kip/bot/blog

Nicholas Carr blogs about Eric Schmidt’s evolving thinking about whether Google Makes Us Stupid. Carr wrote the Atlantic article that asked that question. Schmidt initially dismissed it out of hand, but seems to be wondering . . .

Darren Barefoot turns out to be even more skeptical than I am of the iPad — arguing that it doesn’t even make a good web browsing appliance. (Which is a fair point . . . I see its value for, and will buy one based on, for the scenario of managing my inbox and looking stuff up while I watch TV — Barefoot points out that mine is a very narrow use case.)

Scott Berkun posts Woody Guthrie’s approach to New Year’s Resolutions.

One of the smartest designers I know gave a typically compact and smart assessment of the iPad:

DOA. Apple does better (in the last 10 years or so) when it re-imagines categories, not when it invents them. I’m sure I will regret saying this, but that’s how I feel right now.

It does a nice job highlighting Apple’s strengths (re-invent what’s out there after drafting on others’ experience in the market and with an unwavering focus on user experience), but it also hints at the bigger problem: it’s trying to be several categories (reader, netbook, bigger media player, game platform, web browser), under one technology (shiny, thin, touch screen, with none of those nasty mechanics that collect crumbs from your lunch) without being any one thing that is clearly needed.

While Apple often wins by delivering better versions of stripped down, less function-laden things like the iPod, the iPad is doing this across too many categories and likely to fail in all but one:

Reader Steve Jobs infamously said he would never do a reader because people don’t read anymore. He’s actually onto something — some people are passionate readers, while most do it casually. This means the number of passionate readers is too small for an e-reader to be as big as the iPod. The iPad won’t serve either audience well. It will suck for passionate readers: the battery life is dubious, the finger smudges will be a drag, and most important, the backlighting will be prohibitive. Jane Jepson, the creator of the OLPC screen and founder of Qi technologies (LED displays) likened reading from a computer screen to putting a flashlight in your eyes, it’s unsustainable for passionate readers. Casual readers won’t read enough for it to be worth dropping a big chunk of change and things like beach reading, subway reading will be dicey with a fancy device that large. The math will look better than the Kindle’s — spending $400 on a Kindle vs buying books is a quick and obvious decision for many — but the all-in-one argument is pretty weak when it comes to the reading.

Netbook Jobs’s digs at netbooks totally miss the value they have for people who like having a portable work device. The iPad doesn’t replace the processing power or precise mousing needed for real apps like word processing or spreadsheets with graphics, and it’s still unclear whether typing on glass for extended periods of time (like writing something longer than an email or entering numbers into a budget) works for people.

Bigger Media Player This one is tricky to guess, but I have a hard time picturing people dropping serious coin on a third screen that is bigger than their phone but smaller than their TV. Where would you use it? To watch something in bed before going to sleep? Is that worth the cost of getting a decent flat screen?

Game Player Again, a risky proposition. What’s the market for people wanting to play games bigger than the iPhone but smaller than their console? What do those games look like? They’ll lack the immersion of a TV or computer screen game because it’s too small, but will they add to the little games of the iPhone?

Web browser Right on! The video on apple.com references the superior web browsing experience of the iPad many many times, and they’re right. Having the iPad in the living room (with a remote built-in) so I can do quick simple email tasks (like writing “you’re very welcome” as in the video, or forwarding with “FYI”, or deleting what you don’t need) and look up baseball stats while watching the Yankees on an iPad is vastly superior to using overheated macbook or my crunched netbook keyboard. I do a lot of web stuff while I watch crap TV and baseball, and, as a reasonably affluent convenience-obsessed guy with some concerns about the aesthetics of my appliances, this might be enough to see my way clear to $500.

But that’s it. The iPad will be a high-end version of the web appliance that we all talked about several years ago. Only it will be too fancy to use while cooking (one of the standard scenarios we all gushed about), and much too fancy for us to call it an appliance.

