Kindle – Page 7 – Auxiliary Memory

Kindle DX versus Netbook as Textbook

The holy grail of ebook visionaries is the electronic textbook. Textbooks are huge, heavy and expensive and some poor school kids carry more weight on their backs than soldiers on a march. It’s as common to see backpack humps on college kids backs as seeing cell phones in their hands. Ebook promoters see dollar signs whenever they spot one of those humpback students lugging around all that printed matter.

And those ebook promoters are right. Why carry forty pounds of paper when you can carry 1 pound of electronics? But is the Kindle DX the answer? I don’t think so. First, let me give you a little story. Years ago, before audio books were even common on cassette tape, I took a two semester Shakespeare course. We covered almost 20 plays, each tested with a very detailed 10 question quiz. I remember how I faithfully read and studied the first play and was shocked when I only got six of the ten questions. The professor had a pattern. Half of the questions could be easily answered with a fair reading of the play. One question was always about a very obscure detail that kept most people from getting a perfect 10, and the other four questions divided the class between those who really got into the play and those who didn’t.

I realized a quick reading the night before class wasn’t going to cut it, so I went to the library and got each play on LP. They came in boxed sets of 3-4 discs. The records were old and scratchy, but usable. This was in the early 1980s. I’d play the records while reading the play – it took hours. After that I always got perfect 10s on those quizzes. Now my magic retention rate only worked if I faithfully followed the words on the page while listening to the same words spoken. Reading or listening by itself didn’t work. Other than these two Shakespeare courses I never used this learning technique again in school.

However, when I started using my ears as my main sensory input for reading back in 2002, I started playing around, experimenting with each form of input. I paid attention to what I noticed when just reading with my eyes. Then I paid attention to what I noticed, just from listening with my ears. I would then read something I had just listened to, or vice versa. Each time I’d found details I had missed with the opposite method. I discovered what the eyes learned was different from what the ears remembered.

One book I did this experiment on was Emma by Jane Austen, a book I was reading for a book club. I listened for an hour. Then I reread that hour with my eyes. Listening was great for getting a sense of character and dramatic action, but it was poor on retaining words. Austen immediately introduced too many characters – that made the story confusing. Each character live in a house with a name, often set in a different village, with another name to remember, so I was overwhelmed by people and place names. Seeing all those names in print helped clear up many issues.

Again, I concluded that to study a piece of writing for academic purposes, I needed to see it with my eyes if I wanted to memorize words and spellings. However, by listening, I experienced the nuances of conflict, characterization and plot better. Hearing stories helped me to to imagine 3D action and settings. I saw color and details better when I heard the words rather than read them.

Listening, which is far slower than reading, forced me to concentrate on the subject, and that was especially reinforced when I watched the words while also listening to them. Seeing a word and hearing it made me think about it’s pronunciation and spelling more than when I just read it with my eyes. But listening alone is terrible for learning spelling. There are many books I’ve only heard that I have no idea how to spell the character’s names.

I think these observations are key to the success of future etextbooks. Strangely enough, the Kindle now offers to read books to their owners, but they also allow Kindle users to play MP3 or Audible.com audio books while reading, although I think few people take advantage of this feature. I sold my Kindle 1.0 to my friend who prefers to read with her eyes and loves to travel, but I do have the Kindle reader software on my iPod touch and do some reading with it. However, iPods can’t multitask, so I have to play the audio book on my Zune and read it on the iPod touch.

From this one anecdote you might surmise that the Kindle DX will make a great etextbook, but I’m not so sure. I found the e-ink technology clumsy for random reading, which is often what people do when they study. Also, kids studying will be taking notes for writing papers or passing tests, so I think the future of etextbooks will be on netbooks, and those little devices are great at multitasking, allow reading and note taking and even cutting and pasting of quotes.

To really memorize details for a studied subject, I think you need to see it, hear it, and then write about it. iPhones and Kindles don’t help here. When I write this blog I keep a browser window open, with tabs to Google, Wikipedia and OneLook (a dictionary gateway site).

The computer literacy movement of the 1980s promised so much but delivered so damn little. I’ve always wondered why programmers couldn’t write programs that taught math. Kids will play video games for hours, games that mesmerize them into deep rapt attention, tricking them into learning a myriad of details from game play. Teaching mathematics via interactive computer animation should be a no brainer, but most software that attempted the job came up with dull drills and tedious flash cards. That doesn’t mean the concept of computer aided learning is a bust. Anyone who has played with Mathematica should shout they’ve seen the light.

What’s needed is a synthesis of many learning techniques and technologies. First, I think etextbooks won’t be ebooks. That’s way too lame. Etextbooks should combine video lectures, film clips, audio, computer CGI, and photos to go with old fashion black on white text, plus add tests, quizzes, puzzles, word problems, virtual worlds, games and any other interactive method to get kids to practice math.

If I had the money and resources to create etextbook on mathematics I would build my course around the history of math. I’d take it from anthropological ancient history to theoretical here and now. But I’d build it as a suite of components, usable on different platforms in different study environments. So if the user only wanted voice, in iPod mode, they could spin through the centuries to find MP3 podcasts about the history of math. If they were in a mood to play with their Nintendo DS, they could load up a mathematical game, or install a challenging game app on their iPhone. If they were in the mood for a documentary, I’d let them stream video to their television sets. Hell, I’d even offer to print puzzles for when they have to sit on the pot.

