Tablet market looking up

A Tablet to Rival the Leader, David Pogue article.

David is very positive about the Nexus 7.
The only real downside (apart from small storage) he says, is the Google Play market, which has so far much less content than the Amazon or Apple ones.

But I would say that when that gets better, and if and when there are many more Android apps tailored to tablets, then we are for serious looking at a healthy, competitive tablet market which will spur everybody on to make great tablets, rather more than the single-player market we have pretty much had until now.

And even more so when Amazon hopefully responds to this competition and makes the Kindle Fire stronger (say, with volume buttons), and when Apple has a small iPad too, and if Amazon and Google comes out with larger ones. A lively and strong market, great choice for consumers. Kewl.

And for the record, I also hope for further development of the e-paper readers. Particularly I would jump right back in there if they get the low-contrast screen problem solved, thus making me buy my fifth Kindle*. And the Nook's front light is a great thing, hopefully soon to be replicated on the Kindle.

*I realized recently that when you include devices with Kindle apps on them, I have eighteen devices for reading Kindle books! Hmm, now I know what book shelves will be for in the future.

Solidification of iPad Mini rumors

The rumors of a smaller iPad are really solidifying.
I think it would be kewl, especially if they could make it really light-weight. Maybe make the back of plastic. (It seems unlikely these days, although there was a day, a decade ago, when Apple's devices were made of plastic. It's still a good material if you use a good grade.)
But most people will probably care more about a possible $200-$250 price.
Existing apps should run fine, if it keeps the same screen resolution as iPad one and two (1024x768), which seems likely. The smaller size will make for the higher sharpness (pixel density) which the market is now getting used to (I know I am!).

Paper or screens?

From The New Yorker. (Which I paid a sixty-dollar iPad subscription for back in November and forgot about until now I tried to do it again.)

I like this cartoon. Both paper-lovers and screen-lovers will point and say: "hahaha! Well, see!?"

Get refund for Kindle books if you "don't like it"?

I didn't know you could do this, but you can: get a refund for a Kindle book if it is poor quality. I've just done it with two books which I bought as an experiment and which were so poor they were bordering on a scam. (Both were maybe 20 pages of amateur output which felt like it was taken at random from some Internet bulletin board. One of them was photos, and they looked like they were taken with a cell phone 10 years ago.)
I just selected the "quality was poor" item on the Refund popup menu (in the Manage Your Kindle area, under Books), and it all happened quickly and smoothly.

One might ask if one can do this if one simple didn't like a book? Well, they don't define "poor quality" for you, so I think you can. Whether it is really ethical to do this, I don't know, I think that's a very big cultural discussion. What if half of the audiences of The Hulk (either one) had demanded their money back because the movie sucked? I think we would need new legislation for it, and it might change our culture a bit. On the one hand, being responsible for the quality of the entertainment you create might be healthy. On the other hand, these are subjective matters, and for instance, many people were very disappointed with Bladerunner, but the movie is now a classic and loved by millions. Who knows but that it might not have been stopped dead in its tracks and be totally forgotten now if anybody could get a refund in cinemas on subjective judgment.

A big new paper library

Where Wal-Mart departs, a library succeeds, article.
When the discount superstore moved to a larger location, it left behind a vast empty building. The community took advantage of the space and converted the warehouse-like building into a public library.

This is of course highly laudable. Great stuff.
Still, the timing... I wonder where this library will be in ten years? The build a new paper-book library in the year where ebooks rocketed up to selling 50% of paper book sales?
They better have plans for how to include ebooks, is all I'm sayin'!

Bonding with Fifty Shades. Erotica and literature

Bonding with Fifty Shades, article.

It seems that the kinky Fifty Shades of Grey book is a hit so huge that it's having effects outside the book business. Interesting, that does not happen often. One phenom like that was Apple's multi-colored iMacs in the late nineties, for a while there, that design inspired so much copycatting... I even saw bottles of hair products shaped like the circular iMac mouse, in five colors!

