Unless you’re one of those people who doesn’t really pay attention to technology, and if you are, you probably aren’t going to be reading this, you’re aware that Amazon has an electronic book reading device called the Kindle. If you happen to be living north of the 49th parallel (give-or-take) and within a particular band of longitude, you will also be aware that this device is now available in Canada. We got ours last week.

For this review, I’m not going to post any pictures. I’m giving the word full reign in honor of what the Kindle is supposed to stand for. It’s a “Book Reading Device” on which, the printed word is supposed to be conveyed to the reader. As an electronic device, there are a few logistical hurdles that must be overcome. Amazon have provided a couple of means of doing that as well as what must be a bunch of resources to actually convert these books into an easily-digestible format for you to enjoy.

The first of these delivery mechanisms is wireless. This is no mere wifi, but a 3G cellular radio that should operate just about everywhere in the western world. Amazon has gone to some mysterious lengths to forge deals with the owners of these airwaves so you can buy and download books wherever you happen to be. This is a powerful concept and fairly unique. As far as I know, they are the only company to have forged these blood-pacts with otherwise unapproachable broadcast entities to create something they’ve called “Whispernet”. You don’t even get to know which wireless provider you’re piggybacking on. It just connects when you activate the wireless function on the device.

I’ve purchased a few books through Amazon now and it’s a seamless mechanism. You can browse online on kindle.com from your computer or on the Kindle itself. When you buy a book on your computer, you can select a “send to this device” option and the book magically appears in your list the next time you connect to Whispernet on your Kindle. Magical.

The other, more pedestrian means of getting content onto your Kindle is via good ol’ USB cable. Or USB cable to proprietary Amazon pluglet. Why they chose to create yet another incompatible device connector I cannot fathom. If the white cable is any indication, it’s because they wanted to be somewhat “Apple-ey”. They certainly nailed the packaging and unpacking experience, though it certainly has a distinctive “Amazon feel” to it with the pull-tabs on the cardboard boxes. In any case, USB transfer is pretty straightforward. Just dump your mobi-formatted (and now, as of version 2.3 of the Kindle OS, PDFs!) eBooks into the Documents directory on the Kindle and they’ll show up in your list.

But you may not like what you see there. And now I have to get to the dark part of this review. Not all ebooks are made equal. If you’re downloading books from various sources online and they deliver them as a mobi book it may not be formatted optimally for the Kindle and may look funny, have poor metadata or no table of contents. Worse, if you’re unlucky enough to get something in an HTML, RTF, or plain-text document, you’ll have to convert it to mobi format yourself. There are several tools to help you do this, Calibre being the one I’ve used most so far, but it is a fiddly process, often with several iterations of conversion and checking, usually with mediocre results. If the book you’re trying to get into your Kindle is available on the Kindle store, you might want to save yourself the possible bad experience of messing around with document converters and buy the thing on their site. It’ll look good and be optimally-formatted. [ed. Gutenberg books are good]

Which brings me to the important part of this review. What is it like to read a book on this thing? After a week of carrying the Kindle around with me and reading my first purchased book (the mediocre, The Professional by Robert B. Parker) I can say that it is a very pleasant experience. The Kindle feels nice to hold, even in the leather book-like cover available as an optional extra. It has a heft to it that is somewhat more than a paperback, but it feels more comfortable than reading a hard-cover. Text is very legible on the reflective screen and you have the option of several font sizes to choose from.

My only real complaint is that there isn’t enough space for your thumbs to rest. The keyboard area at the bottom of the Kindle is easy to press buttons on. The 5-way navigation button on the right eats up further real-state your thumb could be coasting on. The large Next page buttons right in the middle of the device are comfortable resting places, but you might accidentally skip ahead. This is a fairly minor complaint though and for the most part, you don’t have to think about it.

Ok, I’ve thought of another complaint. There are nearly 70,000 missing books from the Canadian Kindle catalog. I’m not sure why they’re missing. If it’s some publishing agreements the apparently quite powerful Canadian publishing houses have or if it’s a matter of language. Looking up Iain M. Banks’ Matter I see it’s not available in Canada. I wonder if it’s because the Canadian edition used the UK text and it was “translated” for U.S. readers? In any case, I am confident it will get here and in the mean-time, there are plenty of other books to choose from. I’m currently reading the last of the “back-catalog” of Culture novels, The Algebraist.

If you’re looking for stuff to read, check out dria’s post about Project Gutenberg. I plan on signing up for at least a few books this year.

“Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem” (Amir D. Azcel, Amir D. Aczel)

I read this on the flight into San Francisco yesterday. It’s been awhile since I’ve read a math story (I last read, “The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity” (Amir D. Aczel)). Amir D. Aczel is a great writer who’s able to distill some complex topics in an understandable and entertaining way. It turns out, the world of pure math is an interesting place, full of vibrant characters.

Fermat’s Last Theorem covers the entire history of math from the Babylonian era up to the present when Andrew Wiles broke the puzzle in 1993. The book gives an overview of the important theories that made up the eventual proof and describes the various sets of numbers used (rational, irrational, complex). It was a fun read and like the last book of Aczel’s I read, it made me want to learn some more math. It’s fascinating stuff.

Now I’ll have to lug the overlarge copy of Black Man I brought with me for the flight home.

Over the holidays, I read Charles Stross‘ Glasshouse and thoroughly enjoyed it. It continues to amaze me that Stross can write such interesting science fiction about acceleration and the singularity and that each can be so different. Glasshouse takes place around 700 years in the future in the “post-human” era. Humans have been through a singularity which happened sometime around 2050 and are able to modify themselves and store backups in case they die so they can be restored. It’s a bit similar to Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, in the sense that humans have become the product of their memories and the physical form is a mere shell. The comparison stops there, though as Stross’ post-humans have some other technologies which shape their universe and make it quite different and stranger than the noir earth of Altered Carbon.

Without spoiling too much, the book’s protagonist awakes from a memory wipe – a surgical procedure to erase painful or unwanted memories – as a near blank slate with a mysterious agenda. He emerges in a rehab facility for other patients of memory surgery somewhat guarded and fearful of some unseen threat. This serves as a bit of foreshadowing that something’s not quite right, or that there are some residual memories guiding him, or he’s a paranoid nut-case. We learn more about the threat later, and that unfolding turns out to be pretty interesting. It must have proved an interesting challenge as well, to write about someone with no real memories and how to give them the necessary context for what amounts to a mystery inside this futuristic, non-terrestrial “world”, er… space… whatever.

Eventually, our hero signs up for a simulation to escape the people who appear to be tracking him. The experiment takes place in a closed polity and will be sealed for three years once it’s started. The kicker is that the experiment is a simulation of “dark ages” society; pre-singularity humans living in an earth-like environment sometime between 1990 and 2010, i.e., “now”.

The trick Stross used to put us in the “dark ages” is since every bit of data we now create is encrypted (“for no apparent reason”) and locked away in proprietary formats, much of what we created was lost. Still more data was lost due to magnetic tape storage degradation. He has a funny way of putting it that comes across as “closed source killed our databarn” which made me chuckle. “Ironically, we know a lot more about their culture around the beginning of the dark age, around the old-style year 1950 than about the end of the dark age around 2040,” one of the experimenters explains to the group during their induction.

What ensues is a great bit of paranoia set in a parody of current-day society that is something like a mix of 1950’s sitcom living mixed with a massively multiplayer role-playing game with “zombie” sims. They’re governed by a point-system designed to encourage suitable behavior in people used to not having to do anything for themselves because their machinery, now unavailable to them, used to do it all for them. It’s funny and entertaining and needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong.

That’s enough spoilage. It’s an entertaining book that has some really interesting ideas packed into it. The future-version of “identity theft” is way worse than ours and replaces murder as the worst crime imaginable. I’m looking forward to reading Halting State in the near future.

This week I’ve been frittering through Accelerando by Charles Stross. It’s a great book, and I’m genuinely bummed that I’m going to be finished it soon. Like, tomorrow sometime in the midafternoon probably somewhere over Nebraska. Stross has vaulted himself into my shortlist of science fiction writers with the likes of Vernor Vinge and Richard Morgan. Also, the man writes a great blog. How does he do it?

This week’s been a bit of a whirlwind. I’ve been hanging out in Silicon Valley experiencing first-hand the onslaught of the singularity. It’s not difficult to imagine that we’re approaching a technological asymptote while hanging out here, watching Googlers speeding by on their community motor-scooters, borg-like humans conf-conversing with their hive-mind over bluetooth headsets while the non-uplifted struggle to keep up. Connectivity is everywhere (Google Wi-Fi doesn’t work very well yet, but it will). Every coffee shop and eatery presents a different hot-spot, competing for your laptop’s attention. Handheld computers are roughly equivalent to the most advanced desktop computers of a decade past. In turn, an unimaginable computing resource ten years before that. Storage is now more easily measured in terabytes per household instead of gigabytes. The storage capacity of a single hard-drive easily outstripping the capacity of a single house’s volume if filled with books.

