kip/bot/blog

A new book-reading group from Penguin recommends the top ten classics that everyone should read. The reason to read them?

Why read classic works of literature? There are a myriad of reasons, just one of which is to catch the numerous references that appear in movies, television, politics, and throughout pop culture. In the above video, you can see a trailer for a short film we produced showing what happens to a hapless young suitor who hasn’t read our Essential Classics.

That was disappointing . . . read the classics so you can follow popular culture references (which pop culture artifact references Oedpius beyond the already known sleeping with mom or maybe tearing ones eyes out gag?). I would have had a lot more respect for the outside chance of impressing women or making people feel bad about themselves when you drop little literary bombs on a conversation.

Happily, I was pleased to find I had read all but The Inferno. But even then, I’ve bought several copies of The Divine Comedy‘s various volumes over the years with serious, I mean serious, intent to read them. I feel good about that. And you know what? I don’t actually know any references from Dante (aside from the uncommitted cursed to chasing a blank banner — I like that one), so I may be missing a whole bunch of references in 24 or The Unit.

Speaking of 24, Season 7 of Jack Damnit Bauer is my current exercise motivation. Jack has been exposed to some weaponized bionanotechnocellulonucleo whoozeewhatsit and is, apparently, waiting to die, wishing he could lead a mission but knowing that that would endanger the mission and the men on it. He is already dead. Positively Shakespearean. Good night sweet prince.

Just re-read Martin Neuimeier’s A Designful Company along with a bunch of my co-workers. Reading a book at the same time as other people is a fantastic thing to do — it sets of neuronic chain reactions and builds common language — and the book itself was pretty good. However, it highlights one of the things that continues to bother me about our collective obsession with innovation.

Neumeier has a passage where he describes his “good/different” chart. It’s not rendered as a quad graph in the Kindle version of the book, but given that it involves two variables with 2 possible values, it practically screams for one:

Like any good quad graph, “up and to the right” is the sweet spot, or, as Neumeier put it “as you might have guessed, ‘good and different’ is the combination that produces home runs.” This bugs me. While I know marketing is all about the whitespace, the onlyness, the thing that no one else does, it seems like a distraction from the real issue: quality and betterness. Good and different could translate into Netflix and the Prius (examples Neumeier cites). But it could also translate into another rev of Microsoft Word that has yet another feature which not only doesn’t make it better, it actually makes it marginally worse because of the clutter and confusion. This would still be “good but different” (making it worse didn’t make it bad).

“Good but different”, as a construct misprioritizes and muddies people’s thinking. Good can very easily become good enough (the Microsoft example) and can cause people to rush to novelty or newness as the goal. Rather than focusing on being better/best, we pick the most obvious and lowest possible standard (who would actually argue on behalf of not good?).

Netflix is much better understood not as different (they used the mail), but as better than the current space. Yes, they used mail, but they did so in order to address the flaws of the video store model: availability of films, locational convenience, and perhaps most important, late fees. Prius is still actually a car, but it’s a better car, not a different one: it burns fuels more efficiently, it runs quieter. The point wasn’t to be as good as the past, with a difference, the goal was to solve problems with fossial fuels and internal combustion engines.

We should really throw out the notion of being different and focus on being good, better, then best. Not only does it avoid the rush to novelty, but it forces product creators (marketers, designers, engineers) to get customer- and user-centric in their thinking. It forces us to step back and ask first questions: what is good/ what would be better? is our belief that the status quo is good really accurate? is our understanding of the category (video distribution) correct?

Scott Berkun has a great post about why we should stop saying innovation, with the great line, which to me says it all: “Just be good. That’s hard enough. Most things made in the world suck. They really do.” This is a big cultural change for most places because an understanding of quality, of what is actually good is usually missing (or not shared or driven by individual tastes) and a conversation to understand what’s good requires time. Much easier to assume that what’s in front of you is plenty good and look for something that makes it stand out. But that’s the real lesson of the above examples, a focus on doing something better, on solving the pain points.

Stop talking about innovation, stop looking for points of differentiation, build a better ________ and people will beat the proverbial cliche to your hackneyed portal and you’ll be all win-win in the sweet spot of whatever quad graph you have.

