Pragmatic 42A: Hopefully They Don't Burn It Follow-up 1

This is Pragmatic Follow-Up Part A for Episode 42. Hopefully, they don't burn it. I'm John Chidjy and joining me is Vic Hudson. How's it going, Vic? I'm good, John. How are you? Very good. Pragmatic Follow-Up for this month is sponsored by Harvest. Harvest lets you start and stop a timer for any task you might be doing anywhere you might be doing it. Mobile devices, desktop, web browser and so on, so you can keep track of your time. If you're doing client work, it's handy to know what projects and tasks are taking your time. your time, but even better, you can use that information to create invoices directly through Harvest, which integrates easily with PayPal and Stripe. Check out Harvest at getharvestoroneword.com and sign up for a free 30-day trial and start tracking your time and invoicing others simply and painlessly. Once your 30-day trial is over and you've realized how great Harvest is to use, then use the coupon code "Pragmatic" at the checkout, and you'll also save 50% off your first month, and that also applies to any of their plans. hurry though because the offer expires on the 15th of January 2015. So be quick. Okay, we actually got 14 individual items of feedback which is, you know, reasonable. I know. So the e-reader topic which of course was our first fan voted, listener voted topic and well, obviously it turned out to be quite popular. So without further ado... Without further ado, via Twitter from LivingMarkov. A little bit of back and forth conversation with them on Twitter and they noted that whilst we did raise some good points during the episode, thank you, the suggestion was that we missed annotability, that is to say annotations, and marginalia, which is essentially, you know, annotations in the margin. And I guess my response to that is that I was specifically focusing on paperback novels. And I don't know about you, but I know you don't like, you have this thing about not dog ear tagging pages. I can only imagine what you must feel like if I start scrolling on your favourite paperback novel. Am I right? Yeah, I'm pretty against writing in the book too. Yeah, I figured you might be. And frankly, so am I, because I think that's kind of sacrilege or blasphemy or something. Anyway. Unless it's a textbook. Yeah, and that's exactly what I thought. I have a lot of allowances for that. Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, if you're sitting in a lecture theater and you own the textbook and that's a key thing, you own the textbook and you want to make some a handful of notes, then fine, go right ahead. That's OK, I suppose. But that really wasn't the use case that I was comparing. And besides which, a lot of people hire their textbooks, especially if you're at school. Most schools have got textbook hire schemes these days. And honestly, if you scroll anywhere on that book, you're not going to get your bond back. There's a little deposit that you pay at the beginning of the semester. And if you damage your book, you will not get it back or all of it back. But at least that's the way that used to work when I went to high school anyway. So anyway, we also got a bit of a side discussion about whether writing with a fountain pen was more efficient than typing. Anyway, he's he linked to guided me to an interesting podcast called Sources and Methods. There's a link in the show notes. It's interesting. So you have to listen to that. that if you want. It is interesting. I'll leave that one there though. So, interesting sort of a side discussion. Okay, this next one comes from Craig Reynolds via the feedback form. Now, he's from Perth and he's a long-time listener of the show. He mostly agreed with what we were talking about, about e-book technology being superior and sort of looking forward to a time when the e-reader is more like a loose leaf of maybe thick paper or cardboard, something like that. Obviously, you want to make sure it's durable, but beyond that, you know, and that eventually I can see that eventually happening, but it's going to be a while yet. Also, I agree about sharing e-readers, but a lot of people get personally attached to it, and I guess I kind of see that, but, you know, people, if they're already prepared to lend out a book, if the cost comes down enough, I can't see that being an issue with an e-reader. if they become so cheap and ubiquitous that there's multiple ones in the house. I don't necessarily see that as a big issue. With respect to physical bookstores, Craig's saying that he feels mostly that nostalgia when he goes into the bookstores. As I was saying in the episode, it's more about the fact that it's a memory of something. If you were to, again, as I said, just to reiterate, you were a child growing up and all you had were e-books and then they brought out bookstores, you'd walk in the bookstore and think it was the weirdest thing in the world. So nostalgia, yeah, that's fine. It won't last for that many