Argh.

So I wanted to buy a specific title for a friend (The Soul of a New Machine, in fact) who would be in town in just 2 days.  Not wanting to pay 2-day Amazon shipping, I went online to Borders and “reserved” the book at a local Borders outlet.

When I went to pickup the book, there was nobody at the customer service desk.  While waiting for someone to show up there, I went over to the Search terminal to see if they had a copy of the DVD Triumph of the Nerds.  Searching for ‘triumph of the nerds’ returned over 13,000 hits (even when narrowed to Movies & TV).  Searching for the whole phrase returned 0 hits.  When the customer service person finally arrived (I had to go to the cashier and ask to have someone sent there), and told me that the book I had reserved would be at the cashier station, I asked him to help me with the search.  He tried without success and asked me whether I was sure the item was still available for sale.  (It is.)  I then asked if he could direct me to the section where I might find other books on the history of computers and technology.  He needed an example title to answer the question, so I suggested Insanely Great.  He did some unsuccessful searches and asked me whether I was sure the item was still available for sale.  (It’s in its second printing.)

I went home and ordered all the items from Amazon.  I’ll have to wait a couple days to get them, but (a) the search function found every item as a top hit on the first search attempt, and (b) I am paying less, even without considering sales tax.

Borders is fcuked, and probably so are the other big box stores. From now on it’s my neighborhood independent bookstore when possible, and Amazon otherwise.

I was pretty excited about the Kindle DX announcement yesterday. In fact I had ordered an iRex iLiad Book Edition, and ended up cancelling that order to pre-order a Kindle DX. Both have full-page-size native PDF rendering; the iLiad gives me the ability to mark up/write on the screen, whereas the Kindle DX gives me the ability to have all my other Kindle books. It was a tough call, but the iLiad’s not likely to go up in price so I saw no downside to cancelling my order even if I decide to reinstate it later.

I have to admit I’m puzzled about some of my colleagues’ pessimism surrounding the proposed deals with textbook publishers and pilot programs at various colleges for e-textbooks. Maybe I’m overly optimistic but I see a win here for publishers, students and faculty. As a student, I would have loved to avoid carrying around 40 pounds of books. Also, most textbooks are revved very frequently, and a lot of paper is wasted when old editions are discarded; the tree-hugger in me cringes at the thought of how many books are thrown away. Yes, students currently benefit from the used textbook market because they can recapture part of their investment by selling back their textbooks each semester, but the even as the books are replaced by e-books that enjoy bigger margins.

But more importantly, in the long term I believe students will also benefit because a lot of textbooks are already available online free or nearly-free from their academic authors, and there are several movements and organizations working to make textbooks more affordable and to create open-source textbooks. Large-screen ebook readers provide a low-cost distribution mechanism for them (creating an e-book that is friendly to small display sizes is not trivial, especially if there are lots of graphs, equations or technical figures). Over time I suspect that e-book prices will fall to the point that students will, in fact, either experience a net savings compared to the current practice of buying and later re-selling their used physical textbooks, or be willing to pay parity price but not have to lug books around. (And the DRM used on Kindles doesn’t prevent buybacks or textbook rentals; it just hasn’t been implemented.)

On another note, I also noticed the new deals announced with various newspapers to subsidize Kindle DX’s for purchasers who subscribe to the Kindle edition of the paper. This is an interesting approach, and I wondered why not do this for small-screen Kindles also, but then I read Robert Fabricant’s interesting piece on FastCompany on how the physical layout geometry (and therefore the size) of print media matters for news & journalism in a way that doesn’t apply to other kinds of print media. The idea that you can juxtapose stories, points of view, etc. by putting them side-by-side in a newspaper layout is something that might kind-of work on the Kindle DX, but wouldn’t work at all on the 6-inch Kindle.

