Oyster surprise

I'm beta-testing Oyster, and I like it for a few reasons I didn't expect, while disliking it for the reasons that I expected to like it.
My usual grumpiness about ebook readers is that they focus much more on the shopping experience than the reading experience. But the shopping experience in Oyster is fabulous. I am totally sold on the $10/month all-you-can-read plan. It is THE most fun to see a book I want to read, click on it and just start reading. The book selection contains a lot of slightly older, semi-popular books that I hadn't read mainly because I didn't feel like spending $12.99 on each one of them. A subscription model unblocks that problem. Granted, I am only selecting books I already know something about, so I don't need a lot of editorial context and reviews. And I know that most of the books I'm looking at now, I won't want to keep and re-read. As my sister the librarian puts it, these are "cuddle books," books to read for pleasure.
There's also a concern that this model requires a connection for some tasks. I'm curious to take this into the subway tomorrow and see what those tasks are.
The reading experience, which is what interested me in the first place, is actually not that great yet. It feels very proof-of-concepty -- there are just 5 options for font/color packages, all of which are quite nice; 5 type sizes; and a slider bar for screen brightness. All these options are accessed through a separate menu instead of Stanza-style on-page controls. And you're still forced to right-justify, which makes the pages look ugly, and the view only works vertically, as far as I could tell, which makes for some very short and airy force-justified lines. The page framework never really disappears, and it's very easy, especially because the controls are on the right-hand side and I'm right-handed, to trigger the full suite of page controls when you're just trying to turn the page. Page turn gesture is also still horsey -- you have to flick up, instead of tapping, and the page turn is animated, which is just silly in 2013. I get the feeling more options are on the way, which will be nice -- this version is built just for iPhone, not even for iPad yet. So I'm hopeful that the view improves, but the store and business model are already pretty amazing.

Let's agree it is still not completely pleasant to buy and read ebooks. My suggestion for what's missing: monks.

To compare: Among the pleasures of reading a physical book are the experience of browsing shelves in a store, a library, or your house; flipping open a book at any point to look at it for as long as you like before committing; being able to pay for or check out the book in a few simple ways; and reading a well-laid-out page that is free of typos.

In the ebook market, no one seems to be working on these problems (maybe because of the distraction of building hardware, making markets, price-fixing). Because who works on the day-to-day usability of a book? The monks who work in bookstores and libraries and obsessively shelve, neaten and re-order; the monks who edit, proofread and typeset physical books and magazines. In new media, where I work, the monk class has not yet arisen, and when individual examples of the type arise, no one really knows what to do with them. There's no room in fast-moving, fast-changing new media for monks who do one small, audience-facing thing well, over and over.

Sub-thesis: Trying to buy an e-audiobook is so much worse I can't even start. Sorry, Mom & Dad, for our failed attempt yesterday to acquire you a Jo Nesbø audio mystery for your 8-hour drive.

20 maxims for life, from philosopher Thomas Davidson

From Thomas Davidson: A Knight-Errant of the Intellectual Life, by William James:

... Davidson's idea of the universe was that of a republic of immortal spirits, the chief business of whom, in their several grades of existence, should be to know and love and help one another.

We all say and think that we believe this sort of thing; but Davidson believed it really and actively, and that made all the difference. When the young wage-earners whom he addressed found that here was a man of measureless learning ready to give his soul to them as if he had nothing else to do with it, life's ideal possibilities widened to their view. ... In one of his letters to the class, Davidson sums up the results of his own experience of life in twenty maxims, as follows:


 1. Rely upon your own energies, and do not wait for, or depend on other people.

 2. Cling with all your might to your own highest ideals, and do not be led astray by such vulgar aims as wealth, position, popularity. Be yourself.

 3. Your worth consists in what you are, and not in what you have. What you are will show in what you do.

 4. Never fret, repine, or envy. Do not make yourself unhappy by comparing your circumstances with those of more fortunate people; but make the most of the opportunities you have. Employ profitably every moment.

 5. Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty. But learn to be happy alone.

 6. Do not believe that all greatness and heroism are in the past. Learn to discover princes, prophets, heroes, and saints among the people about you. Be assured they are there.

 7. Be on earth what good people hope to be in heaven.

 8. Cultivate ideal friendships, and gather into an intimate circle all your acquaintances who are hungering for truth and right. Remember that heaven itself can be nothing but the intimacy of pure and noble souls.