generations. But anyway, he sort of added to that that he really only visits once or twice a year to a bookstore and only ever to browse and not to buy. And that's a very becoming a far more common thing, not just with books, yeah, across the board, pretty much, you know, because yeah, so people walk into a bricks and mortar store as they're becoming known, which I always find kind of hum-- kind of hilarious because, well, you know, it's just weird that, you know, the shops that we've been using our entire lives are now referred to as a bricks and mortar, you know, anything. It's a bit odd. It's just the shops, anyway. Okay. Yeah, it's just weird to me. But anyway, that's okay. So you go into a bricks and mortar store, you have a look around, you pick up the item that you're looking at physically, put it back on the shelf and then go and buy it on Amazon or you do in North America anyway. Pretty much. Yeah, exactly. It's funny, I do wonder how Amazon will do longer term if they end up killing all the bricks and mortar stores. But anyhow, I guess everyone will have to buy everything from an Apple store. The only two things left in the world, Apple stores and Amazon. Hmm, that's interesting. That's a weird world. That would be a very strange world, like a slider's kind of parallel world. But anyway, if that only makes sense if you watch that TV show, that sci-fi show called Sliders. That was a good show. Well, the first few seasons of it. Yeah, it kind of went a bit strange. It went off the rails there at the end. Yeah, I know, Cro-Mags and yeah. When the star wants to leave and you try and replace him at... Yeah, it doesn't work, does it? - Oh dear, it's a common thread. Okay, anyway, back on topic. - Only Doctor Who can pull that off. - Yes, that's true. That is very true. And we are not gonna talk about Doctor Who, thank you very much. Your attempt to derail me further will not succeed. Okay, maybe later. Excited about the Kindle Voyage, and that's available on the 1st of December, at least in North America it is. And anyway, so what he did, Craig also mentioned was that he will make DRM-free copies of every e-book he gets is just sort of an insurance policy against Amazon in case they do something stupid, you know, and decide to exert their... Well, they have been known to remove them. Yeah, exactly, and we'll get to that in a minute, because we had some more feedback about exactly that. There was a lady somewhere in Europe, they removed every single book she had. Goodness me, that's terrible. I didn't see that particular one, but I know that Amazon have been known to do it. It was a couple of years back. I think she had technically violated the EULA agreement because she was in one European nation and she was using the store from a different European nation. And I don't remember the respective nations. It was too long ago. But the bottom line is that they said she committed fraud by buying them from a different store because they weren't for sale in her store. Oh, God. Lovely. Man, all right. Well, if you ever forget a link to that, send it through and I'll add it to the show notes. Okay. So thank you, Craig, for that follow-up. Much appreciated. A long time fan of the show, Russ Newcomer, sent in a full page email. So yeah. Wow. His preferences, essentially going beyond just the weight of that, was sort of like the Kindle versus the iPad. but preferred the Kindle because it was more of a dedicated device over the iPad. So from a, from a lack of distraction or, you know, the alternative, the opposite of that, of course, the focus point of view, a single dedicated device is, you know, better to read on than an iPad which has dozens of apps on it, presumably and Twitter and iMessage and all that other stuff. So I kind of understand that sentiment and yeah, and that's fine. But I'd say that the Kindle sort of does is, is more than just a dedicated device just for reading books because you can, it does have a web browser. It's terrible, yes, but, and the experience is so bad I guess most people wouldn't use it, but yeah, it's more of a dedicated device, not because it can't be a more multipurpose device, but just because of its design doesn't lend itself to be much other than what it is, which is mainly an e-reader and less multipurpose like a tablet. So, I think that's more of a design consequence than a design intention, if that makes sense. Anyway, so Russ also noted that different printed ebooks can have different typefaces that add character and personality, which I completely agree with and that's true. And that different dimension to the reading experience, you know, it's sort of more difficult to get on a Kindle because there's a limited number of fonts available to you and some would argue they're not all that great and some of the discussion that, you know, recently a few people like Marco and Jason Snell have had posts about the different fonts available in the new Kindle Voyage that's about to come out shortly and