I’d also find some way to create a scoring system, especially one that could be tied to a Elo type rating system, like they use in chess, so students would feel challenged to compete. It would be great if the American Mathematical Society had a way to rank people’s knowledge of the various Mathematics Subject Classifications. Kids love video games because they enjoy beating friends with a specialized skill, and they also love competing against a computer too. Traditional schooling is so boring and passive. Etextbooks need the challenge of competition, but it would be so tired if all they did was offer time competitions on who could finish solving ten equations first.

What if a Civilization type game required various mathematical skills to play, so if a student wanted to build a pyramid in the game he’d need to know geometry, or if she wanted her little Sims to sail across an ocean, she’d have to use celestial navigation to advance the game.

In other words, if publishers are only going to take the text from their printed books and put it in an ebook, that’s not going to work. Even if the Kindle had full color and resolution to match the printed page, so a Kindle book could contain all the photos and illustrations of the real textbook, I still don’t think it will be equal to using paper volumes. Modern textbooks are gorgeous compared to what I remember I had to use as a kid. If I had the choice between 5 books, weighing 40 pounds, and 1 Kindle weighing less than a single pound, I’m afraid I’d shoulder the burden, because real textbooks are far easier to use, and much more spectacular to look at. I kid you not. If you haven’t seen a text in forty years, go find a kid and look at theirs.

When I owned my Kindle and subscribed to Time magazine, I found it easiest to read from page one to page last, and endure the time it took to page past articles I didn’t want to read. There were navigation links, but between flipping back to the table of contents and to an article to see if I wanted to read it, it was just easier to stay in linear mode of page, page, page, page….

Etextbooks will only be better if they offer a variety of ways to study. Ultimately, I don’t think individual etextbooks will be the answer. I think students will subscribe to an online textbook service, and pay $4.99-$19.99 a month per course, and access a myriad of multimedia features, paying about the same as buying a textbook for a one semester course.

The old way to going to college involved scheduling a class with a professor and studying a book together in a room with other students for a few months. Online instruction means studying on your own with a professor you might never meet who shepherds unseen students through a system of requirements. Wouldn’t you prefer a textbook service that gave you podcasts to listen to at the gym or grocery store or while doing the dishes, and video lectures to watch before bedtime, and online games to play against your classmates, and ebooks to read on your iPhone at break at work. Local college professors may stop lecturing, and end up becoming educational gurus who help their students find their way to enlightenment in the subjects they paid to master.

The textbook of the future will have to be very flexible. I don’t even go to school, but I study all the time. I just finished the audio book The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg about cosmology of the early universe just after the big bang. I’m about to read the hardback and listen to the audio book of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, which will go deeper into many documentaries I’ve been watching lately on The Science Channel and PBS, but I also want something more systematic, so I’m going to get a DVD set or two from The Teaching Company. Their great DVD courses would be fantastic to keep on a netbook.

The more I study cosmology and physics, the more I feel the need to study mathematics. I wish I could find something like the RosettaStone language courses to help me. I also wish I had something that tested and rated my knowledge. I don’t feel the need to go back to college and major in physics, but if an astronomical association offered online testing, with amateur rankings, I might be tempted by their challenge. Our K-12 upbringing made most of us to hate learning, mainly because they made gaining knowledge all about passing crappy tests. Video games are a form of test taking, a fun kind, that addict kids.

It’s a shame that most adults study new subjects like snacking on potato chips. We constantly nibble on information but are never challenged to do anything with our empty data calories. People will spend 60 hours a week playing online video games that require an amazing amount of study just to slay imaginary dragons or build pretend lives in Second Life. Why not set up servers and let players build an historically accurate virtual Tudor England, so they could apply their hobby history scholarship to a challenge. What if teachers told their students, “Your homework for this week is to create a virtual Mayflower, and show why the Puritans came to America. Each of you must flesh out one historical character and show that person in twenty scenes from their life interacting with the characters your classmates create. Please tell you’re parents they aren’t allowed to play this week.”

See why I think existing invention of the textbook shouldn’t be converted into a gadget that only displays electronic words and images on an electronic page because it’s lighter than a bulky book? Modern textbooks are already bursting their bindings trying to become multimedia experiences. E-ink would be a huge step backwards. Go find a 2009 textbook, and flip through it. What I’m saying will be obvious. It will also be obvious that the weight of all the knowledge within that tome won’t be easily consumed by your darling rug rat. Today’s kids chow down on HD video and 1080p Xbox games. The Sirens of virtual worlds call to kids and the printed black letter on white paper, or gray e-ink, just won’t charm them.

JWH – 7/3/9

My Life on a Hard Drive

I wanted to call this essay, “My Life on a Terabyte Drive” because it sounded cooler and more specific, but then I’m thinking about buying a netbook and they only come with 160 gigabytes of hard drive space, something less glamorous to say in a title. I can’t even fit my music collection on that, so it wouldn’t be true either. If you read to the end of this essay, you’ll see I could have called it, “My Memory Book,” but that title wouldn’t mean anything to you until I explained it all.

Either at work, or with friends, I’ve had to help many people move their personal data from one computer to another. When I started this kind of support years ago, all I needed was one floppy. The last time I moved my stuff to a new machine, I bought a 750gb USB drive. No, I didn’t need to fill it up, at least not then. My Mozy.com account says I have 193.3gb backed up with them, but that’s only my life from one of three home computers, and I’ve yet to complete the epic task of scanning all my family photos.