 9. Do not shrink from any useful or kindly act, however hard or repellent it may be. The worth of acts is measured by the spirit in which they are performed.

 10. If the world despise you because you do not follow its ways, pay no heed to it. But be sure your way is right.

 11. If a thousand plans fail, be not disheartened. As long as your purposes are right, you have not failed.

 12. Examine yourself every night, and see whether you have progressed in knowledge, sympathy, and helpfulness during the day. Count every day a loss in which no progress has been made.

 13. Seek enjoyment in energy, not in dalliance. Our worth is measured solely by what we do.

 14. Let not your goodness be professional; let it be the simple, natural outcome of your character. Therefore cultivate character.

 15. If you do wrong, say so, and make what atonement you can. That is true nobleness. Have no moral debts.

 16. When in doubt how to act, ask yourself, What does nobility command? Be on good terms with yourself.

 17. Look for no reward for goodness but goodness itself. Remember heaven and hell are utterly immoral institutions, if they are meant as reward and punishment.

 18. Give whatever countenance and help you can to every movement and institution that is working for good. Be not sectarian.

 19. Wear no placards, within or without. Be human fully.

 20. Never be satisfied until you have understood the meaning of the world, and the purpose of our own life, and have reduced your world to a rational cosmos.

eBooks and the actual experience of reading

I love reading and I'm picky about how I do it. My favorite thing right now is using the Stanza reader on an old iPod Touch that has been dropped about 50 times and repaired with duct tape (which actually makes it very easy to hold). Anything that I can read on Stanza is okay by me, because I can control every aspect of how I read: 

+ the way the pages turn

+ the color of the page

+ the type size, which can be changed with a two-finger swipe

+ the screen brightness, which I can change without having to leave the page I'm reading. It's just a simple finger swipe. Screen brightness control would be THE killer feature for me on Stanza except for this one

+ whether the text is flush right (force-justified) or rag right. I prefer rag right.

Force-justified text is one of those things like bad kerning that you don't see until you see it, and then you can't not see it. I really dislike ebook readers that force text to be flush right (the text runs hard up against both margins) because it leads to pages full of u  n  e  v  e  n    e m p t y       s p a c e. The "type color" is uneven and ugly, and the page just isn't a pleasure to look at. Why shouldn't a page be pleasant to look at?

So, any book I can read in Stanza, I prefer it over anything else. This means pretty much all books written before 1923 and any book published by Melville House, which sells brilliant new books like How to Wreck a Nice Beach as non-DRM files.

For new books, I use Kindle's not-so-fabulous reader for iOS. I don't hate this reader, but it's clearly been pretty well ignored by the Amazon designers, who wish you'd buy a Kindle Fire. The controls are horsey and very limited. I have a choice of 5 set type sizes that I have to leave my page to change; three page colors including a headachey white-on-black; and screen brightness that requires you to leave your page to modify through a menu. Fine. But I have not yet found a way to change the page so it doesn't force-justify. It's not a pleasant experience to read in this reader; it is a disincentive to buy books this way, and if I have a choice, I prefer not to buy formatted-for-Kindle titles. (This leaves aside the fact that you don't actually buy those titles; Amazon rents them to you in a pretty disingenuous way.)

But the ebooks that break my heart are those marketed through Adobe Digital Editions. I wish I was reading some of the amazing titles from the University of Chicago Press. They offer a free ebook each month that is incredibly enticing. And a lot of the time I go ahead and download the book, and then remember, every month, that the book has Adobe DRM on it, which means I need to read the book in an Adobe product or Bluefire Reader. Neither of these offer the flexibility and features of Stanza, and both of them are actually rather tricky to set up. The screencap above is what I got when I tried to look at a sample chapter of a neat-looking book; my system does not meet minimum system requirements evidently. I am running this software on a two-year-old MacBook Air. And I know that if I do manage to get this book working, it's locked into this one software license on this one machine. When my old Air died, I lost access to all the sample books I'd downloaded (including one I was in the middle of: No Dig, No Fly, No Go) because the license died with the MacBook. 

Ebooks right now are marketed to be easy to buy, and to use on custom machines; I'd love to see more thought given to the experience of actually reading.

In a related story, check out this post on Forbes: "Why Are eBooks Riddled With Typos?"