the selection is really not that impressive. But you know it is possible to jailbreak your Kindle and you can make it compatible with any TrueType font that you might like if that's a big issue but then again of course you have to jailbreak it and do a whole bunch of stuff and void warranties and blah blah blah blah. So not sure really what else to say about that. It's an interesting point. I I personally don't get hung up on fonts very much, but then, you know, I also didn't get hung up on coffee until a few months ago, so who's there? Never say never. Anyway. Things change. Yeah, they do. They do. And I think it's good that people change and evolve because otherwise it'd be really boring. Anyway. All right. So, other points that he brought up, that Russ brought up, were some very good points about books not going away anytime soon. Another example of why, many countries don't have access to reliable electricity. So what good is an e-reader that needs to be charged when a book doesn't need charging? I didn't mention in the episode, absolutely completely fair point. He also points out that there could be a benefit in handing out e-readers with solar charging points and limited Wi-Fi access for remote villages to improve education in poorer countries. I thought that was an interesting idea. And I think that as the price of e-readers drops down, then that could be an option. I mean, there was that whole X, OLPC, one laptop per child thing, which is an ongoing thing. Well, you know, why not start with e-readers, you know, because I mean, they're a lot cheaper to make. But anyway, yeah, rather than going full, you know, full laptop. Anyway, also brought another interesting point I hadn't considered regarding certain religious texts that, you know, because of their beliefs, once they're printed, they can't be destroyed in any respectful way. Hence the creation and copying, destruction, overwriting of digital versions raises theological concerns for some people. Which I will confess is an angle that I never considered. But it's an interesting idea and something that I thought was worth mentioning. Okay, you also talked a little bit about lending e-books. Got some other files about that we'll get to in a minute. it. In Nebraska, apparently, you can check out books using Adobe Digital Editions, apparently, but it's a terrible, terrible experience. In order to do it, here are the steps he describes. Download the Adobe software on Windows and let it rootkit your PC. Oh, goody. I'm just reading what he said here. I haven't done this. I haven't verified this. Feel free to do so if you choose. Anyway, he does note that maybe things have changed. It's been a few years since he's looked at it and that's fine. But you know, for the minute, this is what he described and I didn't have time to go and check out all the details myself because it involved the W word and that was Windows. Anyway, create an Adobe account, link it to your library account, then you download a book and it's only for a short amount of time. And the reason he stated for this is because the library can only purchase one at a time licenses for books. So to maximize access, you can only check a book out for seven days. After that it would time bomb and not literally explode of course, just figuratively, and after seven days you would then lose access to your book. It would be gone and kaput. So read it while you can. Which I guess from a non-returns policy solves the non-return problem. Yeah. I mean from the library's point of view, right? Yeah. There's a lot of libraries here that are doing programs similar to that. Yeah. thing of DRM, you know, so and this is a big chunk of follow-up I got from a long time fan of the show, Nick Radcliffe, and I'm really terrible pronouncing the name of his company, it's Stochastic Solutions. Oh God, I think I mangled it. Anyway, that's in Edinburgh. Now, he sort of pointed out that I did not mention DRM at all, and I didn't during the episode. The reason that I didn't is because I see DRM as a enormous issue. And when I say issue, you know, it's a multifaceted issue. It's not just about e-readers and not all books you download will have DRM in them. So, you know, it's like I'm trying to compare the physical and convenience benefits. But in any case, I think there is probably enough interest to do an episode solely dedicated to DRM. But I also think in fairness to Nick, that he provided so much feedback. I think we back and forth on email for about four or five times on this specific issue during the week, during the last few weeks, and I think it's only fair that I cover some of the issues that he raised. So I guess fundamentally I'm not denying the DRM is a big deal. I do think it's a huge deal. And honestly, at some point I will look at that separately as a topic, I think. Anyway, so I'll be adding that to the topic lists and people can vote on it. I think it'd be a good topic. Yeah, so do I. So I think we will do that at some