I finally hit a wall with the Kindle where I could no longer continue reading a book on the device and had to get a pressed-pulp book. The book is Dickens’s Bleak House. The factors that moved it into unKindleable, and which make me think there are serious limits to the academic application of the Kindle are:

- complex, rich novel
- first time reading of the novel
- taking notes for more than the recall of a passage
- not a translation, and a deeper engagement in the language

I think Dickens, in particular, provides some challenges for e-reading. His long, circuitous sentences - loaded with asides and interjections - cross Kindle pages in ways that make the button navigation and screen flashes unbearable. Less particular to Dickens, but more to 19th century British writers, the language poses a challenge too. The otherwise convenient in-line dictionary lookup function is helpful less than half the time in Bleak House because the subtlety of the word choice isn’t covered in the dictionary (small dictionary limited definitions), the particulars of the word’s use isn’t covered (British vs American dictionary), or the word isn’t covered at all (19th c.).

Before diving into the real problems with reading Bleak House on Kindle, some things that did work:

Footnotes are very convenient on the Kindle - highlighting the note, clicking the d-button, reading the footnote and then hitting “Back” to return to the text sounds arduous but is actually fantastic. Looking up footnotes with a big brick of a paperback can be a sufficiently prohibitive drag to make me just ignore the reference or word that I don’t understand and stick to the larger flow. (Whether the footnotes are worth reading is a different matter, of course. In my Kindle edition, they ranged from useful historical information, to the explanation of the image or metaphor, to cheesy HS English tips for understanding the book.)

Connecting margin notes to specific text is also an improvement on the Kindle. In paper, you typically have to cram something into the margin and then draw a line to the passage or word the comment refers to, or do an asterisk in the text, and then an asterisk on the note. Kindle is kind of handy in this regard.

Margin notes in general are cleaner and clearer without the space limits of the margin on the paper, it’s possible to take much clearer (no abbreviations or omitted words) and much more legible (no sideways or cramped handwriting, it’s all keyboard) notes.

Now for the #fail part. To transition into the downsides of the Kindle when reading a rich, complex, non-translated book for the first time, an image:

This is a page from Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘teaching edition’ of Madame Bovary. It can be found in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature. The book itself is great. Nabokov’s lectures are opinionated, rich, and show how exciting a deep read of a book can be. Each lecture is accompanied by a page from his teaching edition. And the image above shows some of the problems the Kindle potentially solves: tight margins creating illegible notes, the difficulty of noting a particular word choice.

This picture also begins to highlight the problems of the Kindle. The first problem is access to the notes. On the Kindle, there is no scanning for notes. Many times, I’ll try to find a note or passage which I imperfectly remember — I remember the spirit of the passage, or I remember that I put a question mark next to it, or I remember simply that I made a note in a particular scene. On the Kindle, I need some precise information to do a search, or I’m stuck browsing through all my notes.

A bigger problem is when I have more complex notes. The left hand side of the page is mostly highlighting or attaching a comment to a part of the page. But the right hand side is much richer and deeper. On that side you see Nabokov connecting one word to another (in this case a word associated with a character) and highlighting how the sentence structure works or is altered in translation. Kindling Bleak House, I quickly got frustrated at how hard it was to connect Dickens’s carefully worded and important description of a character’s physical attributes to the actual character. In a book, I would circle the name and connect it to the phrase, making it easy to find and emphasizing that relationship. Not easy on Kindle. It was also hard to track the evolution and repetition of word choices with Kindle’s note-taking. The start of Bleak House is all about atmospherics of muddy, foggy, smoky London and the people moving through it and its thick air. Noting what makes it work, or how it connects to the muddy, foggy, smoky Chancery Court is impossible with the Kindle.

Another Nabokov screen highlights both his intense reading and a dimension of the note-taking problem that seems unsolvable for several more years. This one is from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis:

OK, not everyone is going to spend time to draw the specifics of Gregor Samsa’s transformation. And some of Nabokov’s extensive note-taking simply can’t be done in the book and forces him onto plain sheets of paper: a map of Leopold Bloom’s circuits through Dublin, a map of England highlighting the action in Bleak House, a floor plan of the houses in Mansfield Park (all to be found in the book). But it does highlight a problem with all e-readers and tablets and the iPad, the obvious and reflexive answer to which is “give the reader a touch screen and a stylus.” But the resolution is just too low for good note-taking. Anyone who has worked with a tablet over the years or drawn on the iPhone has seen that the lines are unusably jaggy, the letters look terrible, even an asterisk or a simple circle is impossible to use. The iPad video mentions that there are 1000 touch points on the new screen, which is quite a lot but nowhere near enough to be a meaningful input/note-taking device.

