Back to the lab

A few years ago, I took on the job of writing about a brand new drama on basic cable.  It was the second original series produced by a channel better known for showing the same second-rate movies over and over.  Most of the people involved with the show were relatively unknown quantities, or were best known for material quite different from the show's premise.

The show was Breaking Bad, one of the best shows of our era or any era.  And thanks to my lucky break, I've been writing about it for the last three seasons.

The fourth season premiere is this Sunday, and I'll be writing about it again.  Connected with that premiere, the good folks at the A.V. Club have put together their very first Kindle single.  It's a collection of my posts, episode by episode, combined with interviews and other related content that's appeared over the run of the series in our publication.

I wrote a new introduction for the collection, and it should be available in the next day or two.  What a cool reward for one of the most fortunate gigs a TV blogger could ever get.

It's everywhere

I'm on record as a Kindle lover.  My first-generation Kindle is always with me, tucked into my satchel to be pulled out at lunch or at the gym or at the coffeeshop.  On it you'll find books I've recently reviewed, upcoming and past Wrapped Up In Books selections, and a long list of Project Gutenberg books and other e-texts that I've grabbed off the web and sent to my Kindle's address for conversion.

Prompted by the elegant and astounding website longform.org, I've recently revived a neglected tool for my Kindle.  Longform.org selects and links to long form non-fiction feature writing -- from magazines, newspapers, and blogs.  You can send its finds to your Kindle so that whenever you have a moment to read, you have a collection of high-quality journalism waiting for you.  I find that I don't want to read long pieces on my computer screen; scrolling is awkward, the bright light is tiring to the eyes, and the computer is a place where I multitask rather than concentrate on a text for an extended period of time.  By contrast, the Kindle is exactly the place where I read longer texts, happily and naturally.

To make the longform.org to Kindle connection, your intermediary is Instapaper, a miraculous service that allows you to save the text of any webpage to read later.  Create a free account at instapaper.com.  Then drag the "Read Later" bookmarklet to the toolbar of your browser.

You'll need to set up your Instapaper account to send bundles of articles to your Kindle.  There are a few options; I think the service is well worth the 15 cents per instance that Amazon charges to receive a document and put it on your Kindle wirelessly.  Instapaper allows you to maximize your bang for that fraction of a buck by sending up to 20 of your unread items in a single file, every week or every month, whenever you have accumulated a minimum of 10 items.

Now go to longform.org -- or do what I do and add the site's feed to your favorite feed reader.  Mine is Google Reader.  Whenever longform.org adds a link to an article, it shows up in Reader along with all the blogs I follow.

Click on the "Original Article" link in the longform.org post.  Off you go to the website where the article sits on the web.  Then click your "Read Later" bookmarklet.  A pop-up informs you that Instapaper has saved the text to your account.  (If you don't happen to have your Kindle at any given moment, read your Instapaper articles on your iPhone or iPad, too.)

Pretty soon you'll start clicking "Read Later" all over the web, saving articles from your online newspapers and magazines and blogs.  And your reading time will be that much more diverse and enjoyable.  It's like stuffing your messenger bag full of newspaper sections and magazine issues for the next time you are in a waiting room with time on your hands -- except the selection's always growing, you only have the articles you're interested in, and if you're in the mood for Dickens, The Pickwick Papers is still open to the page where you stopped last time.

A shift in perspective

Our perceptive local critic and professional associate Phillip Martin wrote a feature about a Kindle Amazon gave him for a ten-day trial. (Can't give you a link, unfortunately; it's behind a subscriber wall.) I read it with interest as a Kindle convert.

And what I found was that it's very hard to evaluate the impact a Kindle will have on your reading habits unless you become a Kindle user. Ten days isn't going to cut it, because in ten days you don't reshape your expectations and your behaviors. You don't download a month's or a year's worth of reading material, because you don't have a month or a year. You don't download any books at all that you have to pay for. You don't go to the trouble of grabbing free books as text files off Project Gutenberg and sending them to your Kindle's free conversion e-mail address. You don't do any of this because you've only got the thing for ten days. There's no sense making any investment at all -- in time or money -- to make the thing, you know, actually useful. There's no sense in putting more content on the machine than you could read in a few sittings.

So what you do is evaluate the interface. How does the text look? How do the controls work? How does the experience of using it feel?

Only you're not actually using it. You've got it at arm's length. You're not going to become a Kindle person -- you're keeping your journalistic objectivity. And I know how this sounds, but the Kindle can only be measured by how it changes you as a reader once you've begun using it for your reading.