Maybe the best short-term thing about the DX announcement is the “trickle-down effect”: a pronounced increase in the number of used Kindle 1’s and Kindle 2’s on Craigslist at a price point that people might actually find palatable (I’ve seen as low as $150). Well, Mothers’ Day is coming…

So I’m back from my annual two-week “unplugged” vacation where I catchup on my non-work reading, and this year I decided to take the plunge and get an Amazon Kindle. I read about 8 books on Kindle (+5 print books) during my 2 weeks away, and here’s my initial impressions of using it.EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:An outstanding replacement for mass-market and most trade paperbacks and many hardbacks. Not a replacement for technical books, articles, arbitrary PDFs, etc. A good rule of thumb seems to be that a text that could be reasonably rendered using a simple markup format like Pod or Javadoc will read well on the Kindle. Books with lots of graphs/tables/figures, complex layout, or where typography matters, will not read well. THE GOOD:

• User experience of browsing, buying books, etc. is nicely integrated, though browsing the Kindle Store on the device itself is a little like browsing Web 1.0 pages on a black-and-white, 640×480 computer over slow dialup. (The omission of Wifi is baffling.)
• Pricing model for books is defensible: bestsellers $10 (typically that’s less than half price of the print hardback), mass market paperbacks around $6, older titles as low as $3. If you consider the device a sunk cost, it often makes good economic sense to buy a Kindle edition, even compared to buying a used print copy.
• The user experience of actually reading is great. It’s lighter and easier to hold than even a mass-market paperback. 
• I’m often in the middle of several books at a time. Flipping among them is trivial and your bookmarks are automatically remembered. This will make me read more, by eliminating the minor inconvenience of getting my butt out of the chair to swap out books.
• Most important by far: I traveled with 10.3 ounces, rather than about 15 pounds. With per-bag luggage fees, carry-on limits, and just the fact that I like to travel light, this trumps virtually every weakness of the device.

THE NOT-SO-GOOD:

• I’ve been carping about the lack of PDF support. (Amazon’s PDF “converter” is terrible, yielding mostly-unusable versions of anything that’s not mostly text.) However, I’m beginning to come around to the fact that this device is a one-trick pony: it’s my non-work-documents reader. I’m looking at an iRex Iliad, which has a letter-size display that’s also touch sensitive, handles PDF’s, and allows annotations with a stylus, as a companion device for technical documents. In a sense, complaining that I can’t read letter-size technical articles on this device would be a bit like complaining that a mass-market paperback is not the right format for technical books.
• Although you can change the font size while reading, apparently you can’t change the actual font. There’s evidently one sans-serif font (Helvetica) and one serif font (blockier than Times) on the device. They’re fine to read, but you lose any aesthetics of typography. This is fine if your reading material would otherwise have been mass-market paperback; it may be an annoying omission in other cases, especially for typography geeks like me. 
• Amazingly, while the table of contents of all books I purchased were hyperlinked, neither footnotes nor indices are. It doesn’t seem like this would be hard to do in a markup format (which is evidently what’s being used here,I assume something like DocBook as opposed to a page-description format).
• The page-flip buttons are arranged in such a way that it’s easy to hit them by accident. A simple fix would be software-controllable configuration of what those buttons do (e.g. so I could disable the ones I don’t use, since the functionality on some buttons is redundant).
• The scroll-wheel menus are awkward for “two-dimensional” GUI displays, which crop up occasionally when you’re browsing the Kindle Store on the device itself.
• In general, the Store UI could be streamlined to minimize the number of (SLOW) wireless roundtrips and screen redraws when exploring a book title, reading reviews, etc. I assume a forthcoming software update will fix this.
• As is well known, the selection of titles available for Kindle is a tiny fraction of the print title selection (though still a lot better than for any other ebook reader AFAIK). But if you read as much as I do, there’s always something worth having.
• Why does this thing have an MP3 player (which I didn’t use, and for which there is no comparable “seamless” download experience) but not Wifi?  Who listens to music while reading?
• The price is way too high ($360 currently) but I’m sure it’ll go down. I’d like to see these kinds of devices more widely adopted if only for the positive environmental implications. For now, it’s a luxury for those of us who read a whole lot and are willing to pay a premium for early adoption.
• I’m not going to wring my hands over DRM right now; Apple’s iTunes Music Store eventually became DRM-free once there was a large established market for the product (which isn’t yet true of Kindle ebooks) and a seamless buyer experience (which largely is true of Kindle), so there’s no fundamental reason this couldn’t happen for ebooks. 

