Category: Reading

A New Kind of Reading: iEssays

What’s the best economic model for finding the absolute best essays to read?

I decided to go paperless with my periodical reading back in February, 2008, and my last magazine subscription (Popular Photography) has finally run out.  At one time I subscribed to over 20 magazines. I love magazines, and I spent six years working in a periodicals department at a university library back in the 1980s. 

At first this effort was to do my part in fighting global warming, but over the last few years I’ve realized that magazines aren’t the most efficient way to read about the world.  Out of a year’s worth of The New Yorker, I might only read 1/20th of the printed pages, and it was probably less.  I now subscribe to The New Yorker on my Kindle, but I don’t even look at every issue, so I’m wasting my money.  I do wish I read each issue cover to cover because it’s a great magazine, but in reality I spend far more time reading on the Internet.  There’s something compelling about jumping from one web site to the next grazing on information.

Long before the Internet was a gleam in its designers’ eyes, magazines and newspapers were the world wide web of information.  Most print magazines and newspapers have a web presence today, and they all compete for eyes and dollars, while still trying not to compete against their own print editions, but I can’t imagine that lasting for many more years.  With ebooks, smartphones and tablets all offering periodicals and news reading apps, how can paper periodicals compete?

I wish I could take a news pill every morning and just know what’s happening around the world, but that’s not possible – yet.  But here’s the modern reality of reading – petabytes of data are being created daily, but we all still live in a 24 hour world, and at most I might spend 7 of my 168 weekly hours keeping up the world by reading short non-fiction essays, and when I’m busy or lazy it’s a lot less.

The Challenge of Keeping Current

We live in exciting times, and this is a happening world, but it is surprising how ill informed we are about what’s going on.  For most of my life I’ve watched the half-hour evening news and then supplemented it with some magazine reading, and figured I was doing pretty good keeping up with current events.  But I realize now that I’m not.  Too much of the evening news on television is worthless.  Are daily stories about natural disasters, politics, and economics really that valuable to keeping up with external reality beyond our tiny lives?

In any 24 hour period, what really are the most worthwhile stories to know about?  Let’s say we spend 60 minutes a day, whether surfing the net, scanning RSS feeds, watching television, reading a newspaper or magazine – what’s the most productive way to spend those 60 minutes in terms of learning about what’s going on in reality?

Generally, we all have a passive attitude towards acquiring news.  We take in whatever’s in front of us, whether it’s the NBC Nightly News or Slashdot.org.  But what if we read with conscious intent?  What if we systematically reviewed data sources ourselves, instead of letting editors at newspapers, magazines and TV shows decide what we need to know?

The Old Way

Before radio and television, people read newspapers.  Your daily paper might present 25 stories and you picked the ones you wanted to read.  With mass broadcasting on radio and TV, news was bundled into shows of 30 or 60 minutes and you just sat through all the stories, even if you really weren’t interested in all of them.  If you wanted to know more you subscribed to magazines and hoped they presented in-depth coverage for stuff you missed from your newspaper, radio and TV.  Before the plague of attention deficit syndrome hit the world, magazines often presented long essays, thousands of words on a topic, offering far more data than you’d get in a one hour documentary.

The Current Way

The Internet publishes thousands, if not millions, of stories every day.  There are many ways of finding stories to read.  You can go to a editor driven sites like Google News, MSN, Slashdot, Engadget, or any of countless other outlets and scan for interesting items to read.  Or you can go to social sites like StumbleUpon or Digg and hope serendipity will bring you a great news surprise.  Or, you can add all your favorite sites to a RSS feed reader and try to manage the internet fire hose of data that way.

With the advent of the tablet computer we now hold a magic magazine that can overcome the limitations of the printing press. 

The Better Way?

Money makes a great editor, in more ways than one.  I guarantee if you go buy copies of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scientific American, or any of the many top printed periodicals and read the longest articles you’ll get the best bang for you reading time.  These publications pay writers top dollars and there is a kind of survival of the fittest in information quality going on.  However, we still have the problem of subscribing to paper copies, or tediously searching the net for the web editions.  And whether we pay for paper copies or subscribe to digital editions, we’ll buy a lot of content we won’t read.