I got a massive thousand-page book in the mail a few days ago. Over the next couple of weeks I plan to read it. But when I packed my briefcase this morning, struggling to turn that concrete block of a book in some direction so it would fit, I wished it were on my Kindle, right alongside the other book I need to read for next week. Why am I carrying huge tomes of information around as separate physical objects when their contents could so easily be combined with hundreds of others on one device?

I'm not really trying to heap scorn on those who "don't get it." Heck, I just joined the majority of people in the world by getting a cell phone; clearly I didn't get it for almost two decades. But I know that now that I have one, I'm going to have a different relationship to telephony, connectivity, and information than I did before. I couldn't know who that person would be by trying out a phone for ten days. Only by committing to become cellular-enabled Donna -- at least provisionally -- can I know whether that's a person I would want to be.

You can take it with you

Amazon is now letting blog owners publish their blogs on its Kindle store. So I've just made this blog available for your Kindle.

This is a nifty feature for Kindle owners and bloggers alike. You can choose to get my daily post sent to your Kindle, if you prefer to read it that way. There has always been a selection of big-name blogs to which you could subscribe, but now it's open to everyone.

Of course it costs money -- a monthly subscription fee of $1.99. Nobody's going to take away the web version, or the RSS feed; the blog is still free to the world. But some Kindle owners might want not only to have the blog sent to their machines and appear in their reading lists automatically, but also to put a nominal sum in the tip jar, as it were.

If you read me daily, and you have a Kindle, consider subscribing, reviewing the blog on Amazon's product page, and recommending me to your friends. I didn't put Union, Trueheart, and Courtesy on the Kindle to make money; frankly, if anything more than one more Starbucks chai latte per month trickles in -- ever -- I'll be shocked. As a Kindle enthusiast myself, though, and as an observer of what voluntary micropayments can do, I'm excited about the new venue.

Information should be free -- or at least cheap

Wired reported recently on a Kindle owners' revolt. Angry that what they believe is the promise of $9.99 Kindle books has not always been kept, some have taken to using Amazon's product tagging system to label Kindle items that cost more with the phrase "9 99boycott."

What's interesting about this little exercise in consumer power is that it would be hard to imagine it happening with printed books -- paper between covers. A physical book is an object. We accept that it has costs. We're used to being charged for objects. When a textbook costs a hundred dollars, we complain. But we would never think of demanding that textbooks in general shouldn't be more than fifty dollars. Some books are big, some are small; some are hardcover, some are paperback. Some are in great demand, others sell only a few copies. All those factors, we agree, should contribute to setting the price.

But when you take the physical factors out -- when you reduce a book to pure information, discarding what we have to admit are features extraneous to its core purpose -- the notion of cost, and therefore of appropriate price, becomes somewhat different. With e-books, it's almost as cheap to sell a million as it is to sell one. No paper or cardboard to buy, no ink, no shipping. Sure, there's still authorial and editorial costs, and demand (although no supply) has a role to play.

Yet people feel a different relationship to information than they do to things. Namely, they feel like they have a right to it. We're willing to pay for information, but we don't want to be gouged. A song costs 99 cents. A book costs $9.99. Sure, these are prices that were originally handed down to us by those first offering the product, but we know that you can't fancy up an e-book by adding a camera or a bottle opener. It is what it is, and there's no reason to jack up the price. Once we get a sense of what it's worth to the people selling it, all the power shifts to us.

In short, we've been empowered -- or is it liberated? -- by the shift from a physical medium to a purely informational one. It didn't have to be that way, but because of the way the Internet grew and the passions of the people who kept it out of hierarchical and corporate hands, here we are. Kinda makes me feel ... optimistic.

Back to the classics

I got my Kindle right before my series of October trips, and in the 24 hours before I left town, I loaded it up with public-domain texts from Project Gutenberg. My first strategy was to download the books in plain text (by right-clicking the page), then transferring the .txt files to the Kindle via USB cable. I reread Mansfield Park on my Denmark trip after getting the text that way.

But before my Chicago trip, while experimenting with putting my panel presentation and board materials on the device, I ran across the directions for the Amazon free conversion service. Send a file in just about any format -- JPEG, PDF, HTML, Word, etc. -- to your Kindle's free e-mail address, and Amazon sends you back a link to download the same document translated into an .azw file (that's the Kindle's propriety format). Then attach the Kindle via USB cable and drag the file into the documents folder. Boom -- Kindle-native "books" out of your own files. (For ten cents, Amazon will deliver the converted document wirelessly to your Kindle -- no connection required.) I loaded up the Kindle with the hundreds of pages of information for the the Board of Directors meeting, sent to me as PDFs, through this service.