point, just not now. But anyway, so beyond DRM, Nick also mentioned some of Amazon's questionable business practices with unpurchasing of content and removing it from other people's Kindles post-purchase like you were talking about for a different variety of reasons and I completely agree yes that's *******. Let's not forget, you know, it's like honestly, how do I put this? you buy a paper book, unless you break into that person's house, you can't really remotely remove it. And I guess that's the point, isn't it? So, you know, just because you have that leverage like a kill switch of sorts or a remote remove switch, just because you have that doesn't mean that, you know, you can use it or that you should use it. So, and so far as Amazon being the bad guys, yeah, let's be honest, Google did the same thing in 2010. Yeah, with a few apps if I remember correctly using their remote kill switch. Yeah, and this is not just them. I think Adobe's done it. I wouldn't be surprised. I didn't look into every single possible individual or anything like that, or company, sorry, I should say, to figure out who had and who hadn't done it. But suffice to say, you know, people, other companies have done this. Yeah, and they all justify it by using the term license versus purchase and buy and own Yes And I've always, my big issue with that is just that the button doesn't say license rent It says buy when you click it So, I feel like they're misrepresenting the storefront there I think that there's probably legitimate reasons for doing what they've done in some cases The problem is once you have access to the button it becomes a responsibility not to use it to only use it when it is truly justified and that's where everything gets all grey Ultimately though it comes back to, well for me anyway, it comes back to the fact that when you actually sign up to buy an ebook on a platform in their terms and conditions there's usually a set of rules saying that you can't do things like you can't legally back them up, you can't strip the DRM off them and all that sort of thing Yeah, and yes that's true and some platforms are more open than others. So it's not a universal truth. But anyway, maybe that's something we'll cover more in the DRM episode. But anyway, so I also raised the issue that Amazon and Apple can track your purchases and they know what you're reading and when you're reading it. Well, the truth is yes, they could and maybe they do. But, you know, first of all, why is that such a big deal? I mean, I don't get it, why that matters. matters. I mean, if it's all about target advertising and you're against that, then stop using Google completely. Yeah. You know, but in any case, most people I think don't care about that. And if they do, they're not gonna be reading ebooks. I'll be sticking with physical books. And I guess maybe that's his point. But in any case, the other issue, I guess I said that was an A, the B is that, you know, if they're really keen, they can already do that when you go and buy a physical book. I can't tell when you open the pages and flip them. Sure, that's true. But what they can do is they can tell what books you buy, if you use something, anything, anything other than cash, they can trace it. You know, and of course, they'll give you the loyalty cards and the loyalty cards are an even easier way of tracking that you don't have to negotiate with credit card companies or anything like that. No, no, no. Yeah. You know, store cards are store cards for tracking purchases and that's the way to track everything regardless of payment method. Exactly. And all you gotta do is read the terms and conditions and you sign up for these cards. And that's, there's no mystery there. It's no revel... no, it shouldn't be a revelation to anybody, but anyway, never mind. So as I said, if you're paranoid about that sort of thing, yeah, stick with... stick with paper books, because I mean, it... and pay with cash, I guess. But anyhow. So... right. So this is I was thinking that, you know... Sorry, I just... I just guess I just want to wrap up on Nick's feedback because there was quite a lot of it but there's a great quote from his fourth email that I want to read verbatim. "I think not even to discuss DRM is like endorsing some despotic state as a great holiday destination without mentioning human rights abuses or risk of incarceration or whatever." So I see what he's saying. Ultimately, yes, DRM is an issue that affects ebooks. The issues that Nick raised are more about the companies supplying the ebooks on their platform and locking you into them when the information isn't platform dependent. Text, like a WAV file or an MP3 file, is an open standard of sorts. It's easily playable and readable on any platform, any device you want to mention. The problem is the DRM is used to protect the author or the content creator, if you want to talk about it like that. It seems weird, but anyway. It's being used unfairly by the intermediary company as