Heading Upstream

Kindle, reading, research, opinion

"Amazon sold more Kindle books than physical books this Christmas - SlipperyBrick.com"

Hmmm.

"The Kindle was a bad idea, Jobs told the New York Times after yesterday's Macworld keynote. "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

I suppose it’s not shocking that someone with a vested interest in portable devices and snack-sized consumption would think so.

A little research on this subject produces interesting results. There’s clearly no consensus that “reading is dead”.  The data/facts can go either way. Further, even if only 40 percent of the population read a book, that means that somewhere around a 140 million people dedicate around 10 hours (my calculation based upon average reading speeds and book lengths) to following a single subject through to it’s conclusion. In my less generous moments – sitting in traffic for instance – I would be hard pressed to believe that many had that much focus.

Then again, there’s this:

“The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn’t read any, the usual number read was seven.”

Hmmm,  seven books means 70-hours of focused attention. I didn’t watch that many movies in all of 2009. That may even be true if you throw in TV movies.

Then again, there’s reading, and then there’s desire to read. Kindle’s may sell because we feel we should read more. We just know it’s a “good” thing (bit like taking vitamins), but there’s always an excuse handy that gets it the way. If that’s true, and the Kindle promises us a solution, I suspect that would be more valuable to Amazon than growth in actual book reading. The Kindle is in an interesting place: more convenient than books (if you can get past the buy-in price), and quickly becoming a status symbol in its own right. I can say that I haven’t read more books because of my Kindle purchase, but I have bought more books because of it.

Opinions: portable electronic book reading devices will largely replace physical books in 10-years; the Kindle will disappear in 3-5 years, but not before establishing a standard reading format allowing Amazon to ship books to any number of reading devices; lots more books will be purchased, but a smaller percentage will be read end to end.

I got White Christmas for Christmas

I’m psyched. I’m a sucker for nostalgia, and old movies feed that passion just like an old song, Christmas lights, or the smell of turkey dinner in the oven. One of my favorites is White Christmas. My wife got us tickets for a live performance at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle. Last time we were there we saw “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” – another classic.

Did you know that “nostalgia” has a history? It was a one time considered an ailment. Maybe so – but I think I’ll keep mine.

New Eyes

"A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying,

SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES

The other writes back triumphantly,

GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES"

From "The Art of Possibility", Rosamund and Benjamin Zander.

From "The Ego Tunnel"

"Phenomenal states are neurocomputational organs that make survival-relavant information globally avalaible within a window of presence." Much cooler than it might, at first blush, sound.

Hmmm, I'm distinctly uncomfortable...

I am uncomfortable, but not for any of the standard reasons. I suffer no illness. My shoes aren't too tight.

No, I've just read a book review in Time magazine -- Time. If the book were stock I'd buy it. What bothers me, is that I didn't see it coming. My online "community" missed it entirely. They're fired. Every one of them. It's time to start over.

There's an edge at stake.

Differences without meaningful distinctions

So I’ve been following this discussion regarding the distinctions between social networks and social graphs. Some say there is no difference, and others say there is and that one is the relationships themselves, and the other is a “map”, a representation of those relationships.

Jeez. In the six or seven years I’ve been in the business of connecting people online (not so artfully dodging the use of either phrase) I can’t recall a single instance where either phrase was used, and had the speaker chosen the other, would there have been any loss of meaning or understanding.

IMHO, you can use whatever phrase rolls better off your tongue and not have to worry about being misunderstood – at least for that reason.

Here’s another one: directories and social networks. Whitepages.com is a directory. It’ a big list of names and contact information. Facebook, as a social network, is supposedly much different. I think not.

Facebook, just like Whitepages, is a directory. It’s a directory of some of my friends. (Not all of my friends have fully integrated online social systems into their lifestye, and some of my FB “friends” aren’t friends at all.) The only difference is the activity that makes the list interesting, the exchanges that define that activity, the features coded to enable those exchanges, and the way each directory is monetized.

It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what activities are central to the directories mentioned, nor the exchanges that support those activities. The features in each make both readily apparent.

Perhaps we should call “useful” lists of names social directories.

Of course, clarifying subtle differences in meaning can be productive and often is. I suspect that when we find differences without distinctions what we’re really uncovering are conflicting emotional states.

Old Favorites

I hadn’t visited Librarything for a while. That was a shame. It remains one of my favorite subscription services. Look at the right hand column for a listing of some of my recent reads.

Couple of books worth mentioning

I do miss blogging. Just too busy. Still, I do enjoy sharing my reading list, so here are a few of my recent favs.

(BTW, the Amazon book plugin for Live Writer no longer works -- that sucks.)

 

 

Proust was a Neuroscientist. Lots of fun. Turned me on to several authors that really stretch your imagination.

 

 

How we Decide. Not a lot of new information, but presented well. Some of the stories/examples are told so well you have to wonder if Lehrer should be doing fiction.

Facebook and MySpace, what does being the "winner" mean?

"Clearly, the world eagerly embraced MySpace, but as the average person has adopted social networks, where they come to first is making connections with the people they already know.  "Facebook has done an excellent job of capitalising on that."

  Brett Brewer, co-founder of InterMix Media, the company that developed MySpace.

I've never been a fan of MySpace. That's not because I felt there was a problem with the service. I don't. Depending upon what you think it's for, it works just fine. And that's the point. What is it for?

If we view social networking as a single thing, then every social network competes with every other social network. (In the general sense that everything competes for attention, there's some truth to that. That observation, however, isn't particularly helpful, so I'm going to ignore it.) If we view social networking as a category we come to some different conclusions.

As I've endlessly repeated, all we're doing with the internet is creating reflections of ourselves. Yes, it's true that there are aspects of virtual space that offer creative potential as we articulate the many aspects of our individual and social selves, and you might even say there's an element of self-discovery in it, but that is essentially what is happening. Social networking is a reflection (more or less creative) of our social selves manifesting in virtual space.

I've used phrases such as "nothing more" and "all we're doing" as if the process were something other than profound. I don't mean to trivialize any aspect of it. Personally, I find it endlessly engaging.

But here's the point: surely, there's more to our social selves than the exchange of status information. What Facebook is winning is the battle for that aspect of our social selves associated with the exchange of status information with "friends". When I look at my life I see more types of engagement, more relationships, than are represented by the activities, by the exchange, offered by Facebook. 

This is far from a criticism of Facebook. Status updates, what I tend to think of as "what's up" networking, may well be the most pervasive form of engagement. And that is why I believe they have such huge adoption. Said otherwise, in the category of social networking, they are dominant in the element we might call "general status updates between friends" -- for lack of a more official sounding, possibly Latin, label. If MySpace wants to duke it out with them for dominance of that "niche" good luck to them. Personally, I think there's another niche with their name on it.

I believe there are more Democrats in America than Boy Scouts. Does that mean that the Democrats have beaten the Boy Scouts? If the Boy Scouts try to field a candidate for public office, I suspect the Democrats would have the stronger position between the two of them. Do the Dallas Cowboys, compete with the Boston Celtics? I have to admit that might be entertaining -- once or twice.

Obvious? Perhaps. But when I see major social networks adding status update services when it seems obvious that activity has little to do with the social need they are serving, I have to wonder if Facebook envy won't be the death of them -- or if they'll succeed despite themselves.

More on nostalgia

"Nostalgic time is that time-out-of-time of daydreaming and longing that jeopardizes one's timetables and work ethic, even when one is working on nostalgia".

Boym.