Author: Andrew Huey

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.

yet more dnrTV

Not that anyone but me is going to be interested in this, but I watched dnrTV show #13 today, the second part of the CSLA.NET 2.0 overview. I’ve only scratched the surface on CSLA.NET so far, but I think I have a little more of an understanding of what’s going on and how it works.
I also caught up a bit on the .Net Rocks podcast on the trip down to my parents’ house and back today for Easter. I’m still about 40 episodes behind. I was (mostly) keeping up for a while, but I started falling behind when they went to twice-weekly. Then, my commute got shorter, which means less time for podcasts in the car. So, the end result is a huge backlog of DNR episodes.

dnrTV – Generics

I keep meaning to watch dnrTV, but I never seem to get around to it. I need to find about an hour where I can sit still in front of the computer, and give it my full attention, and that isn’t easy lately. I did just watch show #9, with Venkat Subramaniam talking about generics in C#. This is one of a handful of topics that I’ve got on my mental to-do list to learn more about. I see that show 105, the most recent show, is also about generics, so maybe I’ll try and watch that one tomorrow.

There are a number of shows on CSLA.NET, which is another topic I really need to learn about. I really need to talk myself into watching this stuff more often, and maybe watching a little less Frisky Dingo!

Dave Stevens

I was saddened to read today that Dave Stevens has passed away. The Comics Reporter has a thorough obituary. I loved his work on The Rocketeer back in the eighties. I remember seeing him at the San Diego con a few times over the last several years, but I never got around to actually stopping by his booth, saying hello to him, and letting him know how much I liked his work.

some blogger stuff

I’m messing around with my Blogger template a bit right now, so the blog may look weird until all the pages update. I haven’t touched the template for this thing in about two years, I think. The basic layout will remain the same; I’m still plenty happy with the two-column layout I borrowed from BlueRobot some time ago.

Kindle

I got a Kindle today. I ordered it back in early February, so it took about a month for Amazon to get it out the door. It’s pretty much what I expected. The screen is very readable, in any (reasonable) light. As many others have pointed out, the button layout makes it a little awkward to figure out a good way to hold the thing without pressing either the next page or previous page button. I think I’ll get used to it though.

The built-in web browser is interesting, and might be somewhat useful. Gmail seems to be usable on it. Lotus Notes webmail is out of the question, though. Mobile-friendly sites like http://nytimesriver.com/ ought to be useable.

I haven’t bought any books for it yet. For now, I’ve just got some free books on it that I downloaded from ManyBooks and Tor.

For the most part, I’m liking it. I have so many hard copy books sitting around that I won’t be using it for most of my reading any time soon, but I’ll start reading something on it soon, just to start using it. I’ll likely blog more about it after I’ve played around with it some more.

Secret Skin

Michael Chabon has an essay in the New Yorker about superhero costumes. And there’s a related audio interview here.

I still haven’t gotten around to reading any of Chabon’s books, despite hearing many good things about them, but, judging by this essay, he’s definitely an interesting thinker and talented writer.

WSJ RT 3: Quest for the Teenage DM

“An adventure in which your 7th-level columnist honors the passing of Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax by exploring the depths of his own early teen D&D years. Featuring hypotheses of attempted profundity and confessions of adolescent dorkery. Enter, brave adventurer, if you dare!”

Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal has a nice column on Gary Gygax. It sounds like Mr. Fry is about the same age I am, and started playing D&D at about the same time. And he too was a DM more often than a player. It sounds like we have a lot in common, in the area of D&D experiences. (I never colored the pictures in my Monster Manual though. Yikes!) He’s got a lot of good observations in this piece that I heartily agree with, particularly his note on Gygax’s vocabulary, and how it had “taught me two very interesting ideas at once: first, that a single thing could be described by many names; and second, that each of those names meant something subtly different.”

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e-mail clients for my Dad

My Dad has very serious vision problems, but he’s not completely blind. This means that he can use a normal computer, but he has a lot of problems doing so. We’ve got his machine set up so that he’s using very large fonts, and a high-contrast color scheme. The problem we frequently run into, though, is that most software developers don’t take these kind of things into account. We’ve found that developers are really haphazard about when and where they respect the default font size and color scheme in Windows.

We recently switched him from a dial-up ISP (Wal-Mart Connect) to Verizon DSL. The Wal-Mart Connect service used a proprietary client for e-mail and web browsing (basically, the old CompuServe 2000 client), and that actually worked pretty well for him.

When we switched to Verizon, I switched him over to using Outlook 2000, largely because it was already installed on his machine, and I was familiar with it. That turns out to have been a pretty bad idea. Outlook does a pretty poor job of respecting large font sizes and still leaving you with a usable interface. My Dad just hasn’t been able to get used to it, and there are a number of hurdles that make it hard for him to use.

I’ve been researching alternative e-mail clients for him. Basically, I’m looking for something with a fairly simple interface that’ll work well with a high-contrast, large font environment. I tried Scribe first, but that had a few interface quirks that made it unusable. I then tried Sylpheed, and that actually looked like it might be usable. I didn’t get too far with that though, since my Dad couldn’t remember where he’d written down his e-mail password, so I couldn’t actually get all the way through the setup. We’ve also been talking about just switching him over to Outlook Express, but I’m not sure that’ll be much better than Outlook. Hopefully, the next time I visit my parents, he’ll have found that password and we can play around some more.