And on it goes… Moore’s Law, if unchecked, will bring us unimaginable computing powers. Mere darwinian evolution is about to be made obsolete. It already is. It was…

Technorati Tags: General, Books

14:52 < phik> now that I eat two meals a day, I’m a lot more regular
14:52 < phik> I just thought you should know that

thanks, phik!

I finished a good book a little while ago: Greg Bear’s Eon. It’s an older book – by science fiction standards – from the mid-eighties but it held up really well. I think Shaver mentioned it in channel one day and I glommed onto it with my vise-like mind, its tendrils constantly questing for new material to digest. Do tendrils digest? Mine do! Anyway, it’s about a mysterious planetoid-like spaceship that inserts itself into earth orbit and is turned into a research station by the humans of the day. It takes place in the cold war and tensions between the US and Soviets are extremely high. Of course, the original inhabitants of “the Stone” as the americans call it make an appearance and all manner of amazing things ensue.

Now I’ve moved onto Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World which is proving to be a lot more difficult to pin down. I was sold on it as a cyberpunk noir detective story but the end-product is a lot more unusual than that. There are elements of this in it, along with a strong component of fantasy that makes me wonder if what I’m reading is what I think it is. I’ll know more when I’m closer to the end. So far it’s been interesting and amusing albeit lacking in a degree of grit. For that, I recommend Richard Morgan’s “Kovacs” stories.

“Altered Carbon” (Richard Morgan)

“Broken Angels” (Richard Morgan)

“Woken Furies” (Richard Morgan)

I’m at work, in my cube and I can’t connect to the ‘net through my laptop. Oh, sure, I can use this simulacrum of connectivity, but it feels weird, heightens my paranoia and limits my enjoyment. The reason for this lack of connectivity is that I made some modifications to my Airport last night and forgot to re-enable the dialup options. In other words, I n3wbed myself.

One of my favourite sci-fi authors, Vernor Vinge has an essay on The Singularity where he discusses his thoughts on the impending, technological (or possibly biological) cataclysm that will envelop our planet. It could be the ravings of a crackpot, or he might be onto something.

First, a definition.

a technological singularity is a predicted point in the development of a civilization at which technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend or predict. The Singularity can more specifically refer to the advent of smarter-than-human intelligence, and the cascading technological progress assumed to follow. Whether a singularity will actually occur is a matter of debate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

It’s an interesting read and Vinge covers lots of the angles to this. I still tend to believe that it’s unlikely to happen — the idea of a trans-human intelligence just popping into existence on a Pentium-class machine (or even a cluster of them) is fairly ludicrous, having seen what’s required to keep one from crashing with a dumb operating system. Augmenting our own intelligence gradually through computer interfacing is inevitable and ongoing.

My own intelligence feels limited today. I miss my internets.

boolean is currently listening to: The Wretched by Nine Inch Nails from the album “The Fragile”

This book is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment works of the brain. It’s not a textbook—more of a buffet, really. Each hack is one probe into the operation of the brain, one small demonstration. By seeing how the brain responds, we pick up traces of the structures present and the design decision made, learning a little bit more about how the brain is put together.

from the preface of the book Mind Hacks, O’Reilly Press

I just started reading the above on my safari account. Looks like an interesting book which I was twigged onto this weekend after hearing the author talk on CBC’s “Quirks and Quarks“. When I first saw the title on O’Reilly’s site, I figured it was a gimmicky, pop-science excursion into the workings of the human mind — and it is! The author, Dr. Tom Stafford sounded interesting enough to give it some further reading.

I learned something else this weekend: my PowerBook performs extremely well as a video output device. The S-Video port presents several different resolutions for output, including a very nice 854×480 interlaced display with overscan. The result is a rock-solid., full-screen experience for video output. I watched several episodes of Arrested Development, some Samurai Champloo and a Battlestar Galactica episode and I daresay, the output looks better than converting those high-quality Xvid encodes to DVD through iDVD. Sound is provided by the S/PDIF connector on my Emagic EMI6|2m.

Here are some other webcomics for your reading pleasure:

• bunny,
• Real Life,
• Pokey The Penguin,
• H4×0r Economist, and of course,
• Penny Arcade