As you may have heard, the Amazon Kindle has finally come to Canada. Chalk up another late victory for the digital content ghetto that is our sprawling nation. We join the likes of Kyrgyzstan, Libya and Oman as countries able to use the gadget.
I’ve played with a Kindle a couple of times, and they’re pretty nifty things. You can store about 1500 books on them (have I read that many books in my life? Surely not) and the battery apparently lasts for two weeks worth of reading. Amazon offers about 300,000 books at US $12 or less, and you can get a bevy of newspapers and magazines online as well.
And yet, I don’t want one.
Cost, Backlog and Snobby Appeal
First there’s the cost. With taxes and import fees, the Kindle is going to cost at least CAN $325 before you buy a single book. Given that you might save an average of $10 per book by buying digital versions, you can start realizing cost savings after buying about 30 books. I wish I read more, but 30 books represents at least two years worth of reading. And who knows what options will be available by then?
Yes, it’s thrilling that I could carry a ton of books with me on the go. But, I don’t have a too-many-books-to-carry problem. I have a not-enough-time-to-read problem. I have at least five or six Audible credits waiting to be used because I’ve got a backlog of audio books which I haven’t listened to yet.
Plus, I’m totally unexcited about yet another electronic device which requires recharging. Plus there’s the ‘valuable object’ problem. If my bag gets stolen and there’s a book in it, then no big deal. If my Kindle gets stolen, then that’s a bigger problem.
Finally, there’s the snobby appeal of having your walls lined with bookshelves, and those bookshelves lined with books.
It’s a cool object, and I can see why lots of people want one. If I ever go back to school, for example, the idea of having all of my text books on one device sounds awesome. Still, I’m not salivating about yesterday’s announcement from Amazon.
Today I saw Whip It, the rollerderby movie directed by Drew Barrymore. It felt pretty ordinary to me, and would have been disappointing without the excellent Ellen Page and Marcia Gay Hardin. The critics generally liked (but didn’t love) it.
Confronted with a very rainy afternoon, I lingered for a couple of minutes in the lobby of the cinema. I looked over the eight movie posters in the lobby, and was surprised to see that five of the films they promoted had been directed by women. I snapped some bad photos on my iPhone, and made this unpretty collage:
Of those five films, three are mid-level Hollywood flicks, one is a Canadian indie and one is a feature-length documentary. How surprising is that result? In 2007, of the 13,000 members of the Directors Guild of America, only 7% are women. I don’t claim that my little lobby survey has any sort of authority, but it’s at least a little encouraging. The role of director has always struck as one of the last bastions of near-total male domination.
I’ll admit a little of my own sexism here: I was surprised to learn that best movie I saw all year, The Hurt Locker, was directed by a woman. Kathryn Bigelow has made a minor masterpiece in that movie. I wonder how many other war movies women have directed over the past fifty years?
Let’s end the week with a bit of hockey magic. Owen Nolan (the only player born in Northern Ireland playing in the NHL, as it happens) defied his 38 years last night and scored a top ten goal of the year:
Of course, those two mincing Tampa Bay defencemen made him look pretty good, but it’s still a fantastic goal.
That’s good news. I wasn’t looking forward to selling little USB drives at our book launch if the actual books got held up in customs.
They smell a little odd, if you stick your nose right in them (as I always do with pretty much everything). That’s probably just because they came fresh and direct from the printer.
I recently participated in a game of Pictionary. My team came second (or “first loser” as somebody described it), despite the fact that we had four arts degrees between us.
I was given a particularly challenging word to draw, and I thought I did a smashing job of it. My team disagreed. Travis kindly snapped a photo. My rendering is everything above my finger–we did multiple drawings on every sheet of paper. Can you guess the word? Click for super-sizing:
Hmm…in retrospect it’s not really that clear. Though, in my defense, two people from another team guessed what I was on about.
UPDATE: The correct answer is ‘taxidermy’. So maybe I failed. I did like an alternative suggestion I received by email: “Dance dance critter death edition”, which seems to be in the ballpark of correct.
There’s only so much one can say about Remembrance Day. The ceremony is pretty much the same from year to year–this year I attended the one in front of the Legislature here in Victoria. I’ve written a lot about this day in the past: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.
This year I was thinking back to the Remembrance Day assemblies in elementary and high school. One year, I have a clear memory of a video being shown, featuring a song, I think, by Bryan Adams. I even remember some of the lyrics:
The guns will be silent – on Remembrance Day
There’ll be no more fighting – on Remembrance Day
This wasn’t the video, but here’s the song. It’s hardly In Flanders Fields, but it’s what I was thinking about today.
Andy linked to this delightful alternative time line for the last forty years of popular music. It imagines what might have happened if the Beatles stayed together:
February 11th, 1978. Eventually is released simultaneously in the American and British markets. Some critics find significance in the fact that the first single off the album, “Blow Away,†is not a Lennon/McCartney collaboration but instead a George Harrison song; others find themselves underwhelmed and suggest that the Lennon/McCartney “Free As A Bird†should have been the first single instead. (â€ÂFree As A Bird†is released as the second single six weeks later.) Harrison, for his part, says that “Blow Away†was “a lot less of a rocker†before Lennon suggested an increase in tempo and “letting Ringo go nuts.†No music videos are produced for the album: Lennon says “no, that would be too much bother. We want to have fun with this. Work’s for our own stuff.â€Â
I’m sure these have been done before, but there are a number of creative projects that extend naturally from this kind of ‘what if’ exercise. A book-length version, maybe, or writing songs that the still-together Beatles might have written.
I recommend the same essays about the web over and over again. Essays like 1000 True Fans or The Next Economy of Ideas are both informative and inspiring, and convey fundamental ideas about how the web works.
When I say “how the web works”, I’m not talking about DNS or HTTP. I’m referring to the profound impact that the web is having on community, commerce, communications and so many other parts of our lives. It’s these big ideas that are difficult to absorb, and I find the essays help.
James does the same thing, and he came up with the idea of curating a book (maybe it’s electronic, maybe hard copy, maybe both) that showcases a bunch of the best essays. In short, a toolkit for getting the web.
We were at a business retreat up in Tofino this weekend, and we hashed out the idea a little. Following the best advice of Ze Frank (rude words ahead), we started implementing the idea on the spot. Hence, GettheWeb.org. For now it’s just a Google Sites page with a Google Docs form and a YouTube video (owned by Google) explaining the project.
At this stage, we’re just looking for recommendations for “great essays about how the web works–socially, behaviorally, philosophically”. Plus we made a 78-second video discussing the project (thanks to Jay from Giant Ant for being our two-elbow duopod):
Have you got an essay about the web that you love? Submit it.