But it's claimed that Fifty Shades is selling so much that it's pulling up not just the whole book market, but neighboring markets too! Huh?
I would look into it, except I can't imagine that the book itself will be anything but trivial. While I don't mind erotica, I don't think I've come across any which was anything but trivial in artistic terms. It has to be, because good art gets in the way of the titillation, and vice versa. You can't think important thoughts or enjoy fine nuances at the same time as trying to work up a froth.

Update:
I did now manage to glance at a couple of reviews, though, they confirmed my hunch. Amazon's site says that:
“The books are not well written, incredibly repetitive, there is little character development, and the sex scenes are, well, vanilla.”
sailorgirl27  |  1,599 reviewers made a similar statement
Sample:
About half way through the book, I looked up the author to see if she was a teenager. I really did because the characters are out of a 16 year old's fantasy. The main male character is a billionaire (not a millionaire but a billionaire) who speaks fluent French, is basically a concert level pianist, is a fully trained pilot, is athletic, drop dead gorgeous, tall, built perfectly with an enormous penis, and the best lover on the planet. In addition, he's not only self made but is using his money to combat world hunger. Oh yeah, and all of this at the ripe old age of 26! And on top of that, he's never working. Every second is spent having sex or texting and emailing the female character. His billions seem to have just come about by magic. It seriously feels like 2 teenage girls got together and decided to create their "dream man" and came up with Christian Grey.

Yes, that is one of the things about erotica: the characters are almost always cardboard.  The dom is always mature, but very handsome, fits, and rich. And ice cold.

But all that doesn't matter much, most of TV is trash, and yet some of it is very good. I think it's a good thing that an erotic novel has hit mainstream hard. It's one of those things we need to get out of the Victorian shame which still slops around our angles.

If you wonder what "vanilla" means here, well, it's like you would think. It means normal sex, not kinky or inventive.
See, when I moved to the UK a decade ago, entertainment was scarce, so I walked into a big book store in the middle of town (Edinburgh at the time), and bought half a dozen erotic novels pretty much at random. And it turned out that every single one of them was S/M based. And every one I have found since. It seems this whole country is seeped in it. So I had to learn something about it!

Color books on Kindle

Big color books are coming to Kindle in big waves, hurrah! For example, I searched for books about acrylic painting, and about mixed media art, and there were lots of books which clearly are meant for a biggish color screen rather than the small grey-scale Kindle.

Of course you still have to live with the odd choice of authors and editors. For example in the otherwise nice book about experimental acrylics painting I bought, Rethinking Acrylic, the author tells us that "small brushes are good for small paintings or small details, and big brushes are good for covering large areas". No! Really? Thank gawd you told me. On the other hand he defines "gesso" as "the bridge between the substrate and the paint". I had to use the Kindle apps' dictionary to find out that it consists plaster of paris and glue. Ah well.


But I really like that this is happening. While "serious readers" may be focused on novels and bios, there are big swathes of the book market which depends on complex designs, graphs, illustrations, art, etc. Cook books, comics, children's books, art books, artist's teaching books, text books...

And of course as usual, we have several formats now battling it out. This is Planet Earth after all. There's the new Kindle 8 format. There's the old PDF format. There's Apple's new format for fixed design. And so on. Sigh.

---

By the way, I recently made small changes to the design of this blog. What do you think of it in general? Is it well readable? How do you like the book background and so on? I made most of it me likkle self. 

13 Work Reasons to Buy an iPad

13 Work Reasons to Buy an iPad, article.

Nexus 7, promising reader (updated twice)

The new Nexus 7 seems like a quite promising ereader/tablet. Finally a tablet with a rubber back cover. It's lighter than the Kindle Fire. And it has higher screen resolution. And it's as cheap as the Fire. Very promising. (Also it comes in Europe sooner than the Fire.)

Only irritation is only 8 or 16MB storage (not "memory" which is what the processor uses for thinking), and no SD card slot. An HD movie is easily 5MB in itself.  This is like Amazon's thinking with the Fire. The Nexus even deletes files after use without asking you! (Admittedly sometimes the iPad does this too.) "Ooh, but you use the online storage, see?" Yeah, great, but what if you're in an area with no or weak Net connection, and you want to watch another movie? Come on, guys, you're being a little bit too forward with this, like five or ten years.