When I contemplate putting my life on a hard disk many fanciful ideas come to mind. I like to compare this goal to mind uploading, a science fictional concept that deals with transferring a person’s personality to a computer. I first wrote about this idea in “My Life in 75 Megabytes,” which lets you know how long I’ve been thinking about this concept. Back then my own expanding universe was much smaller, and could fit on a zip disk.

I find I have seven discrete concepts I’d like to explore in this essay:

What goes into a digitized life?
How is a digital life organized?
How do we synced ourselves across many machines?
What role does the media player play?
How to we span living across local and network drives?
What do we need to protect our digital memory?
And do our files define our personality?

Thinking about buying a netbook that will be my carry-around auxiliary mind, a Mini-Me, so to say, I’d like to think about it’s full theoretical potential. Let’s just play with the idea of what we’d like to have on a computer if one day we found ourselves orphaned from home with only the clothes on our back and a computer in our hand.

What Goes Into a Digitized Life?

Photographs have been the primary artifact that people want to protect and preserve. Photographs are what people cry over the most when their CPU bytes the big one. Next up is music files, either ripped, stolen or DRMed. Few people stuff their machines with essays and fiction like me, but many folks like to maintain a wordy autobiography in the form of an email archive. A few $-minded souls, horde tax records like misers. And I’m starting to see hard drives become the new shoebox for home videos. I myself, have hundreds of audio books that I’ve tediously ripped from cassette tapes and CDs that I’d hate to lose. My wife wants to preserve video games, and their activation codes. I’ve met a few people who maintain databases of things they love to collect. When it comes down to it, there’s an almost endless variety of things people junk up their hard drives with and want to save forever.

All this digital junk can be broken down into two extremely distinct types: Unique, owner created data, that can’t be found anywhere else, and copies of stuff other people created, either received free, stolen or bought. It’s far more painful to have a laptop stolen with five years of digital snapshots than one with hundreds of dollars worth of songs bought from iTunes.

For the purpose of this essay, let’s not worry about the actual size of the hard drive on your buddy computer, but instead imagine this device will contain everything you want to save that can be digitized and if found in 30 years by your grandchildren, or 300 years by a scholar of the 21st century history, would make a statement about who you are. Think about this super-netbook as your library of personally created data, plus copies of your favorite songs, books, audiobooks, movies, TV shows, paintings, poems, short stories, novels, etc. Just think of it as the memory you wished your neurons could records.

The File Structure of Our Lives

I don’t know if you’ve ever gone into someone else’s computer and tried to extract what they desperately want to save, but it’s a fascinating task. Microsoft, Apple and Linus all make provisions for storing user documents in a specified place, but users do their damnedest to squirrel important files all over their drives. And even when they stick to the Home directory concept, everyone creates their own folder structure and naming system. In recent years the idea of standard music and photo folders have emerged, which is great, but I think we need to convene a panel of Nobel prize winning eggheads to develop a worldwide standard, to be used across all OS systems, so future archeologists poking through our private digital junkyards can easily find our treasured entombed memories, and make sense of them.

We need to organize our auxiliary brains and keep them tidy for ourselves too, because as we toss more stuff into our net noggins, finding what we want becomes harder and annoying. I love the fact that most applications in Windows now open My Documents as default when you mouse click Open File. It drives me nuts that people want to override this and put their crap all over the desktop or in folders they created off of the root drive.

I’m also glad Microsoft simplified “My Documents,” “My Music,” and “My Pictures” into Documents, Music and Pictures. But now we need to expand on that to include Videos, Movies, Books and other categories. This is where things get tricky, where arguments start, and OS turf wars begin. Under “Jim” on my Vista machine I have:

Desktop
Downloads
Links
Pictures
Searches
Documents – Shortcut
Contacts
Documents
Favorites
Music
Saved Games
Videos

This is how Microsoft divides my life, and they’ve made some mysterious choices to me. I wish I had a Mac so I could see how Steve Jobs wants the same job accomplished. Ubuntu just gives me a home folder, leaving me free to make my own decisions from there Since our computer will define our personality and I said we could save anything digital document that defines us, this means the home folder will become a library of digital files. I’m not sure if the structure set out by Microsoft is a workable Dewey Decimal system for this task though.

What folder do I file my digital audio books? Where do I put my ebooks or .pdf files for magazines and articles? And should I save Gattaca, my favorite science fiction movie under Videos, the same place where I would store my home made clips? And if I collected favorite YouTube videos, should they also be filed with my personal videos?

I think we need to rethink the \Home\ folder concept. \Jim\ should be just for documents I created, and another folder called \Library\ should be used for all files I collect that were created by other people. And the two might even have sub-folders with the same titles, like \Videos\, \Photos\ and \Music\. (That’s assuming I become more creative than I am now.) Thus the new \Jim\ might contain these sub-folders:

Audioclips
Banking
Blogs
Bookmarks
Data
Diary
Emails
Essays
Fiction
HTML
Lists
Medical
Numbers
Photos
Timeline
Video

This isn’t perfect yet, but I hope you see where I’m going. Under \Library\ I might have these sub-folders:

Art
Audiobooks
Books
Lectures
Magazines
Movies
Music
Photographs
Podcasts
Television
Video

In my personal folder, I have Photos, for those I take, but Photographs under Library, for pictures I buy. Art would be for digitized artwork I like. My desktop gallery program could be set to pull from Art, Photos and Photographs.