Love this email I just got from Amazon:

Full disclosure: I get quite a kick out of the Dan Brown oeuvre, despite the horrible writing. It’s like the old computer adventure games made into a book. Literally. The old games — like MYST, Journeyman Project, Tex Murphy, Last Express, Obsidian, Lighthouse, Gabriel Knight, even the fighting adventure games like Resident Evil — had a winning formula:

- gruesome/startling crime in the beginning (Lighthouse wins this one hands down with not one but two great openings: 1) you explore a house with interesting objects, but only when you press the answering machine button to get a hysterical call for help does the game kick in with a great drive through the rain sequence that presents the credits and great animated lightning effects); and 2) when you explore the house of the friend who called you, you see a baby quietly sleeping in its crib. When you return to the baby’s room, you see an alien stealing the child. Seriously jump out of your skin freaky. Dan Brown has the usual Robert Langdon being interrupted in some refined pursuit (dreaming about hiking the pyramids with a babe, or giving a lecture) and then being dragged to a mutilated corpse.

- discovery of solvable riddles — adventure games are riddled with barely- to not even close to plausible riddles that you’re happy to solve. They propel the story. Nearly every image presented in Dan Brown allows the reader to puzzle out the clue.

- obscure reasons for villainy The worst example of this was a ten minute or longer discource in Journeyman Project Turbo. These reasons usually warrant a page or two of monologue and sufficiently flawed logic for Langdon to feel the need to correct the villain on the true meaning of the text. Not quite “that belongs in a museum” but close.

Final disclosure, while I won’t leave my battery on, my morning ritual of turning on the wireless will have an extra jolt of excitement (I like it even when I’m just getting the paper) tomorrow morning.

Just signed up for bookarmy this morning. Someone had posted on an old entry of mine that it was pretty good, but first impressions can be killer. Leaving aside some confusing design issues (a mix of authors, readers, reviews, publisher descriptions, and user-generated content threw me off), the first recommendation was beyond terrible. After you sign-up, you ‘get started now!’ by entering a book. I entered my standard Unbearable Lightness of Being. Not only is it a favorite book that I go back to again and again, it’s also the classic example of how weak recommendation systems are — Amazon seems to always indicate that if I liked that book by Milan Kundera, I might like these books. Until very recently, all these other books are invariably by Milan Kundera — like reading more of this author hadn’t occurred to me.

So what did I get at bookarmy?

In fairness, the top listings can be hard to sort out, so I went to the second page of recos:

This would almost have to be driven entirely by “people who read this also read this” with little to no reliance on even basic publishing data such as genre, period, fic/non-fic. Bummer. I’ll give it a few more titles.

I don’t know if this was always the plan, or if this was an easy thing to do, but I feel well served as a Kindle owner (almost enough to be not pissed about the big Kindle), and impressed by Amazon.

Got an email this morning:

This is a for-real need I’ve experienced often — I highlight a passage in a book I’m reading on my Kindle. Later, when I need it for a blog post or to send to someone in a mail or for use in a document I’m writing, I have to open the Kindle, find the quote and type it in. Hard to read and type, hard to find, and little context (when you can only see small sections of a small number of notes). The Kindle site, sparse but pretty fast fixes (most of) that:

While my kindle experience has generally been a love-fest, there are some areas where it falls short and I feel the pain:

- the digital version of books don’t always preserve section breaks within chapters. This is especially true in novels, the kindle format sometimes loses the extra paragraph break or first word capitalization that indicates a shift in scene

- some weird capitalization/italicizations appear or linger in the digital versions of some books. I think this is mostly classics, but the last three public domain things I’ve read (two Austens and a Dickens, which, to be honest I haven’t and may never complete) have random-seeming words appear in caps. it’s very jarring

- taking notes can be funky. When you highlight passages of periodicals, you lose those highlights when you store them at Amazon and take them off of your kindle (yes, I’ve spent enough money to fill my kindle memory and my sd card). It’s not really fair to complain that Amazon should store the state of my book, but it is a difference between the book and the kindle

- Random access::difficulty moving through sections. this is the biggest problem. It’s nearly impossible to quickly navigate between sections or highlights of a book.

- real note-taking. While the commenting function of the kindle (with its keyboard) is useful, it’s still less rich, and yes less satisyfing, than having an open book next to an open notebook where you scribble madly. I was wrong earlier, this may be the biggest drawback.

