For those still ruminating on the latest reading gadget, a full review of Kindle with lots of closeup pics is at Appleinsider.
February 2009 Archives
So while the rest of us were reading, or something, a controversy erupted about the online social networking site Facebook. Facebook issued a new set of terms and conditions to its users, which, when read by a layperson (and apparently some lawyers), gives the impression that when you sign up with Facebook, the company owns all of your content in perpetuity, including your mother's love letters to her Italian lover, you diary you kept for a year when you were sixteen, your liver, your kidneys, and, in certain circumstances, belly button and all lint therein. After enormous outcry, Facebook relented and switched back its terms, and so at least for now, your kidneys are safe.
Facebook is enormously popular - it provides a place for people to "poke" each other, which is useful, and do other things that sound dirty but really aren't. Celebrities and politicians use it to promote their work. And I imagine more than a few writers are considering hooking in themselves. I mean, why not? I could put up a Facebook page, hook it over to my blog and vice versa, and maybe cast a wider net. There are writerly versions, of course - Redroom.com is one example - but Facebook is the Great Everybody, where you can run into that old high school classmate who just happens to be the head of a publishing house, or failing that, you can find that fellow from college who made cool sounds with his armpit.
I have decided to take a smaller leap, and jumped onto Twitter. Twitter (which is sometimes described as Twitterific) is an example of what is called "Microblogging". It's a status tool, allowing a person to post short phrases that answer the question, "What are you doing?". Users who have a Twitter account (free) can "follow" other users, which is less odd than "poking" but also more creepy. If you are a user you can follow me - including automated updates when something new is posted on Northern Word. The potential of this tool is more obvious once you have found a few people to follow. You can follow famous people or people you know, or just pick random people to follow. This is old news to Twitter aficionados - but a large percentage of the population is completely unaware that this sort of thing is going on. We'll see where it all goes.
Below: people who do not Twitter.
Elephant Seal at Ano Nuevo, California.
A new feature here at Northern word is "My Life: Fabuloused" in which Susan takes treasured childhood memories and destroys them by making shit up. Because why should James Frey have all the fun.
When I was five, we lived in Reno, Nevada, and once when I was hanging out in my backyard, I was overrun by a terrible swarm of ants. I lacked the sense to immediately stand up and brush off the creatures, and so the swarm enveloped me quickly. But the time I jumped up in horror, the ants were climbing all over my body, all the way up to the top of my head, where they kept climbing, one on top of another, until they created a narrow tower of ants. As I stumbled around in 5-year-old stupor, this tower leaned over until it formed the top of a question mark. I wandered our barren Nevada yard with this punctuation on my head for most of an hour, until finally the insects answered their own question and leapt off in the form of an exclamation point, never to be seen again.
As I start digging up my long-forgotten past for a nonfiction project, I'm wandering through album after album of old pictures. My family was stingy with the film; lots of pictures of vacations, but sparse documentation of everything else. This shot is from a vacation to Canada, probably somewhere between Banff and Jasper, sometime around 1982. I was raised in the woods, and when we went on vacation, we always found more woods.
You do know that the entire reason I do these writing prompts is to procrastinate my own writing, don't you? So ironic. But here I am again, procrastinating. Here is a photograph I took a few weeks ago at the Grand Canyon of a path, right along the edge, covered in ice. Perfect conditions for taking a "long trip" if you will. So here's your prompts. Fiction: Send your character on a precarious path, on the edge of something. Will they fall off? Aaah, that would be short story. For a longer effort, you'll have to find a way to get them to hang on. Make it literal or figurative. Push them as close to the edge as you can.
Nonfiction: What precarious paths are there in your neighborhood, your town, your city, your childhood?
Three minutes after the picture below was taken, a large hippopotamus wandered up the path, slipped, and disappeared. About half an hour later we heard a big "splat". (ok, I made that up. I've decided to "Fabulous" my life to make it more interesting).
As a writer who is also a gadget freak, I've been watching the progression of ebook technology over the last few years with great interest. Sony and others jumped into the space, attempting to create an electronic device that, proponents argued, would eventually replace the paper book. The response from the reading public ranged from underwhelmed to unaware. If an ebook reader is launched on the market and nobody reads it, does it matter? Answer: Noooooooo.