How to Keep our Digital Life Synced?

I have two desktop machines and laptop at home, and various iPod and MP3 players, including a iPod touch, and I’m planning to buy a netbook. Plus I have several computers at work with years of programming code I created that I never want to loose. At work I have USB drive I brought from home that has a backup of all my home files, but in particularly, my music library so I can play songs at work. At times I also bring USB drives home, so my work is backed up.

The absolute ideal file storage solution would a 100% reliable gigabit network to a federally protected online databank with all my computers accessing one file system library that was perfectly safe until the Sun goes nova. Plus, my data would be preserved for ever and ever, even after I died, for historical researchers. I’m watching The Tudors – don’t you wish the producers of the show had access to Henry’s and Anne’s home directories?

Unfortunately, we don’t have such an ideal solution. The trend is toward owning multiple computers, and by computer I also mean cell phone, iPod, and even video game units, anything that processes and stores digital data you create. And we’re already seeing syncing solutions. You can backup cell phone directories to your home computer, or if you have an iPhone, you can get your email, contacts and calendar from an Exchange server at work, thus syncing your phone numbers in one database.

In fact, the iPhone is a marvelous device, in that it can sync songs, photos, audiobooks, television shows, movies and other files from your mothership desktop to your lifeboat phone. Apple doesn’t seem to like the concepts of netbooks, hoping you will use an iPhone/touch instead. However, I find their amazing little screen too small to be my carry-around computer companion.

The Role of the Media Player

iTunes is also a fascinating program and concept. It’s a program that attempts to manage the \Library\ portion of your file system, and a media player for playing songs, television shows, movies and audiobooks from your library. With a bit of tweaking from Apple, it theoretically could handle my Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher and PDF documents too, if we wanted one file librarian to manage all my computer files, including the personally created \Jim\ files too. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Right now we generally have one program that creates each kind of content, such as a word processer for writing, a spreadsheet for playing with numbers, a database for handling data in tables, a publishing program for making magazine content, web editors for creating web pages, audio programs for recording voice, and so on. But on the other hand, there are two classes of programs emerging that show us the results of what these other programs produce. The first general class of file viewers is the web browser for looking at data files on the net, and the second program is the media librarian for looking at files on your computer.

I’m not sure if media librarians are a good idea or not. They are designed to make life easier for the user and isolate the user from knowing about the file system. The entire Macintosh philosophy seems to follow this belief too, that things are easier if you keep the user from needing to know too much about the file system. I’m not sure that’s a good educational goal. Both the web browser and media librarian work to replace the operating system. An emerging class of Linux netbooks work to create an easy-to-use visual menu that sits on top of the OS and hides things from the user too.

The trouble is, if users work directly with the file system and double clicks on one, whether word processor document, or mp3 music file, those files will be launched into an editor program, rather than a player program, assuming the user created the files. Media librarians like iTunes, Windows Media Player, Rhapsody, Audible Manager are great for organizing and playing certain kinds of files, producing playlists, sharing media with other users, etc. The trouble is to select one universal media library program that does everything perfectly.

When I download an audiobook from Audible.com, it goes into my iTunes and Audible Manager, and I can have it also go into my Windows Media Player. Sometimes the download gets messed up and the audiobook doesn’t get filed in one of the players. So I have to find the file and manually add it to the library. iTunes files all MP3 files under Music, so songs and ripped audio books get mixed together. That annoys me.

Plus iTunes only wants to work with iPods, so it doesn’t help me when I use my Zune. But then my Zune Media player won’t have anything to do with my iPods. And all my media librarians fight to own my MP3 collection of 18,000+ songs. It’s a huge pain. I also have multiple programs willing to play my videos too, but none are universal, thus I have to have specialty programs like Amazon Unbox to view videos bought from Amazon.

Right now you can set Windows to launch any program you choose for a particular file extension. Thus if I have Rhapsody set for .mp3, it will launch when I click on a song or an audiobook or a podcast, all of which share the .mp3 extension. I wish Windows would allow a folder override to this system, so for \Audiobooks\ I could set Audible Manager as a my player, and for \Music\ I could set Windows Media Player, and for \Podcasts\ I could set iTunes.

Now that we’re slowly moving away from DRM enslaved files, we will be less reliant on media librarian programs like iTunes. Also, why does your favorite program to play songs also have to be your program to load songs onto a MP3 player? And why can’t I have one librarian for all my devices, including iPods, Creative MP3 players, Zune, phone and netbooks? Every portable device has a limited amount of storage space, so wouldn’t it be great to have a librarian on my largest computer that could talk to all my lesser computers and help me manage a subset of files I want to maintain on each?

I would love a librarian where I could rate my content 1-10, whether songs, movies or word documents, and then when I plug in a portable device, the librarian would show me how much that device can handle by telling me, “This device can hold all content rated 8 and above, would you like me to load it?” Or I could set it to always load personally created data first, then songs as a second priority, and only sync television marked unseen, and to manually sync movies.