What we need is the iTunes of essays, iEssays or a Readers Digital Digest.  Articles under 1,000 words should be 49 cents, 1,000-4,999 should be $1, and stories greater than 5,000 words that aren’t considered books, should be $1-3.  If you buy one $5.99-6.99 magazine a week, you’re spending a $1 a day for essays, and I doubt many people would read more than one long essay a day, so these prices are about equal to average magazine reading.  Leave the under 500 word content to free web sites supported by ads.

Picture The New York Times Most Popular section but getting content from hundreds or thousands of magazines, newspapers and web sites.  This is how I read the NY Times, start at this page and only reading the best/most popular articles.

At our iEssays site, we could follow best seller lists set up by topics to quickly find the Hit Essay of the Day from a variety of subject categories.  They can also keep lists for Hits of the Week, Month or Year.  Imagine sitting down with your iPad once a day with the intent of spending 30-60 minutes reading a very high quality article and you’re willing to spend a buck.  This would definitely weed out the crap and silly stories you mind at most social news sites. 

And it’s important that the site not charge a subscription for the whole site.  What we want to do is generate hit essays like iTunes creates hit singles.  It would be important to still read newspaper sites or watch TV news to get a general impression of the news, but if you wanted to really learn something new every day about the world, I think the iEssays would be the best way to go.

Also, to help the survival of the fittest process, I think as part of your purchase you get to send an article to up to five friends, or link it on your blog.  So articles could be promoted up the Hit List by purchase votes, recommendation votes, or link hit votes.  The New York Times allows free reading to its articles if they come in via links.  I think that’s an innovative way to promote stories and still collect payments.

And finally, I think the iEssays should be an app that stores your purchased articles forever in the cloud, so they become part of your digital memory.

Conclusion

I’m not expecting this system to supplant subscription systems.  Most people prefer passive news gathering.  Most people are happy to subscribe to a newspaper or magazine and just skim and read, tossing the issue out when they are done.  But I think there’s enough people like me who are annoyed at buying far more content than we read, and wanting to get the most for our money.  It’s like cable TV plans, spend $60 a month and get 200 channels.  Some people don’t mind channel surfing, but I don’t.  Not only would I like a la cart cable, I think I’d like to buy television by the show.

Unless magazines and newspapers go the way of subscription music, I’d prefer paying by the article rather than the issue.  I pay $4.99 a month to Rdio and get to listen to essentially everything.  I use its social tools and charts to narrow my listening.  But I think by the essay pricing would help me find the best article reading the fastest.

Right now The New York Times charges $20 a month for unlimited tablet access.  That seems way too expensive when compared to what I get from the music business.  If The New York Times also presented content from many major newspapers and magazines, then I might consider a $20 monthly bill, like how I spend for TV and movies through Netflix.  But the NY Times is trying to price their digital newspaper like the old paper copies, and this is different world.  Netflix and Rhapsody are changing content pricing models in people’s minds and I don’t think they will go away.

I think the Rhapsody pricing model is superior to the iTunes pricing model, which is superior to the old CD pricing model.  iTunes sells hits, and I want to buy hit essays.  I don’t want to buy whole papers and read just a handful of its stories.  I want either the Netflix/Rhapsody model which is gigantic piles of content for one low monthly price, and I’d use built in tools to find what I want, or I want the iTunes model, where I buy just the hits. 

When it comes to reading quality essays (or short stories and poems for that matter), I predict the price per song model is superior for quickly finding the best reads.  And ultimately I think more writers and publishers would benefit from this model too.  If I spent $20 a month for The New York Times I doubt I buy any only periodical.  Which is why I can’t make myself spend $20 for one online newspaper.  If they added 20 top magazines to their deal, I would gladly pay $20 a month, but I’d rather pay $1 an article for an even larger pool of hit providers.

The monthly library model like Netflix and Rhapsody is great for music, movies and TV shows if you like to try out lots of different songs or programs.  But reading is different, at least for me.  I have a limited amount of time I spend reading, and I only want the very best stories to read.  It’s like people who prefer iTunes to Rhapsody.  They just want to get a few hits to play and aren’t concerned with trying out one or two dozen new albums a week.  That’s why I think some enterprising Readers Digest wannabes should apply the iTunes model to creating iEssays.  Or if the Best American Series editors came out with a monthly digital issue rather than a series of books once a year.

