Impressions of the Kindle, part two

First, a report that (and I quote) Old People Love the Kindle. Well, maybe I am getting older. And I wouldn't say "love" as much as "am fascinated by".

Anyway, second impressions of the Kindle are as follows. Not all books are welcome in the Kindle format. I see two main problems:

1. PAGE NUMBER CONCERNS

First, any book in which you need to know the page numbers will not work on Kindle 2 (or, the Kindle as I have it today). So, think about the following scenarios:

a. Assigning a textbook where half the class (and the instructor) has a Kindle and half the class has a paper copy. No more "ok, class, I need you to read pages 38-46, but you can skip page 40." Pages don't exist on the Kindle, so how to navigate this situation? What about even a book club? ("I loved that line on page 56 where the guy says..." you can't say that anymore unless everyone has the same version, either book or Kindle. Even if a book club is reading different versions of the same material, the page numbers are more likely to be close to each other. You can at least flip around to the right area of the book.) The Kindle concept of a "location" won't translate to paper, and Kindle search won't translate to paper either. This 'location' and 'search' is a definite strong suit of Kindle, I get that, but how to mediate between multiple groups!? Has someone built a web site to translate Kindle locations to paper pages yet? What about the other way 'round?

b. Citations become difficult (for example, giving the page number in a bibliography) unless there is a new APA/IEEE/MLA/whatever citation style that includes Kindle locations. I am not aware of how to do this. I should look this up to see if electronic books have been explained yet, probably have, and how the Kindle is affected.

2. FORMATTING CONCERNS

Any book that relies heavily on non-linear, tabular, or graphical objects is automatically not optimized for Kindle 2. Examples: programming books with large chunks of code to be studied, rock climbing books that show maps of routes, fitness books that show tables of exercises or foods, or sports books that show different pictures of people doing exercises. In the case of rock climbing, for instance, the different symbols used on the maps are critically important, and if the pictures aren't able to be "blown up" (enlarged) in the Kindle, then what's the point really?

I had one book that was so badly formatted that it permanently locked up my Kindle and I had to send it back and get a new one. It took 3 days to track down the problem. Amazon finally tracked the problem to a badly formatted Appendix in a book called The Portable Personal Trainer, that included a table on the glycemic indexes of common foods.

In addition, any book that relies on "as you can see from the discussion previously on page 138..." well there is no page 138. It's up to the publisher before publishing the Kindle version to insert URLs (hyperlinks) between locations, so the Kindle user can move the pointer to the hyperlink that says "page 138" and click to go to that place on the Kindle version.

Which brings me to my real concern here. The Kindle 2 has a lot of potential for things like this, URL hyperlinking and enlarged detailed images. BUT. The publishers aren't using the features. They aren't inserting these features into the "formatted" books. They're doing the bare minimum of formatting, basically running some software to turn whatever format their books are in into an .azw file, making a quick table of contents, and collecting their $9.99.

The real challenge in choosing an e-book therefore seems to be with being able to discern whether a publisher has formatted the book well before buying. Also, if the book is in multiple versions, such as public domain versions, then the user has to be able to choose the BEST formatted version. Amazon currently allows the user to download the first chapter or a sample chapter of many books available for purchase. I've found that this is helpful with choosing between public domain versions (should I buy the $0.99 version or the $0.00 version? What am I getting for my $0.99?), but it's less helpful with new books or with books that have these tricky graphical features that will be spread throughout the book, not just in the first chapter.

Amazon reviews are fairly worthless for discerning the well-formatted from the poorly-formatted. Amazon reviews allow everything from people whining about not receiving their used copies from some 3rd party seller ("One star! I never got my book in the mail!") to plot reviews ("Five stars! I love vampires!"), to opinion pieces about the cover art or the paper content of the book ("One star! Buy the other edition, this one has cheap paper!")

