pondering points

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amazon kindle

This week Amazon announced the release of the Kindle 2; the improved ultra thin e-reader. At $359 it’s a hefty price to pay to see if giving up books, and newspapers for a device is even a way of life that will work for you. I got one of the first generation (for reasons I’ll get into below) Kindle’s last summer. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I do.

The new version has a couple of added features but for the most part it appears to behave exactly like the chunkier err model. Since some of you might be considering taking the leap; I wanted to offer up a little bit of what the experience has been like for me.

I want to look at it in terms of pros and cons. I’m starting with the cons as ultimately I think it’s a good device and want to spin the end positively.

CONS:
1) First and foremost price point. The cost of entry for this “device” has to come down before it will ever approach a mass audience (currently $359). The e-ink is beautiful, but in the end it’s grayscale printed words on a page (which curiously even the art director at Newsweek couldn't take, see illustration). For the price an iPhone packs a lot more punch for the money with color bells and whistles to boot. It just can’t compete at that price.

If you are a moderate consumer of books and newspapers you can build a model that has you recouping the cost, but it still may take a while. In addition to the Kindle 2 it’s rumored that Amazon is coming out with a large format “collegiate reader” this 8.5x11” screen could crack the text book market wide open.

Luckily Bezos has always been pretty good with sticking with something he thinks is a good idea until it really has a chance to catch on.

2) Bookmarks: they’re still a little awkward to use and there’s no way to remember where you were by looking at the side of the book to judge how far in you were. This goes double for remembering where you were on a given page by recalling if you were on the left or right hand side of the page. Bottom line is if you get lost, it's hard to find your place.

3) Books become generic text. Kind of like the loss of album covers. I’m beginning to draw no mental picture of books as physical objects with a face (aka cover). Without that ingraining it becomes harder for me to remember both the title and the author of the book.

I’m also noticing it promotes having a lot more half finished text. Before, as books came into my house/office, I would only let so many half read tomes lie about until I forced myself to finish a few up before adding to the clutter. With the kindle books take up no physical space. It’s way to easy to put something down and not notice it for a while.

PROS:

1) If you love to read and consume knowledge it is the most addictive thing ever invented. It allows you to explore your interests in as many dimension as you want at anytime, anyplace.

2) It makes newspapers relevant again. For years we’ve been hearing about the demise of the newspapers. Walter Isaacson, President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, was one of the NPR show over the weekend and then again Jon Stewart Monday night to discuss his Time Magazine cover story, "How to Save Your Newspaper."

I haven’t seen the article but I’m hoping there’s something in it about electronic versions. I pay a subscription fee for the New York Times. I like how the Kindle handles the text, I like it far more than the a internet browser version. It’s easy to consume and I don’t feel like a detritus making machine in the process. I’m hoping that distribution saving combined with the subscription fees help pay to keep reporters in the field. If a greater mass of people subscribed eventually local newspapers might benefit.

3) Look ma one hand! It’s really simple. I like that I can read any book with one hand. There are forward and back buttons on both sides of the device. You can hold it with either hand. Although, I recently figured out that the “previous” and the “back” buttons on the left and right sides respectively, don’t behave the same when in periodicals as opposed to books.

I can comfortably lie in bed and read. You can adjust the font size of any book. Regardless of the thickness or denseness of the book, no matter which side of the page I’m on, it's easy to read. I never want to put it down.

4) Less messy pop culture lying around. I read lot of “industry” books. Topical tomes that provide valuable information, but ones with a very limited shelf life. There are very few people you can hand these books on to once your done, due to the specificity of topic. They become garbage WAY to fast. The Kindle allows me a couple of adavantages:
        a. The books are cheaper
        b. I can download large samples before committing to buy. This is huge often by the time I’ve read    the intro premise and a couple of chapters all the relevant info is done coming. Ironically it only encourages me to purchase more because I’m always finding something that is “better”.
        c. Last year’s “who stole my cheese” isn’t stinking up my real book collection.

5) Highlights and notes. I like how it allows you to highlight passages and make notes to yourself. I especially like that you can see all of you notes and selections aggregated together. This comes in quite handy in doing research. I would like to see a service where you can share other peoples highlights and notations-- but that's another discussion

5) Things they sell as features I never use:
        a. Email. never.
        b. MP3 player. never.
        c. Now, Now their experimental answers anytime-- was fun, but now it’s gone.
        d. Wikipedia, I wouldn’t say I never use it. Wikipedia renders on the Kindle far better than most multimedia blogs. I use it from time to time, but a color browser is still my preferred mode.

In the end the thing you have to remember about the Kindle is, it’s a book. It’s one book, it’s all books, but it’s a book. It does that really well. I love my first generation model and was deeply saddened when the screen stopped working. Amazon had another one out to me the next day before the DT’s started setting in; another plus for Amazon and their customer service.

I’m sort of jealous of the new model, as I know I will inevitably begin to feel like Kirk surrounded by a gaggle of Pickard’s when the new one hits the street. But, I just got the replacement a couple of weeks ago, and other than now displaying pdf’s there’s just not enough compelling reason for upgrading other than for consuming’s sake alone.

the un-sort

 Last May I picked up a copy (before the days of Kindle) of Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. A distant cousin to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone noting generational changes in values over the 20th century that left fewer and fewer of us finding the League of Women Voters, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends, as it no longer fits the way we have come to live. The Big Sort is an examination of how relative stable economic times since the mid 1970’s have allowed Americans to relocate and self sort along a myriad of dimensions.