leverage, where previously they never had that sort of leverage. So, and again, I come back to this thing, just because the company has the power to exercise that leverage doesn't mean that they should exercise it. So is it an issue? Yes. Is it a big issue? Well, I'd suggest it isn't. And the reason I say this is, most people only read a book once. You know, maybe they'll read their favorite book two or three times, but that's the exception rather than the rule. And yeah, companies do go out of business. Yes, yes they do. Devices also die. Rechargeable batteries die after a long enough period of time passes. None of those failure mechanisms affect written books. So if your intention is to buy and keep control of all your books for the longest possible time with the minimal risk of interference by an intermediary publisher like Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, whoever it might be, then yes, stick with paper. But I think that the vast majority of people don't see these things as big issues. And that's the truth. I mean, if it's an issue for you, certainly take that into consideration. And I think that's really what Nick was getting at. So, uh, Nick, really do appreciate your feedback. Thank you so much for that. Um, and, uh, I promise that we will look at DRM in the future on the show. Okay. There's more. Jeff Hatz via Twitter sent through a link to an article in the New York times called "The Weight of Memory". Now this, I mean, I cannot believe, I couldn't believe my eyes when I'm reading this. I mean, thank you so much, Jeff, for sending this through. It's brilliant. So this article, Professor John D. Oh, man, this is going to be so funny. Khabiah Tawiks, the link's in the show notes, from the UFC, Berkeley, pointed out that the charge held by memory would have a physical mass, as in flash memory. This was to refute my statement that e-readers would always weigh the same amount irrespective of how much was stored on it or how long the e-books were. Well, the professor points out that when you trap electrons in flash memory, which I've talked about flash previously on Die Pages playing Die Weiss. Oh, God, I missed one out there. Anyway, I think it was episode 12 of the show. Anyway, the trapped electrons will actually have a physical mass, which I did realize, and that's fine. But we're talking about 10 to the power of negative 18 grams. So that's like an atogram or whatever the heck that is. It's like not even pico, it's not even femto. It's even it's less femto than femto. So, yo, anyway, goodness, yeah, but technically it is measurable, maybe, if you had accurate enough scales. So, yes, thank you, Jeff. How many scales are there that could measure that? I don't know. I don't even know if it is possible to actually measure that accurately, I think, but anyway. Oh, my goodness. Michael Fessler via the feedback form sent through some interesting links as well regarding written books, sorry, paper books versus e-books in terms of learning and suggested that the kinetic feedback and visual memory of your position in a book is very valuable information for your memory in terms of pacing of a storyline or information. So, the placement of passengers and images on every page in a book isn't always replicated in the e-book version. You know, it should be, but often they're lazy. And I'll just translate the text and just throw it in there and say, there's your e-book, give me money. Right? Yeah. Now, people like, for example, like John Syracuse, when he does his unbelievably long reviews, awesome, but unbelievably long reviews of OS X. You know, when he does that, he takes great care and attention to get them just right in terms of, you know, images and image positions and so on and so forth. Not everyone is so careful. So it's an interesting point is there are plenty of ebooks out there that lose some of that in the translation, but it also affects the pacing and our memory of the pacing, our recollection of the pacing. So anyway, Michael sent through a link to a study by Norway's, I think it's Stavanger University, that was actually done this year. And 50 readers that were given the same short story and then half of them read, it was a 28 page short story. So half of them read that on a Kindle, the other half on a paperback. Now, after they had read the book, readers were then tested on all the aspects of the story, including objects, characters, settings, and of course, you know, a sequence of events in the book. Now, the Kindle readers performed significantly worse on plot reconstruction. In other words, interesting. Yeah. Interesting. Hey, when they were asked to place 14 events in the correct sequence of events that occurred in the book, all the other measures were more or less comparable, statistically insignificant, if you will, but that the pacing was all off. So, it tends to suggest that when people are reading something digitally, they lose some of the dimension of the pages in the left and the right hand