Seriously, I want to have several films and TV shows stored on this kind of device. Expecting video download to work in the train or the summer house is not only ridiculous, but would cost a mint in data fees if you could get it to work.



[Did this remind you of something? Like Apple promotional videos? Apart from looking at people from the left and having more color, this sounds and looks exactly like Apple's promotional videos. The words, the rhythms, the feeling... Have they no embarrassment level?]

Update 1: Janet said:
I have to assume you will get one or maybe not? 

Well, if it wasn't for that storage issue, I'd be very tempted. But on the other hand, during the rest of the year we're likely to see new models of Kindle Fire, *possibly* a smaller iPad, and so on. It's very volatile right now, so I'm waiting.

Nexus 7 leads now, slightly, with weight and screen resolution for 7-inchers, but others will surely follow. It'll be quite interesting to see how the market develops over the next couple of years.

Another thing though: it seems that on the Google Play store, you can only *rent* movies and TV shows. So you're forced to watch it within 48 hours. I like that on iTunes I can buy them so I can take my own sweet time, flicking back and forth between different films and shows, like I do with books.
... In fact it seems like you can *only* rent movies on GP, no TV shows at all. That's a big downside to me, I'm a big fan of the best TV shows, particularly comedies, nothing better when I want to relax. And laughter is healing.

Update 2:
... As a matter of fact, I can't even get movie rental to work on Google Play. I can buy books and apps, and I can *pay* for a movie rental, I even get the email receipt, but when I try to actually watch the movie, my password suddenly fails. Is this because I'm not in the USA? Does anybody know?

Samsung Galaxy looks like...

I don't care for Apple's current litigiousness, but when one sees this picture, one can understand their feelings about Samsung and Google/Android. In fact when one sees this picture, one might never realize that one is not in fact looking at an iPhone, but a Samsung Galaxy II. They completely hovered up everything of the Look And Feel. It's patently embarrassing.

Free textbooks are coming

It is shameful how textbook publishers are taking advantage of their captive market, students, to inflate book prices. But things are starting to happen, this is one of them. I wonder how it'll look in 20 years.




"If you took a course in philosophy or critical thinking at college or university, you paid an average of $70 for your textbook. I think that's too much, especially for students who have to choose between food and the rent, two or three times a year, like a lot of my students. Yet the cost of these books never goes down, because students are a captive market.
So, I've been writing my own textbook, so that my students don't have to buy one. I'd like to expand and improve it and then make it available to the whole world, for free."

Bobo Case

Funny, I like it. Bobo.

Samsung slate

Samsung has one of the first Slate PCs. Looks pretty impressive.

Seems it runs Win7 and yet some kind of touch OS.

It is a PC though, at PC prices, at least $1100.

Notes in Kindle books

I have rarely made notes of any kind, and thus not in Kindle books either. But as an experiment I've turned on public notes for many of my books, so if you "follow" me, you can see them.
I don't know how this will go. On the surface it might be just another Social Network thing, but on the other hand, since the notes are in and about a book, they are bound to have generally more substance than typical FaceBlot or Twigger writings.

iPad Owns 91% of Tablet Web Traffic; Nook Passes Kindle Fire

iPad Owns 91% of Tablet Web Traffic; Nook Passes Kindle Fire, article.

I'm a bit amazed that the Nook passed the Kindle Fire. Especially given the all-out price-war approach of Amazon since last year. But of course this is only about web traffic, and perhaps more people buy Nooks as a multi-purpose device, and more buy KFs mostly for reading and video.

(Clickable.)
... The closest competitor has two percent of the iPad's traffic. Huh.

I do think that part of the reason the iPad is so astoundingly dominant in web traffic is that most other popular tablets are only seven-inchers, and I feel that with complex web sites like for example Amazon (and in fact most popular sites), even the iPad's 10-inch screen can sometimes feel rather limiting. I sometimes have to zoom in on a list of links to be sure which one I hit. And before the Safari browser got the Reader functionality (which isolates and enlarges the text of an article), an article would often be hard to read, due to the wide-spread use on the web of too small fonts and too-wide columns. (Safari Reader or Instapaper of course is a fantastic help there.)