Even still, I’m not sure I like one program to do everything for me. I like choice. I like the Unix philosophy of having a tool for each job. I think I’d prefer to pick each app that played each kind of file. That way I could have the perfect ebook reader for me that might be different from my perfect music player. Hell, I might like one kind of MP3 player for playing albums, another for playing playlists, another for random playing of songs, and even another program where I play and manage my all-time favorite 1,001 tunes. And all of these would work from the same \Music\ folder structure. I’d also like a program that would generate reports on the \Music\ folder by listing all albums, artists and tracks, and keep statistics on each. I have no idea how many albums I own, even though they are all on a computer.

Hard Disk Driving versus Network Driving

As the Internet get better, meaning faster and with more features, space on our local hard drives will be needed less, until we only need to store personally created data. If Rhapsody’s library had every song my personal music library did, I’d never mess with a \Music\ folder again. If the network was fast and always dependable, I wouldn’t even worry about putting songs, television and movies on my devices because I’d just stream them from Lala, Rhapsody, Pandora, Zune, Netflix and Amazon. A netbook with a 160gb hard drive would be fine and dandy as my auxiliary brain until I took too many photos or videos. And if I could store unlimited photos and videos reliably online, I’d again be free of hard drive space limitations.

If the the broadband and the network were that great I wouldn’t even need a \Library\ file system at all. However, any experience with flaky network connections will make you horde your favorite content locally.

There’s a reason why they call these cute little computers netbooks. They are gadgets designed to depend on the Internet for their content. I’ve never wanted a smartphone because I’ve never wanted to pay a broadband cell phone bill, but I’d be much more likely to want broadband service with a netbook. And all the cell phone providers are quickly ramping up to sell netbooks with two-year broadband contracts.

Laptops were supposed to be on-the-go computing, but they have been too big, too expensive and don’t last long enough on a charge, to be the always on-the-go computers. I just don’t want to carry an expensive laptop everywhere, afraid I might break it, lose it, or have it stolen, but I might carry a $350 machine everywhere I went, especially if it’s charge would last all day like a cell phone, and I could get access to the net.

I’ve set up a half-dozen netbooks so far, all for women who want these purse size computers. I’ve had several grown women in my office all squealing like girls over purple and pinkness. They don’t even understand the potential of netbooks, all they see is pretty and purse-able. They even buy netbooks with their own money for work use. I’ve talked to other women that bought them for home use at Walmart or from the Home Shopping Channel, and they tell me their kids are buying them too. Netbooks are hot. $250-$400 seems to be the right price for portable computing.

I’m waiting for 8 hours of battery life, which many models have now, and better video processing, which is coming this fall. I’d also like faster processing and I’m torn on deciding between a 10” or 12” screen, and what resolution it should have. I’ve set up a Dell Mini 10 with 1366×768 resolution that’s super sharp but teeny tiny But the Dell’s was properly proportioned at the resolution, something not true of all netbook screens I’ve seen. I hate squashed or stretched fonts!

Netbooks are getting very close to showing 1080p video, so they will make great on-the-road theaters that can replace portable DVD players and iPods, plus they make great Skype video phones. Combined with broadband and Bluetooth headsets, they can be cell phones too. The implications for this auxiliary brain as a communications tool is immense.

Backing Up is Hard To Do

As we put more of our life on our netbooks, or should we steal a trademark, our Lifebooks, it will be vital to back them up. If netbooks are synced with desktop computers, that’s one level of backup. Asus even sells their netbooks with 10gb of online storage. And there is always services like Mozy.com that backup files to Internet servers. But the main thing to remember, these devices will become our heads we can lose, and we’ll hate the day we experience a digital lobotomy. I’ve always said the Internet is our real sixth sense, and netbooks will only reinforce this belief. Once we all got addicted to electrical devices like computers and televisions, we’d get pissed when electricity went off. After I became dependent on the net, I actually get jumpy and depressed when the net goes down. If we become addicted to our little buddy computers we carry everywhere, losing one will be painful indeed. Like losing part of ourselves. Being able to quickly replicate our digital life onto a replacement netbook will be extremely important.

Do Our Files Reflect Our Personality?

If a team of psychologists with AI tools, found my future netbook with all my writing and all my favorite photos, art, books, movies, television shows, songs, on it, could they analyze the content and produce a description of my personality? If netbooks had been around for hundreds of years, and we could study the content of our ancestors, how much would we know about them? My father died when I was 19, and there has always been so much I’ve wondered about him. I would love to have a copy of his auxiliary brain.

Also, imagine kids starting school with netbooks and keeping all their schoolwork, photos and videos they make throughout their K-12 careers. Boy, I wished I had such a childhood treasure. I wished I had taken photos of all my classmates, all my classrooms, hallways, schools and teachers. I wish I had taken photos of all the homes I lived in, with photos of all the rooms, furniture and the streets I walked. We always focused our cameras on families and friends, but I wished I had also taken photos of objects, like houses, rooms, streets, cars of my life, to aid my memory. I’ve forgotten so much that I’d love to recall. Maybe it has little true value, because I did forget all that stuff, but now I wish I had more evidence of my earlier life. I wish I had photos of every dog and cat I owned. I can barely picture my furry friends now, mostly just recall their names, like Blacky, Chief or Mike, and some I can’t even remember, which is sad.

I seriously doubt there is much real detail to download from our brains, if such a science fictional reality is ever possible. I don’t know if personality profiles can be resurrected from netbooks, but I think my sense of personal history would be much stronger, and my self awareness, far more vivid, if my poor old brain had more solid evidence.

