Author: Andrew Huey

LaLa.com

I hadn’t used LaLa in quite a while, and I don’t recall getting any e-mail messages from them either, so it was a bit of a surprise when Donald Fagen’s “Nightfly” showed up in my mailbox yesterday, in a LaLa envelope. I guess the ship notice must have gone into my spam folder or something. I hadn’t shipped out anything myself since February, and I hadn’t received anything since May 2007, almost a whole year ago.

This got me interested in updating my lists on LaLa, and seeing if there was anything I could ship out. I wound up shipping three CDs out. A little while after I did that, I got a notice that another CD was on its way to me: Mazzy Star’s “So Tonight That I Might See”. Cool.

Poking around on the site a bit, it does look like it’s still an ongoing concern, with a modest amount of trading going on. There’s talk in the forums about the impending release of LaLa 3.0, but not a lot of solid information that I can find about exactly when this will come out, or what it’ll offer. And there are indications in some forum messages that new members aren’t currently allowed to trade CDs, just use the other aspects of the site. Weird. There used to be a corporate blog where Bill Nguyen would talk about the site, but that seems to have disappeared, so I guess you have to root through the forums to figure out what’s going on.

Randy Pausch

I blogged about Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture back in September. (Well, I just linked to the video. I didn’t really say anything about it.) He’s now got a book available, based on that lecture. It’s available from Amazon, in hardcover, Kindle, and audio CD versions. And the audiobook is also available from iTunes. There’s also a page up at the Carnegie Mellon site, with links to various versions of the original lecture (DVD, PDF transcript, etc) and other related links. I guess this all took off after ABC aired a special on him about a week ago.

The whole “inspirational” thing makes me kind of queasy, especially when people like Oprah and Diane Sawyer get involved. But, hey, Randy’s a computer science guy, so it’s OK for me to be interested, right? I’ll probably read a sample of the book on my Kindle, and if it doesn’t look like it’s just the lecture, padded out to fill a book, then I’ll shell out the $10 and read the whole thing. Or maybe I should buy the hardcover through the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network site, so they get a few bucks from it.

free Doctor Who ebooks

The BBC has a bunch of Doctor Who ebooks available for free download. So that’s another three or four free books I’ve got loaded onto my Kindle now. I don’t know if any of them are any good, but they didn’t cost me anything, and they aren’t taking up much disk space, so no big problem there, right?

more stuff to read

I’m still loading my Kindle up with free stuff. I haven’t bought a single ebook from Amazon yet. I just re-discovered the 2007 Nebula page at Fictionwise, which lists a bunch of Nebula-nominated stories from last year that are available from them for free.
And I also just noticed that Fictionwise has a number of magazines available in Kindle-compatible formats, including Analog and a few other SF and mystery magazines. I’ve been somewhat disappointed in Amazon’s selection of magazines for the Kindle; they’ve only got 11 magazines available, and none of them are primarily fiction magazines. I may decide to try out a couple of magazines from Fictionwise and see if they work well on the Kindle.

Tribeca Film Festival

The film guide for the Tribeca Film Festival is up. I’m going to try to get into the city and catch a few films this year. I caught a few good ones last year, and I’m looking forward to finding a few interesting movies again this year. Here’s a list of some possibilities:

  • Idiots and Angels: a new Bill Plympton film. I saw some of this (in rough form) at a Plympton panel last year in San Diego (I think). It looks like a lot of fun; the usual Plympton weirdness.
  • The Caller: Frank Langella and Elliot Gould in a “neo-noir thriller.” It could be good.
  • Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon: Historical Chinese epic. Sounds like it should have some nice battle scenes. And it’s got Sammo Hung!
  • Terra: This appears to be a computer-animated SF movie. I don’t know much about it, but it looks interesting.

And that’s all just from a quick look. I’m going to have to get organized, figure out what’s showing when and where, and then see about getting tickets and getting into the city.

