kip/bot/blog

A couple weeks ago, I put out a plea for a Carl Sagan quote for an Ignite NYC talk I was going to do. I had to paraphrase the line as “This is the kind of problem that is fun to think about while walking in the woods on a winter morning.”

My friend Parfait found the quote last week!

“They are books you ponder over as the water is running out of the bathtub or as you walk through the woods in an early winter snowfall.”

Not crazy about the bathtub water image (or image of me), but it still works. It’s still the romantic, “Papa Carl makes the world of science and cosmology so interesting” line I remembered. Except:

The actual line is in reference to three Robert Heinlein novels (Oi!)! Not only that, but Sagan refers to them as “remarkable efforts! (Oi! Oi!). Not only THAT, but one of them has the word Zombies in it! (Oi! Oi! Oi!).

While I’m wondering if maybe he doesn’t use a similar image somewhere else (hard to imagine since I got the book right), it’s now more interesting to me how my initial processing of the quote meshes with my current memory of it and how I matched that memory to science problems and lofty things. I was every bit the snob then as I am today when it comes to Heinlein (not much, but enough to cringe at calling any of them “remarkable efforts”), so I must have been so overwhelmed by the romance of the image of walking in the woods with Saint Carl contemplating something rich and deep on a crisp winter morning that I glossed over it.

Novelist (and fellow alum of my alma mater) Nicholson Baker, went through an interesting exercise in U and I, a memoir of his obsession with John Updike. One of his many exercises in intellectual self-flagellation was to mortify his literary sensibilities by trying to reconstruct, from memory, the passages from Updike that made him want to be a novelist. Then he compared them to real one. He generally was further off in his memories than I was . . . though he didn’t stumble into praising Heinlein’s literary genius.

I recently downloaded a bunch of digital books highlighted by Peter Meyers at OReilly Radar. Meyers is a terrific thinker about digital books, going deep on usability, design, how text should be created for ebooks, and what the medium can do to enhance reading experiences.

In his “10 Innovative Digital Books” to check, he included two Bibles. Interactive, dynamic, well-annotated Bibles are of interest to the spiritual-but-not-religious side of me and to my designer side. Few texts could benefit and be enriched by interactive technology and web connections as the Bible. There are so many versions of the Bible, translation topics and controversies, archaic words that need to be understood to engage the text more fully, concordances, cross-references and allusions (or contradictions, if you’re coming from that angle) that interactive can facilitate. While I’m still bummed at how hard it is to find NRSV translations (the ones that left-liberal types like me go for), there are some interesting ones out there (which is a different post).

This post was just to highlight a great screen shot that caught me early this morning while I was reading Gary Shteyngart’s Russian Debutante’s Handbook. One of the most interesting possibilities of a digital iPad Bible is a reading plan. There are many different versions of daily scripture – to work through the New Testament or the Pentateuch or to follow themes and ideas. There are also plans to help you read the entire Bible across the course of a year. I signed up to do the last (not really, I don’t have time, much as I’d like to). This was what came up while reading about Volodya’s first encounter with Rybakov:

As a run-up to the O’Reilly “Tools of Change for Publishing” Conference, an O’Reilly Radar article suggests that Amazon should get back to selling content and let the open source community take a crack at evolving the Kindle.

Imagine how many great new features would be implemented in this model. Rather than being limited by the fixed (and apparently small) number of developers assigned to the internal Kindle apps dev team they’d suddenly have access to as many developers as they could recruit to the open source project. They could create a world class set of apps and quickly distance themselves from the competition.

Interesting contrast to the quotation in my previous post from Tim Cook: “We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.” Or the Steve Jobs line about focus:

We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

Open Source tends to do two things well: 1) execute well-defined functionality (mimic stuff that’s already out there with some improvements); and 2) solve well-defined problems (as Eric Raymond puts it: “with enough eyeballs, every problem becomes trivial”). Open sourcing the Kindle will almost certainly lead to the creation of more features and functionality, but it won’t necessarily find the right balance of them and craft them into a clean product.

I would like to see it. Audacious . . . bold . . . so crazy it might just work.

Nearly two years ago, I gushed about how great goodreads.com is. A social site where people record what they’ve read, are reading, just finished reading, or intend to read, goodreads.com is a way find great book recommendations, connect with readers with similar interests (socially, or as a resource), and if I were brave enough to tell people all the crap I read, a journal of your reading life. The textual part of your lifelog, if you will.

Anyway, I convinced a colleague of mine to join up recently, and it’s been a real treat. Whenever someone joins, there’s a rush to put a lot of books out there. Digital natures abhor vacuums, and there’s a need we all have to have a bookshelf that represents recent reading, a collection of favorites, or in my case a pretentious statement of taste. My friend is done with that phase and now he shows up in my daily goodreads.com email (the only one I read faithfully). He’s turned the mini-review, blurb into something of an art form. Today was his best yet:

Just spent another weekend doing a Boulder Digital Works executive training session. Always great, always a treat learning from attendees and folks at CP+B, Mondo Robot, and Colle + Mcvoy. About four sessions ago, we started adding reading lists, resources, and tips to the end of each of our presentations. That’s always a fun exercise, seeing which things have had the most impact on your thinking over various stretches of time.

One of the underlying themes of the BDW workshops is around ‘getting digital’. It’s a tricky phrase, implying various unprovable states of binary and raising the question of whether digital is even a useful word (much better, to my mind, to use interactive to emphasize behaviors and relationships over technologies and channels). Anyway, below is my list of things for my planning presentation. Interestingly, I had no overlap with any of Edward Boches’s books on his BDW list.

