- Sorry for the silence here; I rarely go a week without posting but a lot of things ganged up on me. Many have noticed that I'm gradually moving toward posting less often but doing longer posts. I've discovered that it doesn't take me a great deal more time to write more detailed posts than shorter ones, but not posting at all on some days allows me to concentrate more fully on other projects.
- There is a major total lunar eclipse tomorrow night, 2/20-2/21, which will be almost perfectly positioned for viewing in the US. See the NASA page for details. And if you're not up on lunar eclipses generally, ask Mr. Eclipse.
- Flash memory is getting bigger; a 16GB SDHC card would hold a lot of ebooks.
- Pertinent to the above: I'm not bullish on solid-state drives based on Flash, especially if they're positioned to replace ordinary spinning-disk hard drives. Flash storage cells can change state only so many times until they cease holding a state reliably, and extra hardware is needed to “spread the wealth around” so that frequent write activity in a particular location doesn't kill cells. Flash is thus best used for things like storage of music and ebook files, where you write data rarely but read it a lot.
- Also, Flash may evenually be superceded by nonvolatile phase-change memory. We're still a few years off, but phase-change is faster than Flash and may even replace volatile RAM. No information yet that I've found on whether the cells degrade or die after a certain number of write cycles.
- One other ebook note: Although most early reviewers claimed that the Kindle's SD slot was limited to 2 GB cards, the truth is that the card slot is SDHC and many owners have reported success with larger cards up to 8 GB. I don't have 8 GB of ebooks yet and may not for several more years. I just don't read that fast. For people who are actively converting their print library to ebooks, however, larger cards are a very important issue.
- This nice link to NPR came over from Don Doerres, concerning the growing hobby of watching satellites. We used to go out and freeze butt looking for Echo in the early 1960s, but these guys are calculating orbits, photographing flares (momentary bright sunlight glints off polished satellite parts) and profoundly irritating the spooks. Watch the videos. Really watch the videos.
ebooks
Odd Lots
The Revenge of the Classics
I've lived such an overstuffed life for so many years that I'd almost forgotten a psychology that was a very big part of my youth: Sniffing around for “just something to read.” I'm a very deliberate reader these days because I don't have a lot of completely uncommitted time. I have a reading buffer of 50-100 books on hand here, all of which were chosen because they touch on one of my interests or another. (My library as a whole contains somewhere around 2500 books, down from 3000 before we left Arizona.) I never have to cast about at random for just something to read.
For many people, reading is an even bigger part of their lives, believe it or not. (Maybe fewer than we'd like, but they're out there.) These people are driving the ebook industry right now, and I've noticed a phenomenon few others have commented on: the explosion of interest in out-of-copyright books by people who might not have been slobbering Dickens or Jane Austen fans in the past. At numerous sites online, people are uploading ebook versions of many classic texts. I follow Mobileread, which now has about 3,800 free ebooks online for download, the bulk of them pre-1923 works, some well-known (they have Dickens' complete works now) and some pretty obscure, like the Scottish Psalter of 1650. Mobileread is interesting because people are creating versions in the popular small-screen ebook reader formats like Ebookwise, MobiPocket and BBeB rather than raw text—nor formats used primarily on PCs, like PDF and MS Reader.
I continue to boggle at people reading Thackeray on their cellphones, but boggle or no boggle, it's being done. The classics are coming back. I can't entirely explain it, but I have some hunches:
- Many of these ebook editions are beautifully done. The Dickens canon is the work of one man named Harry in the UK, and they include some of the nice old 19th Century woodcut illustrations plus color covers where those were available. (Oliver Twist, yes. Martin Chuzzlewit, no.) They are not shot full of OCR errors and gaps like some of the stuff I've downloaded from other places, including the venerable Project Gutenberg.
- They are free and they are easy to get. There are no hurdles to jump, nothing to sign up for, no money to lay out, and no DRM to drop sand in the gears of the experience.
- There are no ethical issues involved in obtaining them or passing them on. I still think people are basically honest, and they do consider the rights of copyright holders.
- They're classics because they have withstood the test of time. They're good.
The classics have always been available in bookstores, of course, at prices comparable to those of newly published books. But if you're shopping for something to read on the train going in to work because it's a dead hour coming and going, it's hard to beat free, especially if free is easy and involves no pokes from the conscience.
What we're seeing here might as well be called open-source literature. It's being done by volunteer labor, including people who are drawing new artwork and contributing it without copyright claims. It's significant because people writing new ebooks have to take into account that the total available number of reader-hours in the audience is finite, and the friction involved in obtaining and reading the classics is now approaching zero. Like Linux, it will take a while yet for the well-formatted library of classic ebooks to mature, but like Linux, they will eventually become a competitive force to reckon with.
And wow, dare we hope that the premodern will put a fat boot up the ass of the postmodern? A lot of those “dead white males” must be grinning about now.
Odd Lots
- Bob Halloran wrote to remind me that dual-booting Windows and Linux on a single hard drive is easy—but you have to install Windows first. When you install Linux it will see the Windows partition and configure grub so that grub will allow you to choose either OS when the hard drive's MBR gets control. If you install Linux and then Windows, Windows will overwrite the MBR with its own stuff, and grub will be gone. I'm going to try this with a couple of Linux installs alongside Windows (I want both Ubuntu and Kubuntu on that drive, at minimum) and will report back here in detail as to how it goes.
- From Engadget comes a report of a prototype ebook reader (including handwriting recognition) shown without any explanation at the recent CES. This looks damned good to me, and is worth watching, at least in part because it's not tiny. I do not want a tiny ebook reader. I want something that shows an 8 1/2″ X 11″ page full-size. The dimensions on this gizmo are unclear, but it's sure as hell bigger than a cell phone. I'll trade a keyboard for a stylus, but I want the display to be at least letter-sized. (And I want a photovoltaic panel on the back to charge it when I'm not using it!)
- There's nothing whatsoever preventing a piece of software from rendering a PDF ebook as reflowable text, and we're starting to get hints that Adobe may provide that ability, at least for the Sony Reader. This will allow people with big displays to read an ebook as pages, and people going crosseyed on small displays to read an ebook five words at a time. It should be the reader's choice, and I'm annoyed that that ability was not there from the beginning of PDF time.
- Finally, I'm going in for serious gum surgery tomorrow morning, and I do not plan to be fully present intellectually for a couple of days. Do not look for a Contra entry before Thursday, but if you see one, it means I'm in better shape than I expected to be.