JWH – 7/17/11

12 Ways for the Kindle to Compete with iPad

The Kindle is clunky!  As a paperback book replacement, the Kindle is superior to the iPad because of size and weight.  However, as a magazine, newspaper, television and computer replacement, it fails miserable by contrasting it with the iPad.

Robert L. Mitchell, over at Computerworld writes “Why iPads will beat e-readers,” and he makes some very good points.  Basically he asks why have two devices when one will do, especially one that does so much more.  For most people this will be very true, but not all, and the not-alls can still be millions of bookworms.  Not everyone is ready to spend $500 for a reading gadget, but some people are ready to spend $139, and millions more would get into the game if the Kindle was $49.95, one tenth the price of the iPad.  The real question is:  Is the Kindle good enough in the long run?  If you could buy an iPad for $139 how many people would even think of purchasing a Kindle?

My biggest gripe with my Kindle 3 is not the e-ink display but the user interface – the Kindle is clunky at best, compared to the uber-elegant iPad.  How can Amazon fix the Kindle so its users would no longer feel iPad envy?  Can the Kindle be marketed as a single task device in such a way that it doesn’t psychologically compete with the iPad at all?

The problem is the iPad can be a universal ebook reader and that’s why people see the iPad as competition to the Kindle.  Plus the iPad can host thousands of dazzling programs on a beautiful and elegant screen.

The iPad proves that a touch screen is the perfect user interface (UI) for tablet size devices!  The Kindle 3’s buttons and UI is a major leap forward over previous models, but it’s nowhere near the quantum leap of touch screen tablets.  My biggest gripe against the iPad is it’s way too heavy to be a book.  If you’re the kind of person that reads for less than an hour a few times a week, the iPad is fine.  But if you read hours a day, seven days a week then the iPad is clunky and chunky.  This leaves room for Amazon to compete.

Amazon can go in two major directions.  First, it can continue to be just a book replacement device or second, it can go into the tablet competition arena.  And since Kindle software is already on all the major tablets, it’s doubtful that Amazon needs to market its own general purpose device unless it wants to compete with the Color Nook, which is essentially a half-ass Android tablet, and B&N’s attempt to beat E-ink technology.  But at $250, it’s too expensive for most people wanting to get into the ebook reading.

Does Amazon really need to make money in hardware sales?  Does it really matter what platform Amazon’s customers read their books on?  Now that the ebook market has exploded, and readers are accepting the idea of buying ebooks, does Amazon even need to sell Kindles?  Does it even need to sell ebooks in the Kindle format exclusively?  Amazon’s real competition is not the iPad, but Apple.  Apple now sells music, movies, audio books, ebooks, television shows – much of the same content that Amazon is pushing, and a reason to want Android tablets to succeed.  And how does Amazon compete when Apple takes in a 30% profit margin on anything Amazon sells on Apple devices.

Amazon needs to beat Apple, not the iPad, and the best way for that to happen is if Android phones and tablets outsell iPhones and iPads.  Or if Amazon has a device that its loyal customers love more than an iPad.  For the Kindle device to succeed it must be the ultimate ebook reader – and it wouldn’t hurt if it was $49.95 or less.

Here are a number of ways the Kindle could be improved.

