basis by the publisher, and even when enabled, allow only one loan of a given title – ever.  Not only does that fail to take full advantage of the capability of digital books, it adds a restriction that doesn’t even exist in the paper world.  Disappointing First Sale Doctrine Fail.

It seems unlikely that the Nook could win the day on the basis of the sharing feature, even if it did everything I want it to, but the hobbling of that feature looks like just another indicator that the Nook will go the way of the Zune – not gone, but forgotten.