All these years later, Amazon.com is desperate to launch an eBook reader that sticks. The stakes are high for the world's largest online bookseller; a business model similar to the lucrative iPod has a quite an allure. No shipping costs, for one. The possibility that consumers will make more impulse purchases when they can have their book right away, for two.
A couple of years ago Amazon launched the "Kindle", it's proposal to end the ebook argument once and for all. Amazon spent a lot of time with its supplier figuring out "electonic paper", to give a reading experience as simple and easy on the eyes as a real piece of paper. But the first generation Kindle looked ridiculous, like a block of Romano cheese sliced by a distracted teenager. It did not give off a "cool" vibe, it was black and white, it had technical limitations on how to get books and how many you could keep. The screen was black and white, which means the graphic design of many a book is generally lost on its Kindle copy. Oh, and it cost $350, which is, to be blunt, a deal breaker for most of the potential audience.
This last week, Amazon attempted to rectify some of this by launching the second generation Kindle. Reviews have been mixed (see Cnet's roundup for a variety of perspectives). Most acknowledge that the device has now entered into the general ballpark of "cool" - it's incredibly thin, and can now be slid neatly into a business portfolio. It hooks in, free of charge, to a 3G wireless network, allowing users to download books from almost anywhere near a city. It looks, at first glance, like a promising advance.
But-you knew there would be a very big "But" in an ebook discussion - it still costs $350. There are iPhones that cost less than that, even without a carrier subsidy. It is still only in black and white. So for me at least, Kindle will remain an interesting device I won't purchase. And it remains out of the price range that many students can afford, and still doesn't offer textbooks - textbooks are in my view the "killer app" that will propel the Kindle forward some day.
This iteration of the eBook has gotten closer to true "book replacement" functionality than we've been before. And that being the case, it's well past time to talk about what this means to publishing. Amazon has the potential to become, like Apple, a single, proprietary distribution point for an entire art form. Apple has only recently lifted its restrictions so that users can now play iTunes purchases on non-Apple products. The lifting of DRM (Digital Rights Management) lockdowns from iTunes is a major step forward in creating a market for music that is not firmly in the hands of one corporation and its interests. When everyone else does the same - and you can download music from a variety of "stores" to play on your iPod - the unlocking will be complete. Amazon's model is like iPod 1.0 - proprietary format, proprietary player, single point of purchase. Issues of censorship and corporate control of intellectual content will loom large if this platform manages to really take off before these restrictions are eased. Let's hope the Kindle eventually follows the same path as the iPod. Will Sony Reader owners one day be able to purchase books from Amazon? Will Barnes and Noble be able to sell an ebook for the Kindle?
These concerns all assume, of course, that the Kindle, or any ebook, will actually take off. With an estimated 500k units out there (and nobody really knows for sure) it seems like a small installed base - but keep in mind, selling 100,000 copies is a lot in the publishing world, and the purchasing habits of Kindle users are not known to us. Do they buy more than they did before the Kindle? If so, the impact may be already be greater than we realize. And then there's the dark horse in all this, the new "Shortcovers" app for mobile phones. Its impact may also be large, as the iPhone and others have spent more time on decent color screens - and a color screen is still something the Kindle lacks.
I'll keep my eye on the Kindle and let you know if any new developments crop up.
Below: begging raven from my recent trip to the Grand Canyon.
In the main part of Sedona, which is surrounded on all sides by spectacular red rock formations and crystal blue sky, is a dependable horse. So dependable, I guarantee he will be there waiting for you if you go.
Welcome to Northern Word, the online home of writer Susan McNerney. Northern Word features lots of photography, words on the business and process of writing, original bits of fiction and nonfiction, travelogues and travel writing, and anything else that Susan feels like posting. Browse the categories on the left (or the topic cloud below) to see previous episodes, and don't miss the two big travelogues: A Week in Rome and A Great Southwest Road Trip. Susan is originally from the redwood regions of Northern California, but now lives and writes in chilly Minnesota.
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All images on Northern Word are under copyright (see Creative Commons license linked below). Want to use one of these pics? Feel free to drop me an email at mackerelstreet ((at )) gmail (( dot ) com.