Last Supper

Here’s a great collection of Last Supper images. I started looking around for last supper parodies recently after seeing the BSG one, and remembered seeing the Star Wars one a while back. There’s just an amazing variety of these things out there. I really like the comic character image, with Corto Maltese at the center.

dnrTV: .Net 2.0 stuff

I just watched dnrTV 18, on new language features in .Net 2.0. I was already familiar with partial classes, but they also went over some more esoteric stuff, including covariance and contravariance, nullable classes, and anonymous methods. Geez. There’s a lot of odd stuff in .Net that I just don’t know much about. Well, I guess that’s the point of watching screencasts and reading books and whatnot, huh?

Peerflix is dead

I got an e-mail today indicating that Peerflix will be (mostly) shut down on April 23. They’re basically shutting down DVD trading, but leaving the web site up. I guess they think they can turn it into some kind of news portal, or a competitor to IMDB, or something like that. I got a fair number of DVDs through Peerflix, and traded away a fair number too. Not a lot, maybe a couple of dozen discs total. I always found the service to be a bit of a kludge, but it worked out fine for the most part.

LaLa, which is a similar site for CD trading, still seems to be somewhat active. I haven’t had any of my CDs requested in a while, so *I’m* not doing much on it, but it looks like other people are still getting something out of it.

I guess you could go with the assumption that on-demand movie downloads from places like Amazon and iTunes killed Peerflix, but I don’t know if that would be quite right. That’s probably part of it though. There’s really no way to make a lot of money just off the service fees on a DVD-trading site. If it’s really well-managed, you could probably make a small profit, but it’s not going to make anybody rich. Whoever was investing in Peerflix probably just figured that out.

This all plays into the general trend away from physical products and towards just pushing bits, whether it’s music, movies, software, or books. I still think physical products, in certain areas, are going to be important for some time to come. I think people are still going to buy books and DVDs, but I think we’re moving away from renting movies in physical form, and I think we’re eventually going to move away from “renting” hard copy books. We’ll eventually get some system set up where we can “borrow” e-books from our libraries, and check them out onto a Kindle or something similar. And I think Amazon will eventually allow for paid book rental on the Kindle — maybe it’ll cost $10 to buy a book, or $4 to rent it for a month. (Feel free to come back and read this post again in five years, and laugh at how wrong I am!)

more Kindle DRM discussion

Right after the Kindle was released, there was a lot of talk about the DRM/licensing model it used. The subject seems to have come up again this weekend, starting with a post on Gizmodo that got referenced on Slashdot and Boing Boing. If you look through the comments on all three of these sites, you’ll see some well though out opinions, plus of course some less (perhaps) cogent ones.

I’ve loaded my Kindle up with a fair number of free (and legal) non-DRM’d ebooks from various sources. I do intend on buying some stuff from the Amazon store at some point, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Yes, I do know that I won’t really be *buying* these books, but rather just buying a license to read them on a particular device under specific conditions. I’m OK with that. I usually only read a given book once or twice, and I don’t feel the need to keep a copy of every book I’ve ever read, so I really won’t mind it if my Kindle ebook “library” disappears if I ever decide to just get rid of my Kindle. If I buy an ebook that’s really great, and I really want to keep a copy around, I’ll probably go out and buy a hard copy too.

One of the arguments that I see come up frequently is the idea that if DRM’d ebooks *completely* replace hard copy books, then various really good things about the current book economy will go away — lending books to friends, buying cheap used books, borrowing books from the library and so on. I really don’t think we need to worry about this happening any time in the near future. I think the ebook reader market is going to remain a niche market for quite a while. Even if the price comes down, it’s just not a model that’s going to appeal to most people. There are a lot of people who just don’t read enough to warrant buying any kind of dedicated device for reading. Just picking up an occasional paperback at Border’s, or the library, or the airport bookstore, is more than enough for them.

And I don’t think that the iPhone, or smartphones in general, and going to be used as ebook readers by too many people. That’s also an opinion I’ve seen tossed around a bit. I think the iPhone (or iPod Touch in my case) is great for browsing through the NY Times site and checking out a few articles, but I wouldn’t want to try and read a novel on it.

So I guess that’s my (more than) two cents on the Kindle DRM thing. I don’t know if anyone will find this post particularly useful or interesting, but I just had to get all that off my chest.