  1. E-ink technology limits what Amazon can do with the design of the Kindle.  If Amazon could meld touch screen technology with the e-ink display it could simplify the device by jettison most of the buttons, and vastly improving the user interface.
  2. Add support for EPUB standard – that way EPUB could become the web standard for free ebooks and that would actually help the Kindle.  It would also let Kindle users get library books from Overdrive and NetLibrary, also helping sales.
  3. Make a deal with B&N to support each other’s book formats, so Kindle users could buy from B&N, and Nook users could buy from Amazon.  Hey, the competition is with Apple.
  4. Work extremely hard on the ergonomics of the device so it’s easier to hold and read than any mass market paperback, trade paper or hardback book.
  5. Make the device indestructible so people feel its safe to take their Kindle anywhere something you won’t do with an expensive iPad or Android tablet.
  6. Make the price cheap enough so people will want one for every family member, nor feel kicked in the gut if they loose one.
  7. Work out a scheme for family and friends to share books.  If I owned two Kindles so my wife and I can read the same book, we’d have to have both devices on one account name just to keep us from having to buy two copies.  Being forced to share an account means we can’t have separate libraries.  And if we’re reading the same book at the same time the auto book marking feature would get messed up.
  8. Develop a home page that’s a metaphor for a personal library system.  A Kindle can hold thousands of books theoretically, but not practically.  Amazon needs to make an app like iTunes to manage all the content on the Kindle – but it needs to be far better than iTunes.
  9. Improve the way magazines and newspapers are presented and stored on the Kindle – and aim for cheaper subscription costs than what people have to pay on the iPad.
  10. Most books, especially fiction, do not have photos and illustrations, so it’s easier for E-ink to compete with LCD displays.  It might be better to concede multimedia to the tablet competition, and make the Kindle the absolute best text to brain interface that bookworms can buy.
  11. Make it a snap to transfer text from the Internet and the computer to and from the Kindle.   Getting text to and from the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch can be annoying because of all the security and restrictions Apple uses to protect the user.  It would be fantastic to have a plugin for my browsers that would scrape a web page and put the text content into my Kindle for reading later in the comfort of my recliner.  But just getting .txt, .pdf, and .doc files to and from the Kindle is still cumbersome, and it can’t handle .epub at all.  This would be supported by #8.
  12. Find a software solution to make the Kindle a lifetime library of reading – right now I feel compelled to delete books and docs from the Kindle to keep thing clean and easy, but if the UI was better my Kindle could be a portable library of lifetime reading.  One solution is to provide a lifetime library in the cloud for your loyal users.

I use my Kindle most for reading free stuff off the Internet.  There are short stories and essays on the Internet that are too long to read sitting at the desk so I like to put on the Kindle, plus there are thousand and thousands of free novels, especially classics.  I do buy Kindle books, especially when they are cheaper than buying printed books, but the prices for ebooks have shot up which makes them less appealing.  If I see a reprint of an old science fiction book for $7.99 or $9.99 I just say no.  If it’s $4.99 I think hard about it.  If it’s $2.99 I jump.  $4.99-$7.99 competes with buying used hardbacks for collecting and sharing.  I’d rather buy a used hardback and give it to a friend than buy a Kindle book at the same price.  Sorry Amazon, but sharing books is a factor. 

If the Kindle book is cheaper than a used hardback I think, cool, I’m building an electronic library.  But even that desire is limited because the current UI makes collecting books a chore because of clutter and harder navigation.  I seldom reread books, but sometimes I’d like them for reference, so it’s a toss-up for whether or not to keep them.  I’d love to have a system for building an electronic library of everything I’ve read.  If the Kindle offered such software I’d be more likely to buy Kindle books to keep in my lifetime library.

Right now when I power up my Kindle I see a long list of books, magazines and other documents waiting to be read.  If I want I can archive stuff to an even longer list.  That’s a mess.  What’s needed is a library system for e-readers, something that’s probably only possible with a touch screen UI.

Amazon needs to get some savvy librarians to work on this task.  I can picture the opening screen having the following buttons:

  • Read [it remembers where I left off]
  • Bookmarks/Search
  • Novels
  • Nonfiction
  • Magazines
  • Short Stories
  • Poems
  • Essays
  • Newspapers
  • Documents
  • Notes

What I want is a way to organize my digital book collection and help me find stuff.  And this points to a major flaw of the iPad as an ebook reader.  If you have books in Kindle, Stanza, iBooks, Nook, and other readers on the iPad, and you subscribe to magazines and newspapers, each in their own app, and you collect documents in all kinds of apps, finding stuff will be tricky because it’s all over the place.

I wish my Kindle had a detachable handle, like a church fan handle, but with a trigger to page forward.  Even though it’s much lighter than the iPad, it gets tiring to hold.

But the biggest trouble Amazon will have when competing with tablets is whether or not people start carrying tablets around with them like cell phones.  If everyone gets that addicted to their tablet, then people won’t want a Kindle.  Thus, if Amazon wants to stay in the ebook device business they will have to come out with a tablet that competes with the iPad, or join forces with Android tablet makers.  However, I don’t think people will carry tablets everywhere.  Smartphones will be it, so having a smartphone that can connect with a lifetime library in the cloud could be another big selling point.