While in Chicago I read My Antonia, an American classic that's intrigued me ever since I read a long New Yorker piece about Cather some years ago. And now I'm a few chapters into The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There's something about the Kindle, frankly, that makes these celebrated books easier to swallow. I think there are two reasons for that unexpected effect.

First, the physical package of "a work of great literature" -- a musty library book, a publisher's classics edition (instantly recognizable by the cover designs), a volume meant to be used in a classroom -- isn't present. On the Kindle, all books are equal. They have no sensory qualities, accidental or intentional, to signal how their content is to be approached. When that canon-indicative package gets in the way of actually reading the book, as I expect it does for many of us, the Kindle removes the obstacle.

Second, while reading, all books are the same length on the Kindle. Well, not really; they just appear that way. The Kindle indicates your progress through the book through a tiny row of dots at the bottom of the page. In all books, the row goes all the way across -- but of course, you will fill up the dots more quickly while reading a short book than a long one. It's a relative indicator, not an absolute one. This has the effect of masking the actual length of the book from the reader.

The actual length of the text, and how far you've gotten, is indicated in the Kindle's Home view, which shows a row of dots under each document that differs in size; a two-page document you upload will have only a dot or two, while an 800-page novel will have dots almost all the way across. But this view disappears while reading, replaced by the full-length progress indicator. If, like many of us, you tend to be discouraged by the bulk of a book -- especially one of the cultural-literacy variety -- and disheartened by the many pages remaining to make any significant progress, the Kindle seems to help. Only one page is visible at a time. The device doesn't get slimmer or fatter. Again, the playing field is leveled.

Sure, many of us fetishize the physical object of the book. And there's something wonderful about a very fat book that you can't wait to read; well do I remember picking books at the library based on page count, unwilling to run out of pleasure too quickly.

But for classics and anointed denizens of the canon, even when we want to read them, their status puts the task into the category of a chore. When our attraction to the work is tenuous, almost anything can distract and discourage us. For me, the Kindle removes those distractions and lets me focus on the content of the work, not its packaging.

And what a reward. I doubt I would have gotten around to My Antonia for decades to come if it meant buying a copy or getting it out of the library. But on the Kindle, its magnificence was plainly evident. It was brilliant, intensely beautiful, pleasurable in a way I didn't expect at all. I savored every word.

I would have done the same if I had read it on paper, of course. But I would have had to get over the obstacles that the characteristics of the printed book present. That's my failing, of course, but I suspect it's a failing shared by many, despite their best intentions. The triumph of the Kindle is that it removed those obstacles. And the result is simple: I read a great book that I'd been meaning to read for years. And I loved it.

Crossing the ocean

Key items on my packing list for Denmark:

• camera and extra battery
• six days worth of clothes
• portable umbrella
• mittens and socks to knit
  
• brand new birthday Kindle loaded up with Project Gutenberg books, a few select Amazon titles, and all the 14-day free trial subscriptions to magazines and blogs that I can fit on the home screen

Off I go!

Getting the touch

Noel had a mishap with his beloved iPod Touch while he was in Toronto. He was downloading an update on an unreliable internet connection, and the iPod got hung up; no matter what he did or how he reset it, it would never progress past the opening screen of startup. A visit to a genius bar at a suburban Toronto Apple store didn't fix the problem, so he sent it in for warranty replacement.

Today the new Touch arrived, and Noel has been reorganizing his apps, contacts, and music with a palpable sense of relief. He had a backup in the form of the old pre-Touch iPod that the Touch had replaced, so he wasn't without a way to listen to music. But since he got the Touch at Christmas, he'd come to rely on all the different ways it organized his life.

My birthday is coming up, and I've long thought that I might be getting a Kindle. The manifest awesomeness of the iPod Touch certainly casts a long shadow, though. I'm not sure it would be as useful for me as it is for Noel; nor am I sure that we need two of them in this house. It would certainly be great for me to have a little web device that I can carry in my pocket at work, but my experiment with a PDA a few years ago never really panned out for me. Do I really need a Kindle? Well, in some ways it also fulfills the function of a little web device; I can put documents like syllabi or presentations on it to have them accessible without the bulk of a laptop. And it would be nice to get books to review in Kindle format so I don't have so many huge stacks of printed material around the house; don't know if that's possible for books pre-release, though.

Where the Kindle would really shine is in getting books for class. For the class that I'm team-teaching this semester with my fellow administrators, we had some trouble getting the bookstore to order enough of our five texts for all three sections and 36 students. Students were telling us that they couldn't find the books anywhere. If they had Kindles and if the books have Kindle editions -- and there are for at least 3 out of the 5 -- then you could have the book in thirty seconds from the time you realized you needed it, for less than the cost of a used copy in the student center.

