jameswharris

Going Paperless 6 – Zinio

I started this series about Going Paperless back in February and I’m slowly progressing towards my goal. My initial plan was to give up paper editions of newspapers and magazines, and in theory replace them with editions for the Kindle or on audio for my iPod, but Zinio electronic publishing was also recommended to me, and that turned out to be third path to going without paper. I haven’t renewed any of my paper magazines yet, and I’m still reading paper editions because many subs haven’t expired. As they expire I’ve got to find a paperless solution, thus giving me the incentive to subscribe to Zinio editions.

Even though I haven’t yet subscribed to a magazine through Zinio, I have gotten a number of free subs and issues. Today I discovered a major change in how Zinio delivers magazines that makes a vast improvement over their old solution. The previous method centered around a software reader installed on your machine, and magazines were saved on your hard drive, in the “library” as the program calls it. The new method is entirely web based, and what’s amazing, the online reader is better than the fat client! Web software programs are making quantum leaps in quality these days – it’s just mind blowing compared to just two years ago.

One thing I hated about the old reader was how it dealt with photographs. Photographs didn’t handle magnification like text. Text got bigger and stayed sharp, but magnified photos just got pixilated and jaggy. If you want to see a photo in a real magazine better you hold it up closer to your face and you can see more details. Now, with the online version, you can magnify the photo almost like you have Photoshop. Sure images will eventually deteriorate, but it’s good for three levels of blow-up. This is great for reading magazines like Popular Photography.

And there’s more! The online version is quicker and easier to scoot around within a page. Onscreen reading is greatly improved. The online program tries to be intuitive and guess what you want, so it has fewer controls. It takes a little getting used to, but I attuned to it fast. In full screen one click magnifies to 200%, another full click de-magnifies back to 100%. At 200% a hold-down click allows you to grab the page and slide it around. There’s a -/+ magnifier icon for 100% 200% 400% and 800% magnifications, so only mouse clicking is needed for quick reading and page turning, saving you trips to the top menu. On my 22″ LCD monitor I can read the magazine in full two-page view with no scrolling, but it’s easy and quick to magnified and read in large print.

Zinio isn’t perfect yet. You have to read at the computer, but net reading has gotten me used to that. What I’ve always wanted is a way to build a personal periodicals library that also had a search feature. Now this would work in two ways. I want full-text word search on all the magazines I own in my digital library. At the next level I’d want a full-text word search for all magazines published and be offered a chance to buy a magazine with an article I needed.

I like having an online library. Not only do I not have to save my paper copies, but I don’t even have to clutter up my computer with digital copies. Boy, I wish I had my years of back issues of Sky & Telescope and Astronomy Magazine stored away in the Zinio library – I’d gain enough shelf-space for a hundred books.

Since I started my going paperless quest I’ve learned some limitations about being perfectly paperless. Magazines like F&SF and other short story periodicals are something I’m going to read in a chair, and they are fine to get on the Kindle. I didn’t like Time on the Kindle. Magazines that I want to save like National Geographic or Sky & Telescope might justify their tree killing ways if I do keep them for years. I feel books are worth their ecological paper costs if we keep them for decades or centuries, and the same would be true for magazines we want to preserve. And since I want to sell a story to F&SF someday, I want to subscribe to the paper copy, just in case I ever get a story printed. I can read most of my favorite magazines online with no trouble. Something like Popular Science which has very busy layout, would be easier to read as a Zinio edition.

Zinio still doesn’t offer all the magazines I subscribe to, nor is the pricing on most journals what I think electronic editions should cost. If the publisher can skip printing, postage and distribution costs, then the electronic subscription should be significantly cheaper than buying paper, and in most cases it’s not. 12 issues of Popular Mechanics for $7.99 is A-OK. 12 issues of PC World for $19.97 means I read the free web version. And I’m not even offered magazines like Scientific American, Discover, Seed, Entertainment Weekly, Wired, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and most of my regular reading.

Strangely enough, I can find many of my favorite magazines online offering their content for free – this makes me wonder if Zinio might be undersold by free web content. For companies like Zinio to succeed will require a new way of thinking about how magazines are priced.

I figure the NetFlix or Rhapsody Music model of pricing would be a better system. I pay $10 a month to each of those services and have unlimited access to their entire libraries. Rhapsody Music provides subscription music to nearly everything that’s for sale on CD for one monthly fee and I can listen all day long. NetFlix will send me one movie at a time from their vast library or let me watch a growing list of films on my computer any time for their monthly fee. Zinio, and other companies should offer a similar service for online magazines.

Some of my magazines have expired like The New Yorker, PC Magazine, PC World and Maximum PC, Time and Linux Journal. I don’t know if I should say this, but free web content has filled the need completely over these paper editions. I’m tempted to get The New Yorker on Audible.com, but I don’t miss the others.