I think the Kindle can compete if it becomes a super-book and doesn’t try to be anything else.  A tablet is really a computer without a keyboard, it’s a general purpose device, and as long as it’s heavier and more expensive than a single purpose ebook reader, ereaders have a chance to compete.

JWH – 3/26/11 (Mine and Susan’s 33rd anniversary)

How Can Bookstores Compete with Amazon.com?

Last year I had four large bookstores I could visit.  My favorite is Davis-Kidd Booksellers, a chain in Tennessee.  The other three are Borders, Barnes & Noble and Bookstar.  This year Bookstar closed, and the future of Borders is uncertain.  And the parent company of Davis-Kidd filed for bankruptcy, but luckily, the Memphis store was the robust one of the group and is continuing to operate. 

My wife and I were shopping at Davis-Kidd last night because I had gotten an email saying everything was 20% off March 18.   When we went to check-out we found the 20% only applied to its Members club, which costs $25 a year.  The book we were buying to read for our book club, The History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage was $15.95.  We had decided to buy it because of the sale, otherwise we thought $16 was too much for a paperback.  When we found out we weren’t going to get the sale price left the store without it.  The same book at Amazon for $10.56, or $8.61 for the Kindle edition.  We would have paid $13.60 for the book locally, but not full list.

Now I like supporting my local bookstores and buy a fair amount of books from them at full price, but mostly I buy their remaindered books.  Hardbacks have gotten too expensive to buy new at list price, so I enjoy getting a book I want when they are discounted.  We were disappointed to leave the store empty handed and annoyed that we had been enticed to a sale that we weren’t entitled to use.

This got me to thinking, how should local bookstores compete with Amazon?  Are bookstores failing because they charge full price when online retailers are always offering sales?  If the price of the book were the same I would probably always buy locally.  I will buy loads of books when they are for sale at remaindered prices.  But unless it’s something special I need immediately, or for a gift, I just won’t buy books at list price anymore.

The History of the World in 6 Glasses is also available for the Kindle for $8.61.  I have a Kindle but my wife doesn’t.  She does have an iPhone with the Kindle reader.  So we could save even more money by buying the Kindle edition.  By the way, if a married couple both want to read the book on a Kindle they have to buy two Kindles and register them to the same account.

Local bookstores have to compete with discounted books sold online and with emerging ebooks.  Competing will be tough, but I think it will still be possible.  Right now books best read on ebooks are words only books, especially fiction.  But nonfiction books with photos, diagrams, maps, etc. don’t work well on ebook readers.  Any book you just want to flip around and discover things randomly doesn’t work well as ebooks.

Bookstores will have the advantage on selling books you want to look at, and for selling books you don’t know you wanted to buy until you see them, either because of illustrations, or because you are just shopping for a sale like going through the remaindered titles.  But can bookstores make it without selling fiction?  Fiction is perfect for ebook readers, especially for hardcore bookworms that read one book after another.

Amazon has been selling used books for years and I often buy them over new books when shopping Amazon.  I’m thinking local bookstores should start selling used books, especially upscale collector editions.  Local bookstores have online stores beat when it comes to tactile browsing, and thus should succeed with books that are appealing as objects, like special editions, rare editions, or heavily illustrated books.

One of the books we read for our book club is Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell.  It’s a history of shopping, sales and marketing, and one of the lessons is buyers don’t like to pay full retail, and yet bookstores try to compete with online stores by selling at full list price.  If they want to stay in business they will have to stop that practice.  Davis-Kidd got us in their store last night with the promise of 20% off, but it turned out to only be for their club members.  They need to make 20% off their standard price for everyone and see if they sell more books.  I know I’d buy far less books at Amazon.com if they did.

They also need to get more remaindered books – because that’s what keeps me shopping regularly at their store.  But if they also had a nice selection of used books that would get me shopping more often.  But it can’t be crappy books like you find at the library book sale.  They need to be beautiful books, in near mint condition, great dust jackets, something people would want to own for their physical beauty and collecting appeal.

Davis-Kidd and Borders also sell music, but they have full priced CDs which I won’t buy.  If they priced CDs closer to what Amazon, or even Target does I’d browse their selection every week.  Bookstores might also  consider selling LPs.  LPs are making a comeback and their large beautiful covers could be a big selling point.  If fact, music publishers who want to sell CDs should package them in collector picture books editions that sell in bookstores.