Sure, strictly speaking, I don't need either of these gadgets. But I've been around them enough to know how my life would change with them, and I like what I see.

Information flow

You may remember that I'm a big fan of the Amazon Kindle. Noel had the bright idea a few days ago to request a Kindle for review, and sure enough, it came in the mail today, already loaded with Noel's Amazon account (all his recommendations were listed right there on the home page). I'm pretty sure I'll be getting one this fall, maybe in time to take with me on my conference trip to Aarhus, Denmark.

In a world where the end of fossil fuels is in sight, there's nothing that makes less sense that shipping information around the world in the form of physical objects. Sure, there will always be a need and a desire for beautiful books. But how many books are essentially information -- bits, easily represented by 0's and 1's and completely susceptible to being transmitted electronically rather than on trucks and planes? And I think it's a given that music and movies have outgrown the plastic discs on which we encode them in order to get them from place to place. Yes, we all remember when albums had nice big surfaces for cover art. But the market downsized those covers to CD size without blanching, and I think the fact that we don't really miss them proves that the packaging is quite incidental, and the music is the product. And that product is simply information, most efficiently delivered over the airwaves and not over the roads.

The desire to create, own, and proliferate physical objects that hold information still exists. We all love our books and our album collections. But can't we all recognize that preference as mostly nostalgia? Why should material resources be expended to deliver information, just because that's what we're all used to?

Kindled

Greg expressed some skepticism about the Amazon Kindle's prominent position on my Archies list. I'll admit that I wasn't entirely enthusiastic about the device when it was announced. I read the middling reviews, and sniffed at the uncool design.

But that all changed when I spent four days in the same house with one over Christmas. My older brother, a former Amazon employee and notorious early adopter, brought his Kindle down to the house the family shared in St. Simons. We passed it around curiously.

First impressions: It's lighter than it looks, about the same heft and dimensions as a trade paperback (although thinner when outside its carrying case. The unlit e-ink screen is sharp and very easy on the eyes -- just as good for long-term reading as the printed page, judging by the length of comfortable time various family members spent reading it. And the screen is readable even when turned nearly edge-on to the eye. You can change the font: bigger for presbyopteric eyes, smaller to minimize page turns. Dwayne had about three list-view pages of full books, sample chapters, and other materials loaded onto the machine, and soon Dad was reading Losers: The Road To Everywhere But The White House whenever he could sneak in some time with the Kindle.

But the best features of the Kindle weren't apparent at first glance. On Christmas afternoon, I casually mentioned that I was looking forward to reading Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power Of The New Digital Disorder, a book that sounded right up my alley. Dwayne pulled out his Kindle. We had no internet access in the house. But the Kindle isn't a computer accessory; you don't hook up to a laptop or an internet connection to get content. Anywhere there is a Sprint cell phone signal -- and that's 90% of everywhere you're going to be -- the Kindle can get new content. No connection fees, no cell phone plans. Turn it on, browse for what you want, and get it. A whole book in less than a minute, a sample chapter -- for free -- in seconds.

Dwayne got the first chapter of Everything Is Miscellaneous instantly. He read it and decided he wanted the whole book. Bingo -- he had it. And by the end of the visit, he had finished the book and was saying it was the best book he'd read in quite a while.

Most Kindle books cost $9.95, not much more than half the cost of the trade paperback. I came to really appreciate the hardware scrolling device -- a dedicated "gutter," separate from the reading screen, where a selection dot is controlled by a wheel. At first glance it's not sleek and integrated. It looks clunky. But what the designers have done here is to decomputerize the machine. All feedback does not need to come through the screen. There's a wonderful analog feel to clicking the wheel and moving the selector, and it's always there -- it doesn't need to be accessed through moving a cursor or finding the scroll bar on the screen.

I became so appreciative of the Kindle's ability to access e-books instantly, deliver them efficiently, and make them pleasurable and intuitive to page through, that I began to covet the device. How's this for another feature? Upload your Word docs and images to your Kindle account and put them on your reader. Anybody can upload a Word document to the Kindle store, set a price for it ($.49 cents is the minimum), and make it available to any buyer. Imagine educators harnessing that distribution channel to get texts to students. Imagine self-publishers putting a polished product on the market without any physical infrastructure.

When we got home, Noel was exclaiming over all the cool features of his iPod Touch, and I let it be known that I'd love to have one, too. "Would you rather have that, or the Kindle?" he asked. And I hesitated. I couldn't choose. I still can't. I can see so much potential for both devices. If the Kindle is as attractive to me as the legendary Apple design and innovation that I have loved for years, then I think it's already accomplished something pretty astounding.