My subscription is about to end for Entertainment Weekly, a zine my wife and I both read and enjoy. Susie is not on the path to paperless living, and I don’t want to renew. Much of EW’s content is online, but reading their website is like running a gauntlet of ads, and EW paginates the hell out of their stories forcing you to see page after pages of the same crappy ads. And their RSS feeds aren’t much help either. The paper copy is the easiest of their distribution methods to read. If it was available for a reasonable price, Entertainment Weekly would be perfect to get on Zinio. Because it’s not on Zinio and I want to stick to my paperless philosophy, it means I have to give up reading EW.

Jim

SnagFilms Film Widget

I’m testing out the new service called SnagFilms.com.

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This is just a test of a new online service that promotes documentary films that I heard about on the Audible.com edition of the Wall Street Journal. Watching the films at their site is slick, but I’m not sure about the snagging part. Basically, you watch a film, and if you like it and want to promote it on your blog you hit the snag button and SnagFilms logs into your blogging site, creates a post and puts a graphic advertising the film and allows you to tag it with a little comment.

I would prefer how I put YouTube videos online, using commands within WordPress that embeds the video player in my post. SnagFilms’ method is more viral, pushing people to their site. But it doesn’t allow me to write my blog and introduce the video. I’m writing this after the fact, so the initial RSS feed will just be icon for the video. In the future I won’t use the snag feature and just post a link.

The current selection of documentary films at SnagFilms is small, but high quality. There’s a review process, so you can’t just upload your masterpiece like at YouTube. The video I’m testing is from PBS and narrated by Brad Pitt. It’s a fascinating story about how China works to be environmental. The film quality has been excellent so far, and the aspect ratio is HD. Annoyingly, the second line of the subtitles for the foreign speakers and people identification is covered up, at least for this film – so parts are meaningless because all the interviews with Chinese speakers are missing half the translations. Of course, they are in beta.

SnagFilms makes its money by playing a commercial before the film starts, and between each video segment, and the segments are about 15-25 minutes long. You can also order a DVD from the site, and part of the money goes to the film maker.

I love documentaries, but most documentaries do not get wide distribution. A few famous ones are shown in the movie theaters, and some of the rest get spots on TV, but many are only seen in art houses or on college campuses. SnagFilms hopes to make documentaries more easy to see, which is a good thing. Hulu.com, another video distrubtion site, has some documentaries, but mostly TV shows. I’m getting to like watching video online because I can put one up in a window and watch while I’m working at my desk paying bills or other light duties. Both of these sites have nice size videos that are smooth playing and have good sound.

Online videos are good for sharing with other people, and great for catching a missed episode of a favorite show. They are starting to get good enough to bypass the old TV set. Damn, I bet we all end up like the people in Wall-E – fat slobs reclining 24×7 in floating lounge chairs with our face always in a video screen.

Jim

PickensPlan.com

If you haven’t been to PickensPlan.com yet, please stop by and view the short video. T. Boone Pickens, the big oil man has big plans for wind power. This video should make you feel better about the current oil crisis. Just the thinking is a step in the right direction.

Mr. Pickens’ plan is pretty straight forward and sounds both practical and doable. It’s not a complete solution, but it would dramatically reduce the demand for oil and in a reasonable amount of time. We need more billionaires out there thinking up ideas like this one.

What’s amazing is there is so many people coming up with great ideas that I wonder why people do not feel more positive about the future. Just look at what the last two days of piddling good news has done for the stock market. It only takes positive thinking to create a bull market. Sure, we shouldn’t live in fantasy land and ignore our problems and failures. I can’t see why the nightly news can’t present at least a 50-50 mix of good and bad news, instead of a long stream of negatives with a token upbeat story at the end.

If the middle of America could be made into a giant wind farm, why can’t the deserts be turned into giant solar energy farms? I expect the next twenty-five years to be exciting and transformational. If every oil billionaire comes up with a substitute for oil we should be energy independent in no time.

Jim

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

I seldom read non-English speaking authors, so I have Carl over at Stainless Steel Droppings to thank for pointing me to this vivid little book, After Dark by Haruki Murakami. After Dark came out in Japan in 2004 and was published in English in 2007.

I wonder how much the translation to English altered Murakami’s prose? What we get is stark. Crisp dialog and vivid details suggests little of Japanese culture. It’s almost as if world culture has all melded together. After Dark had more American pop culture in it than Japanese. Was the cultural specifics converted for American readers, or do people in Japan eat at Denny’s and pick up milk at 7-Elevens?

Murakami plays with narration, telling the reader to pretend to be a movie camera, while weaving in unexplained fantastic elements. The novel was beautiful to listen to, but it caused so many questions to enter my mind while listening. Am I learning about citizens of Tokyo from reading this story? How many of them love American music and old LPs? Is the percentage about equal to American kids who love Anime, or is American pop music very popular in Japan? Is crime part of their culture like it is in ours? Why is the prostitute Chinese? Is Japan becoming an Asian melting pot?