That all said, I still love the thing. And I have to say, I am so over the smell of the books and the sound of the riffling pages thing. I still love my big-ass Riverside Shakespeare and still think there’s a certain majesty to my illustrated Dickens, first edition Orwell, and bound series (like POwell’s “Dance to the Music of Time”, which seems larger as four bound volumes, rather than 12 single ones published under different marketing sensibilities), but I’m not bumming too heavy. AND, during a miserable plane ride where I had kids on all four sides of me, it was wonderful to switch from a work-related book, to Thomas Friedman, to the paper, to a piece of pulp trash like The Camel Club and find the right reading rhythm.

And think of all the trees I’m saving . . . *hugs self-righteous self.

From the NYT article covering French writer Jean-Michel Gustave Le Clezio award of the Nobel Prize, his answer to what message he would convey in his address:

My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

Interesting, and interesting to argue, sidenote: Horace Engdahl, the head of the Swedish Academy (which awards the prize) was critical of American literature today, calling it “too isolated, too insular” and “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” No American has won the Nobel literature prize since Toni Morrison did in 1993.

From Neil Gaiman’s Journal: The Graveyard Book Tour

The Proper US tour starts in New York on Tuesday the 30th. At each US stop, I’m going to read a chapter of The Graveyard Book. I’m going to read them in order. Other things will happen too (we’re hoping for some exclusive Coraline footage, for example), and there will be a Q&A and maybe other things. The stops are going to be filmed. Each Chapter that gets read will also be put online by Harpers very soon after it’s read (depends mainly on how quickly the footage can be edited and put up online). So you can follow the tour around, and get the book a chapter at a time for free…

All sorts of forward-lookingness from an publishers who are already doing trailers, author blogs, digital early releases, crowd-sourced promotions and tours. I just wish I liked Gaiman’s novels half as much as I do his comics.

I’m reading Numerati, a fun read about the rising importance of data and modelling (and a healthy antidote to some of the extremes of Super Crunchers. In general, the book has a better, less fetishistic tone, one that acknowledges the power of what’s going on, but keeps it real:

The only folks who can make sense of the data are crack mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. They know how to turn the bits of our lives into symbols . . . [he has a nice jag about using index cards to keep track of dietary patterns, and how inefficient that would be. It's a bit of humanizing text, but I don't feel like typing it.] The key to this process is to find similarities and patterns. We humans do this instinctively, it’s how we figured out, long ago, which plants to eat and how to talk. But while some of us were focusing on more specfic challenges, others were thinking more symbolically. I picture early humans sitting around a fire. Some, naturally, are jousting for the biggest piece of mate or busy with mating rituals. But off to the side, a select few are toying with stones thinking “if each of these pebbles represent one mammoth, then this rock . . . “

Somehow, those paleo-ners playing with the stones instead of mating or eating meat managed to survive long enough to pass on their genes until, millions of years later, they could become Hari Seldons of the 21st century.

The key thread of the first fourth of the book (which is where I am, according to the impossible to count progress dots on my Kindle), is how people are trying to turn data points into meaningful models of people. The first test cases are supermarkets, where discount programs and smart carts are being deployed to gather data points about people. One of the first things that emerges is that there are customers who do too good a job of taking advantage of sales and promotions. These people, called “barnacles” by the numerati and marketers who really never intended for people to take advantage of sales, are the people who watch the movies they rent on Netflix, rather than let them sit on the coffee table collecting dust, or the people who actually go to the gym and try to live up to their New Years Resolution or lower their blood pressure. These barnacles should be “fired” by retailers, as they drag down profits.

On the other side, you have “butterflies”: “customers who drop in at the store on occasion, spend good money, and then flit away, sometimes for months or years on end.” Since they’re unreliable, it a waste of time to lavish courteous, much less fawning, treatment of them.

I suppose that means that the most desirable customers are buffoons . . . those who don’t scrutinize, price-seek or use the products and services they buy and those who are easily ensnared in a seller’s field of gravity.

It’s kind of fun to watch marketing lurch between respecting the customer’s individuality and trying to model them into flippable switches.

Looks like Plastic Logic has an e-Reader that covers many things the Kindle doesn’t: touch-screen, larger display, Office document compatibility. None of the coverage talks yet about energy consumption, keyboard input, or better scanning/navigation of documents (though the touch screen could help that a lot). Also, not sure if 8.5 * 11 is the ideal size for a book replacement.

None of those concerns stops the ache to actually have one and convert my library . . .