And I think the publishers should make special editions of new books that appeal to the visual buyer.  And they shouldn’t be $99, but priced for impulse buying.  I wouldn’t buy a $19 CD, but it it came with a beautiful book for $19 I would.  Ditto for DVD movies.  However, if they are expensive I’ll just shop Amazon looking for 40% discounts.

I love going to book and record stores, but I don’t buy like I used to.  Bookworms love bookstores, but if it came down to a choice between Amazon and Davis-Kidd, I’d take Amazon.  Amazon is actually far more helpful at selling books because of the customer reviews and other sales information at the site.  The assumption is human help is better than software, but it’s not.  Bookstores are great for browsing the visual and tactile qualities of books, for random impulse buying and instant need.  They need to capitalize on these functions.  Otherwise, books as a commodity are better marketed on the web.

JWH – 3/19/11

2010 Year in Reading

It’s that time of year to look back over my reading log and analyze my bookworm habits for the year.  In my 2009 Year in Reading I declared I wanted to read twelve to fifteen books published in 2010 as they came out during the year.  Well, I failed to do that because I read only nine books, but I read ten from 2009, so that makes me feel somewhat better about keeping up with current books.  I also wanted to read less science fiction, and I failed miserably at that!

  1. The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (2006) by Justin Pollard & Howard Reid
  2. Prehistory (2007) by Colin Refrew
  3. The Bible: A Biography (2007) by Karen Armstrong
  4. Martian Time-Slip (1964) by Philip K. Dick  (3rd time)
  5. The Caves of Steel (1954) by Isaac Asimov  (2nd time)
  6. Endymion (1996) by Dan Simmons
  7. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) by D. H. Lawrence
  8. We, Robots (2010) edited by Allan Kaster
  9. Darwin’s Origin of Species (2007) by Janet Browne
  10. Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart (2nd time)
  11. The Edge of Physics (2010) by Anil Ananthaswamy
  12. Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler
  13. Wake (2009) by Robert J. Sawyer
  14. Needle (1950) by Hal Clement
  15. The Windup Girl (2009) by Paolo Bacigalupi
  16. The Lovers (1961) by  Philip José Farmer
  17. Watch (2010) by Robert J. Sawyer
  18. Jesus Interrupted (2009) by Bart D. Ehrman
  19. The City & The City (2009) by China Mieville
  20. The Last Picture Show (1966) by Larry McMurtry (2nd time)
  21. Julian Comstock (2009) by Robert Charles Wilson
  22. Classic Women’s Short Stories (2005)
  23. Food Rules (2009) by Michael Pollan
  24. The Dragon Masters (1963) by Jack Vance
  25. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) by Zane Grey (2nd time)
  26. Out of the Silent Planet (1938) by C. S. Lewis (2nd time)
  27. Little Brother (2008) by Cory Doctorow
  28. Texasville (1987) by Larry McMurtry
  29. Boneshaker (2009) by Cherrie Priest
  30. A Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend (2007) by Felicity Hoffman & Patricia Wolfe
  31. Duane’s Depressed (1999) by Larry McMurtry
  32. When the Light Goes (2007) by Larry McMurtry
  33. Hunger Games (2008) by Suzanne Collins
  34. Rhino Ranch (2009) by Larry McMurtry
  35. Beatrice and Virgil (2010) by Yann Martel
  36. Bonk (2008) by Mary Roach
  37. Catching Fire (2009) by Suzanne Collins
  38. Mockingjay (2010) by Suzanne Collins
  39. Packing for Mars (2010) by Mary Roach
  40. Robert A. Heinlein v. 1 (2010) by William Patterson
  41. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger (2nd time)
  42. The Visitors (1980) by Clifford Simak
  43. What the Dog Saw (2009) by Malcolm Gladwell
  44. Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (2010) by Harriet Reisen
  45. Freedom (2010) Jonathan Franzen
  46. The Fountains of Paradise (1979) by Arthur C. Clarke
  47. Monument (1974) by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
  48. A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003) by Libba Bray
  49. Starman Jones (1953) by Robert A. Heinlein (6th time)
  50. Rendezvous with Rama (1972) by Arthur C. Clarke (2nd time)
  51. Mindswap (1966) by Robert Sheckley (2nd time)
  52. Talent is Overrated (2008) by Geoff Colvin
  53. The Warrior’s Apprentice (1986) by Lois McMaster Bujold

Favorite Novel Read This Year:  Duane’s Depressed by Larry McMurtry.  This novel meant a lot to me because it was about a man my age coming to grips with getting older.  Duane’s Depressed is third of Larry McMurtry Thalia novels, with the first being the beautiful The Last Picture Show.