A Philadelphia joke in "The Good Soldier" that I just got

October 8 2011, 9:38 AM  by Emily McManus

I've read The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford so many times, at least four, because it's on my phone and whenever I idly start reading it I can't stop, and yet I just saw this. The main character is a Philadelphian, and he writes this about his wife:

Florence was singularly expert as a guide to archaeological expeditions and there was nothing she liked so much as taking people round ruins and showing you the window from which some one looked down upon the murder of some one else. She only did it once; but she did it quite magnificently. She could find her way, with the sole help of Baedeker, as easily about any old monument as she could about any American city where the blocks are all square and the streets all numbered, so that you can go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth.

This is clearly about Philly because the blocks are all square and the streets are all numbered -- and because the narrator refers at another point to

the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets.

So the Philly he knows is Center City Philly. 

And you can't go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth there, because the Schuylkill River is in the way.

KA POW.

Cleaning my house today, I found three gorgeous old issues of the New Yorker from the summer of 1979. I bought them in San Francisco because Veronica Geng was reviewing film in these issues while Pauline Kael was on vacation. Honestly. Just flipping through them makes me feel adult. They're slightly larger than the modern NYer and the type is smaller and blotchier, and I found myself flipping through these elegant magazines the way people flip magazines in movies but never in real life, impatiently back to front. Flipping through, I found this astonishing casual item. Just imagine seeing this in 1979, in a summer issue of a magazine, unsigned as everything was.

Of course the New Yorker website has this bizarre capsule version of it (if you want to hurt yourself, btw, read the NYer capsule of "Love Trouble Is My Business") and I thought I ought to type it onto the internet in its entirety. Then I found that someone already had. (And that this person seems to be friends with someone I sort of know, which means I get to ask them next time I meet them about their reading of George W.S. Trow).

I re-paste the text here, rather than linking, only because there was one small typo in the other person's version.



Think about Country Time, a powdered lemonadelike product. The coming forward of Country Time has centered on a certain old man and hordes of eager children. Children starved for news of the past. For years, they ignored Grandpa. Tied him up in the barn. Laughed at his silly ways. But now, after reading Foxfire One through Five in their public elementary school, they crowd around, hoping he'll teach them how to make butter with a stick. There is a song, "Country Time, Country Time," etc. With this idea: Sometimes you're real thirsty, blah, blah, blah, and nothing seems to do what you need to have done with your thirst, blah, blah, blah, and what you want is something real that will satisfy your thirst like good old-fashioned lemonade. That's right -- the idea behind the Country Time powder-product commercial is that lemonade is a thing of the past. No one can get lemonade anymore. Only some rich people. Most people don't even remember lemonade anymore. Only Grandpa, who has been bound and gagged and dishonored all these years out in the desert, like the decrepit warrior in Star Wars, only Grandpa even remembers what it tastes like.

The rundown is like this: Lemonade died out when the Old Ones lost out to the Invaders. But some people with the knowledge of the Old Ones escaped to Mars, where they made a kind of synthetic lemonade, using materials available on Mars. It was a powder and became popular. In the meantime, life on Earth contracted. Now, in these recent days, adventurers from Mars, sensing our need, have travelled to earth with the powder. When the powder is given to certain of our remaining Old Ones, they are made happy and remember lemonade. The idea is persuasive. It cause you to forget that you can make lemonade any time you want by squeezing some lemons in some water and adding sugar. People don't know. They really don't know that you can make lemonade any time you want. That's right. Lemonade is still available. Right now. Any time you want. Lemons are everywhere. You can make lemonade right now if you want to. It's great. Lemonade is still totally within our capacities.

I'm trying to find an "obscure" book to recommend to a wide audience, but nothing I can think of is right. Either the book is already known among the kind of people who like that kind of book, so that I look dumb for thinking it's obscure to anyone, or it's so obscure that it actually wouldn't be liked by a wide audience, and I'd look either pretentious or utterly eccentric for recommending that people read, for instance, "Tales of a Rat-Hunting Man." It is a bit of a brainteaser. I could absolutely cop out by suggesting that this wide audience sit down and read "Moby-Dick," which is not obscure but which goes unread. I'll see if this particular cop-out is needed. Because part of the pressure on this assignment is that the assignment is not actually to recommend a book but to take part in a conversation about recommending a book, and fit into the conversation such that it will continue. This has never been my strong suit, keeping a conversation going.