The Future of Netbooks

Thinking about these seven concepts of how we could store our life digitally and have it readily at hand, to help us with day-to-day activities, makes me picture all kinds of possibilities for netbooks. I doubt our futures will include jacks in the back of our skulls like the people in the movie, The Matrix, but the netbook could become the mind-computer interface between ourselves and the net.

With Bluetooth, we could have cell phone like headsets, so we could make calls, but also use our netbooks for dictating voice recordings, to aid our memory with verbal annotations. Photo and video cameras could be combined with Bluetooth so anything we snap or video is immediately recorded to our external brains. Medical monitoring devices could be combined with Bluetooth, netbooks and broadband for new kinds of health tracking and assessment. Netbooks will only expand social networking, and if our youthful population is so close now because of cell phones, think what constant video phoning will do to their generation.

Netbooks might finally bring us into the age of videophone that’s been predicted by science fiction since Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon entertained tykes in the 1930s in the Sunday funnies. Computer pundits thought we’d all be wearing computers by now, but maybe a good device that’s easy to carry will do instead. This makes me predict purses will become common for men, at least leather over-the-shoulder pouches, or we’ll see more men with messenger bags. But netbooks are so easy to carry, they may never get to far from our hands.

If netbooks had reversible LCD touch screens as a standard feature, so they could function like Tablet PCs, netbooks could replace the emerging ebooks devices like the Kindle and Sony Reader. Right now I find it easiest to carry a cell phone in my pants pocket and a Zune in my shirt pocket, one for phone service the other for audiobooks. But if I have a netbook with me wherever I go, or nearby, then all I would need to carry on my person is a Bluetooth headset. Should I predict the demise of the iPhone and iPod?

The deciding factors on buying a netbook is how big the screen and keyboard, and whether or not they are useable for long periods of typing and reading. I bought an iPod touch to be my carry around computer, but I didn’t like typing with a single finger, and the screen was too small for browsing the web. It’s pretty nice for reading text email, terrible for HTML email, very nice for checking movie times and looking at previews, pleasant for reading ebooks, although I might like a slightly larger screen, and very nice for Pandora and Wolfgang’s Vault.

When netbooks first burst on the scene in 2007, their appeal included solid state storage over spinning hard drives, so, “My Life on a Hard Drive” might be a poor title soon, but if spinning drives disappear, I predict we’ll still call solid state devices hard drives too. Technology is evolving away from moving parts, so we might eventually call netbooks, memory books, the name I want to use for them. If the right technology pans out, and the right pricing for broadband emerges, memory books might be very common indeed.

What will you put on your memory book? How will you organize it. How can a memory book improve your life? A good portion of our population has been able to avoid the computer revolution, but if a memory book becomes so personally useful, will anyone choose to be a Luddite in this revolution? As I age, and my memory falters and skips, being able to query a memory book becomes a very useful mental crutch. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Will it make me weaker or stronger?

I do know organizing my thoughts for this blog helps me retain words, and even learn to use new words. Writing these blogs help me refine and distinguish discrete ideas and concepts. In the past year I’ve met a number of people, usually young, who have asked me what my favorite movies, books and songs are, and I had a hard time making a quick list. That disturbs me. Maybe if I constantly worked to maintain a library of favorites on my memory book, or even just keep my memory book handy and constantly annotated a list of favorites, I would feel better. Who knows, I might not even need to open my memory book, but my real memory of such lists would be fresh enough to have something to say in casual conversations.

I don’t know if my memory weakness is normal for someone my age, or if it portends Alzheimer’s in future years. My wife already gets impatient with my slowness to respond, and hates when I tell her she better start acquiring more patience in case I get worse. “You better not,” she warns me. Having a memory book might become the glasses of my memories someday. Or my memory book might become a very large hand to write notes on. Or it my memory book might become a gym to exercise my neurons. This is all fascinating to consider, and I can’t wait to test out these ideas. I’m just not ready to buy a netbook yet.

JWH – 6/28/9

Kindle for iPhone/iPod touch

I bought the Kindle when it first came out but ended up selling it to my friend who read more books than I did and traveled far more often. I discovered that I prefer to listen to books on my iPod rather than read them on paper or the Kindle. My Kindle found a good home with Linda. It’s been to Paris, all over the U.S. and Mexico, and its getting a lot more use.

However, when Amazon announced that it was releasing the free Kindle for iPhone today I jumped at the chance to try it on my iPod touch. It took all of a minute to find, install and connect to my old Kindle library at Amazon. There were a handful of books I bought, and a few Linda had bought while testing my Kindle, and it took much less than a minute to copy one to my touch to read. Everything was completely simple, intuitive and perfect. Reading is about like reading with my eReader program.

Kindle reading on the iPod touch is very nice. The font sizing is adjustable, and the text is very sharp and dark. The screen page real estate is much smaller than the Kindle, but not bad. Both the Kindle and the touch have a narrow viewing area, which means the eyes have an easy time scanning back and forth. With the Apple device you must page more often. I’m happy enough. Who knows, maybe I’ll start eyeball reading more often.

Since I sold the Kindle there have been times when I wished I still had one when browsing Amazon and seeing a book I wanted that’s much cheaper than a hard copy. Especially for instant accessibility. Although I prefer to listen to audio books, there are times when I have to read with my eyes. I’m in two book clubs and often the monthly selections for discussion are not available on audio. More often than not, they aren’t available for the Kindle either, but when ordering these old classic science fiction novels on Amazon, I keep seeing that notice that encourages authors to provide a Kindle edition.