Favorite Non-Fiction Book Read This Year:  Jesus Interrupted by Bart D. Ehrman.  Historical analysis of the New Testament brings up many theological questions but answers even more secular questions.  I felt it goes a long way to explaining the origins of conservatives and liberals, if you look at this book with the right slant.

Most Fun Fiction Read This Year:  The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.  I don’t know why, but YA novels are often the most gripping page turners I read.  I was amazed by Suzanne Collins’ skill at developing characters and plotting.  She never took the expected route and always dazzled me.

Literary Read of the Year:  Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence.  It’s famous for the sex and dirty words, but it has lasting power because of its deep insight into human nature.  The story also chronicles the divide between the pastoral past and the early days of technology in the 20th century.

Most Admired Science Fiction Novel Read This Year:  The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.  I wished they’d make a movie of this book because it’s so visually imaginative.  It would also show the world outside of written science fiction where it’s at.  Movie science fiction needs to get beyond 1930s space opera.

Science Book of the Year:  The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy.  This is the only science book from 2010 that I read this year, but it was an inspirational one.  Ananthaswamy took a tour of the world writing about the big physics experiments going on today that are exploring the edge of reality.

Inspirational Read for the Year:  Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.  Like last year’s The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, this book is about how brilliant people become brilliant, not through innate talent, but hard work.  Last night I watched a documentary about Glen Gould, the pianist, and he fit Colvin’s pattern perfectly.  It really helps to have the right parents, not for their genes, but for their dedication to raising a successful child.   There are probably no genes for specific talents like music, chess playing, mathematics, physics, finance, etc.  But I wonder if brilliant people have genes for the ability to concentrate on one topic so intently.  Or, is even that. just a conditioning of hard work learned at an early age.  I recommend this book to anyone who is a parent and to anyone who wants to be a success at any task.

Goals for 2011

Again I want to push myself to read more contemporary books.  This year I returned to contemporary music and I feel very excited about music again.  I’m fighting a tendency of getting old of looking backwards and living in the past.  It’s quite delicious to cherish old favorite works of art but it’s also a kind of death trap.  Part of the vitality of youth is surfing the cutting edge of pop culture.  I don’t expect to rejuvenate by keeping current, but at least I hope to fight off brain rust.

JWH – 12/28/10

Reading Online: Safari’s Killer Feature

I’m not a big fan of Apple.  Who needs another browser after you’ve already installed IE8, Firefox and Chrome?  So, I saw little point of installing Safari, Apple’s horse in the browser race.  Well, it turns out Safari has a feature that other browsers lack that makes it worth the time and effort to install. 

The feature is called Reader.  It takes a web page that looks like this:

screen1

 

And makes it look like this:

 

screen2 

If you do a lot of online reading this makes all the difference in the world.  Now it doesn’t work with every web page, but it does with most, like the New York Times I’m reading here.  And it’s very easy to use.  If you look closely at those screen shots above, you’ll see a blue button on the right of the URL locator box, and a purple one in the Reader view.  They both say “Reader.”  If the button doesn’t show up, the feature is not available.  That’s all there is to using it.

While in Reader there are five buttons that will appear at the bottom of the page if you hover you mouse.  They do:  shrink the font, enlarge the font, email the page link, print the reader view and quit Reader.  I wished there was a sixth nifty button:  Save for Ebook.

Reader is great for reading shorter articles online while seated at a desk, but if you find one that’s dozens of pages, it would be cool to save to my Kindle and read from my La-Z-Boy.  If you have Acrobat or a clone, you can print to a .pdf file, but I’d rather have it save to a format common to most ebook reader.

I hope IE9 would add this feature, or even Chrome, because it is annoying to use four different browsers for various reasons.  But as of now, when I want to read the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly Magazine, or most of my other favorite online newspapers and magazines, Safari is the go-to browser of the moment.  It’s like having a special large print edition that filters out all distractions.

JWH – 9/6/10