SIMPLE THINGS I’D LIKE TO SEE: 

• I’m going to try running Amazon’s HTML-to-Kindle converter on the output of latex2html, which usually produces a very usable HTML version from LaTeX source. That might at least give me a way to read documents for which I have the LaTeX source. 
• I’d like to identify a “one-click” formatting pipeline for putting public domain etexts (eg from Project Gutenberg) on the Kindle. Anyone know of one?
• I’d like to see the DRM extended to allow me to “loan” a Kindle book to another user not registered to my same account. During that time, the book would be unavailable on my Kindle until the other user “returns” it. My guess is this would dampen a lot of the fair-use handwringing and be a reasonable compromise. Note that the machinery for this already exists, since you can “return” a Kindle book you didn’t mean to purchase, causing it to be erased from your Kindle before your money is refunded. (Note that you can buy up to 6 Kindles registered on a single Amazon account, and titles can be shared among those.) 
• Similarly…I’d like to be able to “borrow” one of a fixed number of circulating e-copies of a book from, say, the San Francisco Public Library.  The New York Public Library and a few others currently do this for Mobipocket format (DRM’d) ebooks, but these can’t be read on Kindle (although a hack allows non-DRM’d Mobipocket format books to be read on Kindle).
• The decision not to include Wifi (falling back to EVDO, iPhone-style) is baffling. In Mexico I had good Wifi access but no EVDO. At home, the EVDO bandwidth isn’t great and I’d rather use my home Wifi.
• The UI is inconsistent and sometimes confusing. What’s a “clipping” vs. a “note” vs. a “hilight” vs. a “mark”? The navigation UI for these annotation-type things is not very graceful.

BOTTOM LINE: I like it and I’m keeping it. I probably will never travel without it; the extent to which it replaces print books (especially as I’m a big library borrower) for at-home and at-work reading remains to be seen.

Boy, I had no clue how many ebook reader choices are already out there. Most seem to be based on eInk’s
The ebook readers from Astak look promising, but even the cheap one (5″ screen) is not shipping yet. The iRex Iliad looks promising too, but expensive at USD699 for the large-screen (8.1″) version, though it does have a stylus touchscreen and seems more general than just reading (marketing copy claims you can “read comics, sketch, play Sudoku or crossword puzzles…” on it, though I prefer a one-trick pony that does its trick really well, like the beautifully designed iPod Shuffle.)

I’m no longer considering the Bookeen Cybook after one of its users reported that full-page (letter/A4) PDF files are often unusable due to the smaller screen. I intend to read not only technical books but technical papers, so that’s a dealbreaker for me, and I’m looking seriously at the Iliad as a result.

I’ve long complained that if only the Kindle supported PDF, I’d buy that, but I’m not so sure anymore: virtually all the other readers support the Mobipocket format (which has both DRM’d and non-DRM’d variants), and if there is anything worse than a DRM’d ebook format, it’s two incompatible DRM’d ebook formats (Amazon Kindle has its own .AZW format, and while the Kindle supports Mobipocket, it’s hard for me to get behind a device whose main contribution seems to be a new DRM format).

I definitely want to have one of these loaded up with stuff before our big family vacation in August, so I guess I’ll have to make a decision by then…you’d think academics who read a lot and cart around sheaves of papers printed out from PDF files would be a great early-adopter audience, but only the iLiad seems to be targeting them…

Paul Graham’s interesting book has a lot of refreshingly iconoclastic ideas around the art and craft of hacking and how that impinges on the Real World, startups, universities, language design, etc. Unfortunately the density of great stuff doesn’t quite justify reading the whole book, but I really liked the chapter called “Revenge of the Nerds” about the “evolution” of programming languages and how they are becoming more Lisp-like, to the point that we’re almost caught up to 1960. Worth a (quick) read for hackers, who will find much to identify with written in a style of discourse that’s natural to them.