From Publishers Weekly
In the Big Sort Bishop contends that as Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and in the end, politics. There are endless variations of this clustering—what Bishop dubs the Big Sort—as like-minded Americans self-segregate in states, cities—even neighborhoods. Consequences of the Big Sort are dire: balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life. Bishop's argument is meticulously researched—surveys and polls proliferate—and his reach is broad. He splices statistics with snippets of sociological theory and case studies of specific towns to illustrate that while the Big Sort enervates government, it has been a boon to advertisers and churches, to anyone catering to and targeting taste. Bishop's portrait of our post materialistic society will probably generate chatter; the idea is catchy, but demonstrating that like does attract like becomes an exercise in redundancy.

As it’s hard for me to go out now without someone bringing up the cult of facebook, I couldn’t help but think over the past weekend that perhaps facebook (or any other broad reaching on-line social network for that matter) might serve as mediator to the Big Sort tendency.

A friend was recounting a story about how a friend jokingly referred to him as a “porn star” on his wall. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to leave it up because now his conservative great aunt was on facebook. I’m not making an argument for or against self-censorship; I think that’s a personal choice. What I am excited about though is my friend, his randy mate, and his great aunt, are all part of the same community for the first time… well probably ever.

A couple of years ago social networking was a huge youth market, with a couple of old guys like me participating in hopes of figuring out how to sell to them. Now that the late majority has arrived on facebook, it’s beginning to fracture the population in interesting ways. I’m beginning to notice a de-sorting. With 25 years behind us the class of 1982 has gone in a variety of directions-- some of them decidedly not New York liberal media elites, and I like that. Conversation is good.

One of the tendencies that Bishop noted in the big sort is when people of any ideological group left, right, fundamentalist to environmentalist, are isolated as a monoculture they tend to drift further in the direction of extremism. Far be it from me to say Facebook is bringing back mixed ideological communities, but I’m curious to see how this added layer might change attitudes over time.

rogue commercials

I was watching the return of Heroes on Hulu the other night and I noticed something out of synch: in the second season of the NBC super hero saga, Noah Bennett, the guy you’re never sure is good or bad, gives his cheerleader daughter, Claire, a hero with the ability to regenerate thus defying death, a Nissan Rogue in what was a painfully obvious youth targeted product placement. Nissan product placement is back this season, but Noah is in bad guy mode (doing mean things to innocent super Heroes, you know the type) all the while driving a Nissan Rogue.

Since I only watch Heroes on Hulu I’m not sure who the other advertisers are beyond Nissan. But, I’m pretty sure that Nissan’s part of the ad buy threw in the spots for Hulu without giving them a lot of consideration.

One of the problems with advertising on Hulu is… actually it’s not one of the problems; they just haven’t figured it out yet. They’re doing a pretty good job delivering a demographically targeted audience to the advertiser, but then the “strategy” is to show this niche consumer the same spot repeatedly, through every show, all season.

The spot that ran on Hulu last season showed a pair of peppy twenty-something’s playing Marco Polo in their twin Nissan Rogues; built-in cells giggling all the way. Vaguely nauseating when it came out, you could at minimum see the market they were trying to reach. If Marco Polo playing for an entire season wasn’t enough to snuff any budding hipster affinity for advertiser’s product, even in the nichiest of niches, what was bad just got ugly.

In the year of fiscal cutbacks, it’s not surprising that what was more than likely a give-away last year has now been cut from the budget. Opting instead to reuse last year’s spot as is. The same double minted cuties gas guzzling about, living large and carefree. In some ways I think just showing the Nissan logo for 30secs would be more effective.

friends and facebook

For .0001 percent of people who will actually read this post that don't know. I like 140 character microblogging. It's the medium where I'm most comfortable. Part art project, part industry, and sadly part personal brand building,  I use it as stream of consciousness thing. 

My audience for the microblogging comes from primarily two sources, Facebook and Twitter. There's some overlap but not much, the Facebook group is much larger. I post through twitter and it's ported to facebook as my status. My followers on Twitter tend to be "in the industry"-- digital agency people and smarty pants social media types. 

On facebook it's a different story. To start, all of my "friends" are people I've physically known at some point in my life, from the girl in second grade to that guy from the party on Friday. I currently have just under 500 friends. It's like a depot where friends from every year of my life have shown up at the same time. For the millennial teen I'm sure this doesn't seem very odd. But, for those of us with a few years, the idea of your kindergarten crush squaring off with some feminist art fascist you knew in the 80's over a comment from a former .com client is just plain mind warpingly odd.

There is a curious effect I'm noticing all of the layers of friends has on the microblogging, it makes me shy from exageration. I think of them as an enormous vetting layer. There's no room for embellishment when you can be seen and are known from every angle. Old stories, work stories, family stories, nothing can be embellihed-up braggart style or re-routed to serve the narrative. Someone will call you on it.

Thinking about the layers of friends in facebook eventually got me on the construct often employed to depict the afterlife, notions of the greatest bands ever assembled, and meeting relatives and historical figures long since deceased. Facebook is begining to feel like that only with a slight twist;  the working metaphor is "purgatory of the living"