Christian Renaud's Blog

Ode to the Kindle

This isn't my first electronic book reader.  I have been reading books on laptops, my old Newton, various Palm and CE-based PDAs, Smartphones (including my iPhones), and my Sony Reader.  I think the idea of electronic access to my absurdly large library of books makes as much sense as electronic access (via my iPhone/iPod) to my library of music.

I think the Kindle, as aesthetically unpleasing as it is, may finally be a step in the right direction.

Rather than sprout a bunch of platitudes about how fantastic it is, let me just illustrate some uses I have put it to and let those speak for themselves:

The Politics of Marketing, or vice-versa

 

At the end of the newest Bob Woodward book, State of Denial, he quotes National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley as saying "Great! This book (meaning Woodwards) is going to be published in 2006, right after Jerry Bremer's book!" and goes on to say that the one-two punch of these accusations was going to be dangerous to the president and mid-term elections.

This passage seemed conspicuously out of context with the rest of the book, like the camera dwelling a bit too long on a Coca-Cola can in a film or TV show.  Did Simon and Schuster, the publisher of both Woodward's State of Denial, as well as Bremer's My Year in Iraq, purposely 'product place' a plug for Bremer's book in what they knew would be a popular Woodward book?  If so, I think that may be the first deliberate product placement in a book that I have seen yet.  That is, unless those old Dunhill cologne references in the John Gardener James Bond books were paid for.

By the way, since Amazon does not allow you to 'search inside' Bremer's book and I do not own it, I cannot determine if this is cross-promotion.  Anyone who owns it, please let me know if they are shamelessly plugging each other's work.

On a related note, I also recently finished Barry Werth's 31 Days, recounting the 31 days starting with Nixon's resignation until his pardon.  It is just amazing how many people from that time period in the '70s, working for Nixon and Ford, are also currently in the Bush administration in high positions (Hadley, Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc.).

Atoms and Bits revisited (Part 1)

Following up from some prior rants about easy access to my owned information......

Current situation:

I read books, magazines and newspapers by the truckload, scan RSS feeds by the hundreds and process emails by what seems like the thousands if not more.  I also listen to podcasts, Audible's Wall Street Journal daily feed, audio lectures and audiobooks.  Finally, I rarely watch television and pick up a random snippet.

These are all, without question, silos of information.  Many of these modalities are natively electronic, like feeds and email, and some originated that way to be printed later, like the vast majority of books I receive via Amazon.  They are not, however, cross indexed for me so I can peruse, search, and annotate information I like.  These are often items that are customized by me, and therefore far beyond Google's noble goals to index, as they are never exposed to my unique incarnation of that data.  They are also focused around the portal itself, and not around the user (me) who is the consumer of said inputs.

I was looking at two items just today, the Sony Reader ebook device, as well as the Amazon Upgrade service, which allows you to store an electronic version of a purchased book on their site for online annotation and searching.  These got me thinking about my access to the vast information flow coming at me, and the best way to manage the volume in an intelligent way, short of turning off spigots, which seems rather self-limiting, as each one offers content that I need. 

Let me say up front that any overlap in content across these modalities is purely deliberate at this point, as I am walking a fine line between too much duplicate content vs. very few sources of similar content causing a monoculture or path-dependency reaction (as would be the case if I only read libertarian blogs).  If the information were to be funneled through a particular pipe (other than my aging eyes), I could apply policy to the inbound flow and help prioritize, determine relevance, find adjacent recommendations, and the like.

Ideal situation:

All of the above inputs, but with electronic versions available to me either online on-demand, or downloadable (I needed this on the flight yesterday), indexed and searchable.  When I buy a physical book through Amazon, the free, accompanying electronic version should be added to my library there immediately and exposed via a private RSS feed (as is the case with Audible.com and WSJ subscriptions) that can be indexed by Spotlight on my Mac.  This way, all of my purchased knowledge is aggregated for me on-demand, regardless of origination point. 

I recently listened to a podcast that came with an online transcript.  This is a perfect addition to the index.  The same thing should also be included with Audible's audiobooks.

If I am using a laptop to read (scary thought), it should track my status in a book or podcast just as iTunes does with audiobooks right now, and translate that to a particular reference point in an ebook-version (on my ebook reader) or a time-stamp on an audiobook version, so I don't have to pay a cost to switch modes.  The reader, iPod, and laptop should all share the status of my progress through an audiobook, or the 'read/unread' status of podcasts and newsfeeds.  This is implemented in a primitive way with the iPod/iTunes combo right now for podcasts and audiobooks, but needs to grow considerably.

So, all of this meme in one word? Multi-modality.

Have any readers discovered useful tools or techniques to manage this inbound flow of information, short of cauterizing yourself to using your computer and the web as your only information portal? (which means I abandon the hours each day when I am not at my computer as non-input time)

Never in civilized conversation

I guess I am lucky we aren't at a cocktail party together, as I have discussed politics already today, and am now moving on to religion.  Does a blog fall under the old adage "Three topics to avoid at a cocktail party lest you want to start an argument: sex, politics and religion"?

Two related items. 

First, Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor and the incomparable author of The Selfish Gene (which introduced the word 'meme' to my frequently-used-word-lexicon), just released a new book entitled The God Delusion.  The book's title pretty much sums up the topic, which takes a frothing atheist's view of the benefits and drawbacks of religion in historic and present society.  I try to read a balanced set of books on this subject (having just finished Jimmy Carter's excellent Our Endangered Values yesterday), so am looking forward to this insightful author's treatment of the subject.

Second, Baylor University just published a new study entitled 'American Piety in the 21st Century', which is a multi-year, broad-based study of the religious beliefs of the United States.  It touches on a number of issues including the type of God that people feel exists (benevolent, wrathful, etc.) as well as how people categorize themselves as believers (evangelical, born-again, etc.).  There are some amusing bits in there, including Americans who claim membership in denominations that are non-Evangelical and subsequently categorize themselves as Evangelical (in quantities greater than the aggregate of all Evangelical faiths, I might add).   

I think I may have seen these people vote.

All in all, an insightful read for all of us, and not just the 96 percent of Americans who believe in God.

(Update: 4:15p-  Just saw an excerpt from the book, which was so amusing I had to affix this postscript...."To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. ")