Lucky for me Audible.com is actually reprinting tons of classic SF. It’s strange waiting to see which high tech technology old science fiction will show up on first. I’m currently listening to The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov after finishing an audio edition of The Green Hills of Earth by Heinlein. But I considered it a bummer that Babel-17 by Delany was only available in a dead tree edition.

I especially prefer ebook reading when the book I want to read is large and heavy to hold, like The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited 4th edition, a biography of the great 1960s rock group by Johnny Rogan. The damn tome is as big as War and Peace. I have to fold a pillow in my lap to hold it up. An ebook version to read would be wonderful.

The Kindle for iPhone app is a killer idea from Amazon. No, they won’t sell another Kindle 2.0 for each new user, but they will get more converts to ebook reading. Plus, if you’re a Kindle user who wants to read in bed without a nightlight, just load your book on an iPhone/touch.

There is no ordering books from Amazon through the Apple device, unless you use the tiny Safari. What Amazon expects you to do is shop while on your big computer. Books you buy for your Kindle library will show up on the little device and are easily transferred. I hope they make Kindle readers for desktops, laptops, netbooks, notebooks, PDAs and smart phones. I also hope Amazon license’s the software technology so other ebook makers can join the Kindle revolution.

Sadly, there seems to be no feature for reading on your Kindle for iPhone app the kinds of documents (.doc, .pdf) that you can send to your real Kindle. I only see books that I bought at Amazon and archived in my Kindle library. I was able to send books I bought for my Fictionwise.com library to my old Kindle, but I can’t do that now. I can get those Fictionwise books through my eReader.

Who knows, I might learn to like reading again and buy another Kindle. I was mighty tempted by that text to speech feature.

JWH – 3/4/9

Further Adventures with eReader on the iPod touch

For some reason I’m getting more hits on the iPod touch eReader eBook post than anything else I’ve written lately, so I must assume that the iPod touch and eReader are a hit combination. Since I wrote that post, eReader has come out with version 1.2 that offers many nifty new features and they’re promising 1.3 real soon now. Also, the eReader.com site, a spin-off from fictionwise.com, seems to be expanding daily, which implies another kind of success. eReader software isn’t just for the iPod, there’s also versions for Palm, PocketPC, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Windows, Macintosh and OQO systems.

When the Kindle came out stories about it on the blogosphere were more common than stories about Sarah Palin today. Using the iPod touch and iPhone for an ebook reader hasn’t garnered that much notice. I prefer the larger screen of the Kindle, but never wanted to carry it around. The touch/iPhone is designed to commute wherever you go, and wherever you go you can now read your book when you get there. That’s pretty cool.

The screen of the touch/iPhone is better than PDAs and most other smart phones, so for a portable reading device it does very well in the visual department. The screen is physically about one fourth to one third the size of a paperback book page, but the number of words varies because you have several font size settings. Even though the screen is smaller than the Kindle, it’s brighter and sharper. Overall though, the Kindle’s screen is much nicer to read from because of it’s perfect size.

Flipping pages is much nicer with eReader on the touch/iPhone than with the Kindle or the eBookman I used to have. You can set eReader to swipe or tap for page turning. I set mine to tap, so I just touch the right side of the screen to page forward, and the left to go back. Having a touch screen greatly reduces the need for buttons.

My 1st generation touch has 2 buttons, and the newly released 2nd generation touch has three, adding a volume control and tiny speaker, something I wanted. I’m quite anxious for another button though, an on/off switch for the Wi-Fi for the iPod touch. The wireless system drains the battery fast. My touch will drain in 1-2 days even doing nothing if the wireless is on. I now have to go through several taps to turn the wireless on or off. An even more sophisticated solution would be software that turned the wireless on when I sent a request out on the Internet and turned it off after a set period of time.

The iPod touch is about four times heavier than a Nano, and much bigger, so it’s more of an effort to carry around, but still just 4 ounces, or 120 grams. It fits in my shirt pocket like the Nano, but its very noticeable there, whereas the Nano is unfelt. I’ve started carrying my touch some, but I’ve got to admit I’d rather carry the Nano. Whether I carry the touch all the time will depend if I get completely hooked on it. 99% of my use is for listening to audio books, so unless I start using the touch more, I might go back to my Nano. I think I’ll need several months to grow into the iPod touch, to know if I regularly need all of its features.

The frequent low battery message is what keeps me switching back to the Nano. I can get a lot more time if I shut off the Wi-Fi, but that’s annoying to keep up with. Another way to improve battery life is shut off the screen. This is only good for listening to music and audio books, but eReader does have a feature for showing white text on a black background. I wonder if that saves energy. The claimed battery life improvements in the 2nd Generation iPod touch makes me wished I had waited a month to buy a new iPod. I certainly wouldn’t buy a 1st generation touch now unless it was very cheap.

One way to adapt to the touch’s battery weakness is to buy a cradle and leave it on it whenever I’m not using it, but with the battery supposedly only good for 400-500 full cycles of charging, would that be good for it? The iPod touch loses it’s charge so fast when the Wi-Fi is on that I’m thinking mine is either defective or it has a serious flaw. The Kindle, even with the broadband on lasts four or five days.