Emergence, Steven Johnson
Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge (CD is key)
101 Things I learned in Architecture School, Matthew Frederick
Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson
Design of Business, Roger Martin
Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink

These books have a common theme: they’re meta and address how thinking has changed.

Emergence talks about learning to embrace complex and rich results that emerge from simple rule sets, a key piece of game design and IxD thinking.

Designing Interactions is so wide-ranging in its examples that we learn that there are no golden rules or silver bullets and that every problem must be solved (or conjured up before solving) on its own terms.

101 Things I learned from Architecture School introduces the loftiest and most pedestrian aspects of the craft emphasizing that you need them all to be great.

Where Good Ideas Come From highlights the importance of connectedness, constant curiosity, apophenia, and how a culture can kill or foster creativity.

Design of Business is hard-nosed and cognitively rich discussion of design thinking (as opposed to the whispy “we are all designers now” kind of crap that can be read in two hours.

Whole New Mind highlights not only that we have many modes with which to turn on our brains, but many modes with which to engage people around us (turns out there’s more than story! there’s metaphor, and symphony, and meaning, and…).

The second half of the slide — about things you can do to get more digital, got some raised eyebrows:

Get to level 20 in World of Warcraft (ferrealz) — experience the richness of an interactive world, see how great interactive experiences derive not from one big idea, but hundreds of little ones, see how much more goes on than sweat and twitch, watch the wild emergent creativity of other players (my favorites are still the same-sex marriage I stumbled into in Stormwind, and the dwarf who got undressed and told me jokes in return for a gold piece).

Do your info-graphics in Illustrator — overcome the tool tyranny of powerpoint, learn about bezier curves, care about pixels, get some cognitive empathy with visual designers, and do better work

Play with the “Game of Life” or Turtle Art — emergence, pure and simple. Gorgeous, intriguing things like gliders, spinners, shooters and sustainable systems come through.

I actually really think that non-digitals should do all three of these things. Immerse, always immerse!

When I was learning to program in C/C++, for several days/weeks and on several attempts I hit the pointers plateau — that thing which, conceptually, I couldn’t get my head around sufficiently to really grok the damn things. I eventually took a class that spent three weeks on it and now I understand them — their purpose, their usage, their style and how to troubleshoot them. A couple summers ago, I took a geek vacation between jobs and worked my way through the NYU ITP Physical Computing class curriculum and dug deeper into some Arduino stuff.

After a couple weeks, I hit a plateau. I needed things like shift registers to multiply the number of LEDs I could manage with the Arduino’s 13 pins; I needed to use a 555 timer chip to get pulsing, and there was a whole range of chips starting named 74______ that were described as “hugely useful” or “workhorses”. These things were critical and basic, like pointers, but (like pointers) it was impossible to find documentation for them that was comprehensible to someone with my level of experience. It was one of the weird places where the web let me down. I must have done dozens of searches, asked everyone I could for help, and could find nothing. Which is a drag, cuz those chips are what give real ooomph to physical computing projects.

Make Magazine has fixed that with Make: Electronics, an unusually good book even by O’Reilly standards. It contains in-depth explanations of how transistors and logic gates work at the physical level — giving you a more intuitive sense of how to work with them (rather than following steps by rote); detailed descriptions of the pins at three levels: the official specs, the occasional nomenclature, and the actual function; and some simple circuits that show what the thing does. The last might be the most important. Even the most basic 555 Timer chip examples I could find had so much stuff going on that it was impossible to isolate the chip and learn, iteratively through tweaking the code, what the things does. To top it off, the Maker Shed Store has a components kit that pulls all the stuff (including jumper wires) together for you.

The one weird thing about the book is in the index:

What the hell kind of alphabetization system is this?

Of course, it’s not like I have time to do anything on my nifty hand-made workbench. But it’s nice to have it when I’m ready. Hope springs eternal. Put differently.

while (!endOfUniverse)
hope.spring();
;

Ha!

B&N’s “pick me up” is a great cross-channel integration. I’m using my fantasy baseball drafts as a reason to finally learn a Mac-OSX database program, specifically FileMaker Pro. According to bn.com, “The Missing Manual” for FMP appears to be available at the Park Slope store. I signed up to have someone to reserve the book for me and here’s the confirmation:

In the next couple hours, I’m supposed to get an email telling me the book is there. I love how they took any possible confusion out of the process — ‘don’t come to the store’ till you get the email, give the email about an hour. I just did it a few minutes ago, so the only possible room for annoyance is if I just don’t get an email and I have no idea how to track the request. Still, it’s pretty cool.

====

UPDATE: In less than an hour, I got both my email and a text message. Pretty sweet.

I don’t know if I’m just noticing this or if it’s new. But it’s kind of weird — Amazon is touting books that have ‘deckle edge’. I originally thought it was an effect of when books needed the pages cut before reading, but it’s actually an effect of papermilling:

Definition: The ragged edge of the paper as it comes from the papermaking machine is the deckle edge. Handmade paper normally has 4 deckle edges while machinemade paper has two. Normally it is cleanly cut. Left in place, the deckle edge becomes a decorative, textured edging. An imitation or fake deckle edge can be created by tearing or sawing the edge of the paper.

Smoothing the edges is an extra cost, of course, and there have always been books — cheap pulpy, genre stuff, and higher end literary stuff — with the edges. But now it’s being called out as a feature of the book:

Right around the time eReading is set to experience another wave of growth . . . curious.

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.