Mari, the 19 year-old main character seems no different from young female characters in American novels. Now these observations are not meant to be critical of Murakami’s writing. What I’m exploring here is how much we’re all alike. One hundred years ago, stories from Japan made their people seem exotic and even alien. This story only confirms the Los Angelization of the world. Is that good or sad?

The story is full of detail observations, like Mari sitting at Denny’s smoking and drinking coffee, or surreal views of her sister, Eri, sleeping like Snow White. All the reviews I’ve read are positive and mesmerized by the writing. I know I was too. The writing is real and meta-real which pushes me to believe that After Dark has something to say, but I’m never sure what.

The story starts with Mari accidentally meeting with Takahashi, a jazz lover and musician late at night, who just happens to know her model beautiful sister. Mari has a mild adventure during the seven hours covered by the novel, and gets a glance at the seamy side of life. It’s not a major story with a gripping plot, but a quiet tale allowing the writer to show off his writing chops.

To be honest, this story left me wanting more. Like I said at the start, I live in the American pop culture and study English lit, so I don’t get far from my own language. I read books like Memoirs of a Geisha to travel to places and times I’ll never get to see on my own. That’s sad, but I try to make do. This book makes me want to know a whole lot more about Tokyo today. I wished my cable company got the Japanese equivalent TV show like our CBS Sunday Morning or The Today Show.

What is the best way to transmit a snapshot of culture from one part of the world to another, while changing languages at the border? Do movies do a better job? Did Priceless give me a good view of life in Paris? How accurate was The Band’s Visit of Israel? Or how does Jane’s Austen teach us about England in Pride and Prejudice?

Am I expecting too much by trying to travel via novels and movies?

Jim

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I became a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson when he came to Memphis to give a talk last April, where his comedic side had a chance to run wild. I’ve been noticing him showing up all over the TV spectrum for years, mainly on NOVA scienceNOW and The Universe on the History Channel. I bet he gets tired of the comparison, but Tyson has taken on Carl Sagan’s role as cheerleader for science.

Friday night at the Memphis Astronomy club we watched an online video of his Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Colloquium Spring 2008 speech called “Delusions of Space Enthusiasts.” If you have any interest whatsoever about space exploration this is one hour and twenty-five minutes excellently spent.

One reason why I love this speech by Tyson is he covers many topics I’ve explored too and come to the same conclusion. In one segment he attempts to calculate the number of space enthusiasts in the U.S., something that I’ve also attempted. I think I got 300,000 and he got 400,000, but he counted employees working at various aerospace plants that I didn’t count because they should have also been members of the various space enthusiast groups like The Planetary Society, The National Space Society and The Mars Society. Anyway, we both got a small number. Tyson goes a step further and lists many organizations with more than 400,000 members, like the NRA with 4.3 million and the Hanna Montana fan club, with a membership I’ve forgotten, but which dwarfs the total size of all the space groups combined.

First off, Tyson explains that the early days of the space race was political, and that the cold war sent us to the moon and not science or the quest for exploration. He shows how President Kennedy didn’t care for space exploration at all, but wanted us to beat the Russians. Tyson jokes, if you want America to go to Mars, convince the Chinese to say they are going first, even if they have no real intentions.

Tyson spends a great deal of the talk explaining the battle for funding between advocates of robotic and manned missions at NASA. He makes a great case that without manned missions there would be no scientific missions by showing graphs that reveal that the percentage of spending for science missions has always been a fraction of the total NASA budget that directly related to the manned mission budget. He says you can’t sell science to Congress. He says NASA needs more exciting manned missions of exploration to keep NASA moving forward.

However, Tyson doesn’t believe that grand missions to Mars with $400 billion dollar price tags will ever fly. His graphs reveal that NASA has always had about the same amount of effective budget dollars, even compared to the Apollo years, so any new missions beyond LEO will need to fit into those annual budgets. Evidently Tyson was on the brainstorming team that imagined the new Constellation Program and the Orion Crew Vehicle. This back to the future vision is very Apollo like.

One thing Tyson doesn’t cover is whether or not science missions will get the same level of funding once the Constellation Program ramps up. I would think you’d get a lot more astrophysics bang for the buck with robots, but it appears to be Tyson’s belief that manned missions excite the public to carry science along on its coattails.

I highly recommend you download this talk, and also suggest you get the latest version of RealPlayer. Friday night I saw the talk on an older version of the player and it had a lot of bad spots. My version plays the film very smoothly. It’s a shame they didn’t use built in Flash movie technology because video players like Real and Quicktime aren’t universally installed like Flash and discourage people from viewing the video.

For more Neil deGrasse Tyson science lectures with sparkling humor, just search on his name at YouTube.

Jim