What we need is a comprehensive review site for discussing the formatting of e-books, or at the very least, we need the ability to search and group Amazon reviews by whether they explicitly discuss the Kindle/e-book formatting issues. I understand that Amazon has tagging, but it's not used well and it not scaling to the number of reviews they have posted.

If anyone has any ideas about how to handle these concerns, I'd be interested in hearing.

More O'Reilly books now available for Kindle

The number of O'Reilly books available on the Kindle was painfully small, but here is an improvement with 160 books now available. This posting explains ther decision to release these books and why they have not released more. Interesting.

Impressions of the Kindle, part one

So I got a Kindle as part of our department's initiative into investigating wireless and mobile computing platforms. I've been using it for nearly a month. Here are some of my immediate impressions of it. I'll post more substantive critique of some of its flaws and promise later.

1. The movement controls are not web-like. Unlike on the web, the primary movement is not scroll up, scroll down. Here, your primary navigation technique is "next page" and "previous page". This takes some getting used to.

2. The e-ink technology means that you have a very long battery life, and you can read in the bright sunlight outdoors with no eye fatigue. This is very different than most other devices I've seen.

3. The lack of backlighting also means that you can't read in the dark. Just like a "real" book, you'll need a book light to illuminate the screen.

4. Unlike other digital interfaces, most of the screen does not refresh after it has been drawn. This means that seemingly "obvious" items (like a clock for example) are not displayed on the device. Instead, a clock is shown if you click into a menu. The only items that seem to be redrawn are the wireless "bars" and the Kindle's equivalent of an hourglass.

5. Nearly any book available on the Kindle has a free sample (usually the first chapter) that you can download and read immediately before buying. This is useful both for previewing the content, and also for checking the book to see if you like the way the author/publisher has formatted the book. There are multiple versions of many public domain books (think: Works of Shakespeare or the like) and you may prefer the way one publisher has formatted these words over the method chosen by another publisher.

More detailed critique to come... I'll discuss the issues of formatting in greater detail, especially the notion of "locations", linking, indexing, and publisher errors in formatting.

What to call your professor

What to call your professor, a flowchart, in case you were ever wondering. :) (Hat tip to Eric Fink.)

How to make your life easier with Gmail

I have 5 email accounts that I wanted to be able to answer from a single email client. I had run a mashed-up email scenario successfully in the past using Thunderbird, but I was getting tired of the giant size of my email files being stored on my local drive, and using IMAP only solves one of my email account problems, since it's not available for all my accounts. I also wanted to be able to send and receive email on my phone and other devices, from the instructor workstation in my classroom (such as right now while students are taking an exam), and have access to all my old mail during all these times. Finally, I wanted to be able to switch the "send as" address in my client so that mail could appear to be coming from any of my 5 email addresses.

Enter Gmail.

Here's what to do to get your mail to bend to your will.

1. Create a Gmail account
2. Under "settings | accounts" set up all your other accounts that you want Gmail to check. It will send an email to each of these places making sure that you actually own these accounts.
3. Set Gmail to fetch the email from these places. Leave "leave a copy on server" UNchecked.
4. Set up your return address that you want to be the default, and set up your "reply to" addresses. This is all in "settings".

Note that this is not a forwarding arrangement. No mail is being "forwarded" anywhere. It's just that Gmail is fetching your mail for you from multiple places.

The ONLY thing I don't like about this Gmail setup is that you can't configure gmail to check your mail at a specific interval. No more "check for new mail every ___ minutes". So, there is sometimes a short delay between when the mail comes into the account, and when Gmail finally goes to get it. Google says they use some sort of sophisticated algorithm to determine when to go get my mail based on how often I've gotten new mail in the past. I haven't noticed this to be the case. It seems like they check every 30-45 minutes or so, and a deluge of mail on one or two pickups doesn't seem to affect this timing. Maybe I'm just not noticing the sophistication here, ha ha.

I've been using this setup since August and I like it a lot.

Elon ponders its role at Kannapolis

A nice article about Elon's possible role(s) in the new Research Campus at Kannapolis