The last bit of suck in reading a rich, serious book on the Kindle is random access. I’m using the phrase loosely, but the idea is that this kind of reading experience (and re-reading and referencing) benefits from or requires the ability to jump around in the book quickly — going back to a character introduction, following a passage that covers several pages, recalling a passage of dialog — in order to re-orient yourself, or, more importantly, follow a development or theme. Not a big deal with a lighter weight business book or genre fiction, but maddeningly off-putting for deeper reads of deeper stuff. (Random access has always been a problem with e-readers - even with the wheel of the first Kindle or the side buttons of the Sony Reader, this seems unsolveable - but in the context of this kind of book, is crippling rather than merely inconvenient.)

So, my personal choice was to switch over to a Penguin edition. It will solve most of the problems above and leave me with the problem of how to turn a page on the subway, the dilemma of whether to find the footnote or just keep reading, and force me into tighter, messier note-writing on the margin. If I want to read deeper (and enjoy more), it seems I have to let go of Kindle-y conveniences.

Which raises the bigger issue: is my Kindle making me a sloppier, less thoughtful reader? I have a line that “I read more and better in less time” with the Kindle. This line is practically a reflex when people ask me about it. I think it holds true for middle-brow reading, work stuff, and periodicals, but I’m worried about more complex books. Is my reading style flightier and more focused on catching the high points and moving onto the next book now?

One of the few ‘technology is hurting us’ arguments I’ve ever bought is Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly piece about the new cognitive style being created by Google. (I blogged it here, the original article is here.) The key passage that threw me off in Carr’s article seems relevant to the Kindle-enforced shallowness of my reading of Bleak House:

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

I don’t think there’s economic interest in the Kindle making us shallower readers, but I think it is a natural outcome of the design — at least for encounters with new books or books that require deeper engagement and a record of that engagement.

I continue to be crotchety about generalism and the speed with which people think they can learn to be something (see crotchety posts here, here, and here. Here too. Oh, and here. God, do I ever stop? Well, no, but this one here isn’t grumpy.). Listening to Studio 360’s podcast about Moby-Dick today (while I was engaged in the years-long journey of becoming a better cook — in this moment by trying to improve my chicken stock and mushroom barley soup), there was a surprisingly great interview with Ray Bradbury. Why surprising? First, because, despite my love of SF and other genre fiction, I tend not to expect profundity from SF writers. Second, having never read Bradbury, I assumed whatever acclaim he gets is because of the ideas behind and the clever titling of Fahrenheit 451, not for any skill as a writer. (I need to make that right and at least buy, if not actually read, something of his on my Kindle.) Third, it’s just such a nice way of putting something I and the voices in my head are often on about that my head snapped up and I almost cut off the tip of my left index finger when he said it.

Anyway, I spend lots of time trying to convince people to respect craft and the time it takes and the value behind going deep in subject areas. But I see lots of people assuming they’re experts in things after they’ve done something once, or read a couple articles and books about it, or memorized a couple catchy phrases. Malcolm Gladwell recently helped highlight the fallacy that conversancy == expertise or that once is enough to be a guru when he highlighted the thinking that indicates you need 10,000 hours to get really good at something. But that factoid alone doesn’t quite get it across, because it’s not 10,000 accretive hours only that get you there. It’s 10,000 accretive and repetitive hours, with an emphasis on repetitive — you don’t learn new things so much as you learn more about the richness of the things you know. Describing this process and helping people understand it is challenging.

So, Bradbury wrote the screenplay/adaptation for the Gregory Peck film version of Moby Dick. (I didn’t know that, so already I’m happily smarter as I chop my leeks — working on getting more rhythm and precision and speed with my 8″ knife.) He apparently rather famously talked about being Herman Melville for a day during the writing of the screenplay and the Studio 360 host asked him to explain the why and the how of that:

what you try to do is get it into your bloodstream, get it into your unconscious. You can’t intellectualize it, that won’t work. But if you read a book 80 or 90 times, which I did, some sections I read 120 times, and you put that all into your bloodstream . . . and then you ignore it and let it come to the surface, emotionally, passionately . . . then you become the chaser and chased.

I like the image of getting it into you bloodstream and waiting for it to surface. Even more, though, I like the idea of ignoring the material and letting it sit in your unconscious.

Nice Ignite talk by Alex Lundry, who, according to a quick Google hit, does a lot of market and political research and is a consultant to the GOP, has a really great Ignite talk about data viz, visual thinking, and some politics.