The iPod touch also does not seem as robust as the Nano. Upgrading to iTunes 8.0 crashed it completely and I had to do a restore, which took a bit of fiddling to get done. I kept wondering why the touch was always backing itself up, well now I’m glad it had. The restore loaded my upgrades, settings, eReader books, and extra applications, but not my music and audio books.

I bought the iPod touch because I wanted walk-around access to the Internet. I was also thinking of buying the Asus Eee PC for the same reason. After a few weeks of ownership I’ve learned that I don’t actually need to access the Internet that often when I’m away from my work or home computer. It is fun to play with the touch while reclining in my La-Z-Boy, but weirdly the best function I’ve found for those idle moments is cleaning out old email. Browsing the web on the touch’s 3.5″ screen is the coolest I’ve seen on a small device, but it’s not any fun in practicality. Good for emergency searches.

When it comes down to it, the real use I have for an iPod is audio books. I spend hours and hours every week listening to audio books, and the Nano is far superior for that task. The best thing I love about eReader is getting free classic books, but not to read. When you listen to books you never know how many names and words are spelled. Having the text on eReader makes a great supplement to audio books. It’s not something I use often, but it’s very nice.

Audio books have ruined me for reading printed books, so when I do read with my eyes it’s mainly email, RSS feeds and the web pages. That makes the touch good for email and RSS feeds if they are nearly all text. HTML email is better read on a big screen.

The iPod touch is a novelty that I may or may not get addicted to carrying around. Buying it made me glad I didn’t rush out and buy the iPhone. I love the Internet as seen through my 22″ Samsung LCD. But anyone who grew up carrying a Gameboy around will probably find the touch a fantastic device.

Jim

iPod touch eReader eBook

I just bought an iPod touch 8gb for $199 refurbished at the Apple Store. I’ve been wanting a carry around Internet device and the iPod touch is very elegant. It took nothing to set up – just typed in my Wi-Fi code and I was connected. I immediately upgraded it to the new 2.0 software so I could have the Exchange client. That also worked smoothly.

And I’ve already gotten my first App, the eReader, which lets me read ebooks on the iPod touch. The eReader allowed me to log into my Fictionwise.com account and access my Bookshelf there. That’s the great thing about Fictionwise, it remembers your purchases and will let you download any book again, even in a new format. I’ve had ebooks I bought from Fictionwise on a eBookwise 1150, Kindle and now the iPod touch.

The eReader on the iPod touch offers crystal clear type, but small, so it’s not as comfortable to read on as the Kindle. However, after buying the Kindle I discovered I’m not much of a book reader any more, and that I’m really an audio bookworm instead. It’s extremely easy from within the eReader program to jump to sites like Manybooks.net, to find free or commercial ebooks. eReader has it’s own URL entry box to take you to places that provides PDB formatted books.

From inspiration to reading, it only took me about a minute to find and download “The House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton. That’s the next audio book I plan to listen to, so I thought it might be fun to read it while I listen to it.

Even though I’m primarily an audio book person, it will still be nice to have visual books on the iPod touch for times when I’m at loose ends somewhere away from home and want to read, but that brings up the next issue.

Carrying Around the Internet

The advent of smart phones inspired me to want a way to carry around the Internet for 24×7 instant access to information, but I never could stomach the idea of paying their large monthly bills. I’m currently on a pay-as-you-go plan with T-Mobile and I add $50 worth of minutes about every 4-5 months. It’s wonderful not having a cell phone bill. When small mobile Wi-Fi Internet devices showed up on the market, I thought they were a good compromise – not perfect, but pretty good. So I started researching. I finally decided on the iPod touch when I saw it for $199 refurbished. I like it, but I’ve got to learn how to carry it around.

I currently carry a 2nd generation iPod Nano in my shirt pocket. The iPod touch might be too heavy to put there. I carry my cell phone in my left front pants pocket, so the iPod touch could go on the right side, but I worry about it getting damaged, so I’m thinking about a small iPhone holster for my belt, but my pants are already overburdened with keys, wallet, phone, change, handkerchief, and sometimes voice recorder, so that I’m constantly hitching them up. Carrying around another device is going to be annoying. An iPhone would have been ideal because one device would replace two.

The obvious solution would be to start carrying a purse, but I think a bandolier would be better, although my wife already thinks seeing my white iPod headphones permanently hanging around my neck is nerdy enough. I wouldn’t be bothered by any statement my carrying a purse would make, but so far I haven’t seen one I really liked. I’d want something like a small sleek messenger bag made of leather, but if I’m going to start carrying a purse, why not plan to throw a few more items in, like a camera or a Eee PC, which means I’d want a bigger bag.

Also, I haven’t decided if the iPod touch is the perfect portable Internet device. I can browse the net fairly easy with it, with some sites a lot more readable than others. The iPod touch provides a convenient way to read and delete old emails, but it’s primary function would be to look up data, like movie times, weather info, or trivia, and listening to audio books. I’ve wondered if I jumped up in size to the 7″ Eee PC if it wouldn’t make a substantially better carry around Internet device.

You don’t realize how important a keyboard is as a human-machine interface until you hunt and peck on the iPod touch. The iPod touch certainly does a lot with it’s 3.5 inch 480 x 320 pixels screen. I think it will take me weeks to truly explore the potential of this device. Sooner or later I will want broadband access, because I figure in five years everyone will carry around the Internet. I just don’t know what the device we will carry will look like.

Part 2: Further Adventures of eReader on the iPod touch

Jim