to gauge their position in the narrative as they progress through the book. And that makes sequencing the events after the fact more difficult. I found that that's absolutely fascinating. So, thank you so much for drawing my attention to that. There's a link in the show notes. Absolutely fascinating. Now, ultimately though, and you know, because the title of the show is what it is, I'm not sure how compelling that is as an argument in order to stick with printed books, you know, given all of the other advantages of e-readers, but it's still very interesting. So, you know, because if I'm reading a con, if I'm reading a book and I get all most of the facts correct, but maybe they're not in in the correct sequence, some would argue that that's still good enough, especially if you're using it for for learning or tutoring purposes. You know, the content is what matters more so than the sequence necessarily. But in any case, especially if you're learning subjects like science or mathematics or whatever. Anyway, OK. So Michael goes on to say that he uses a Kindle Paperwhite and he has a couple of hundred books on it, but the e-ink is very sluggish and the touch interface is very slow. And browsing through an e-book collection or searching for something is very, very tedious. At least he finds it very tedious. And he noticed that a number of, once the number of e-books got very large, let's say three dozen or so, he wasn't specific, but about three dozen or so based on my reading between the lines of what he wrote, the Kindle software becomes very slow and it can take anywhere between 30 and 45 seconds to add or remove an e-book from his collection, which is quite significant. And when he used an iPad, it was so much faster in terms of speed, changing pages, navigating through the e-book collections and modifying the collections and so on, that that was far more preferable. Bottom line though, ultimately, I guess my take on that comment is that how often do you add and remove an e-book? How often do you even change the page relative to the ease of reading and the battery life savings and the weight savings of using a Kindle. - Yeah. - And frankly, it's only really a matter of time before the technology improves on the Kindles to the point at which they do, they are much faster. They have more memory, faster CPUs, you know, page refresh times are reduced, all of those things. It's already starting to happen. - Yeah, they've already came a long way since the first Kindles came out. - Absolutely. I mean, but yeah, for now though, and in those aspects at least, I do get the point and it is an interesting point. you know, that on the iPad or a tablet like the Kindle Fire, you know, would be faster in those respects. Yes. But I think the most, the more important metric to consider, you know, again, pragmatically is that it's really not a deal breaker for the majority of people. Still interesting. Okay. Andre Chichak, I think it is via Twitter. He's from Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. That's my home away from home. Well, it's close enough anyway to Calgary, close enough, three and a bit hours for our drive North. Close enough. And he has a correction to you, Vic. OK. Chapters. I said, oh, is Chapters still open? Well, apparently Chapters is alive and well. It's a Canadian bookstore. And that's when I go, "Ugh, silly me." Because my brain just latched onto the first bookstore that I went into when I lived in North America. And of course, I lived most of my time in Calgary. And then I went to a Chapters and I thought it was a North American wide store. Clearly, I was mistaken. And when I was living in the US for a few months, I never visited a bookstore. I know, shame on me, but still, that's the truth. I should have said Barnes & Noble, something like that. Yeah, we still get those. Yeah, exactly. A few of them. So, I'll just go shrug, whoops, and Andre, thank you very much for the correction. Okay, Karen Paradis, I don't know, anyway, Karen via Twitter sent through a link to Overdrive, which is a series of apps/service for the Kindle, and that allows users to borrow books from various libraries in the US. So yes, it seems like the whole borrowing thing is happening. I sort of talked about this previously in Nebraska, with previously in the follow up, but the truth is that there is an increasing movement for that and there's a link in the show notes that if you want to go and check that out. So it looked interesting, but obviously I couldn't do much testing of that since I'm not in the US, but many listeners are, so that could be worth looking into if you're not already aware of it, 'cause obviously I wasn't. And again, a fan of the show, Tristan Lostra, has pointed out that libraries are still a thing. So on Twitter, he pointed out that yes, in his hometown, Toowoomba, well, hometown where he lives anyway, of Toowoomba, which is just up on the range out west of Brisbane, they're in the midst of building a brand new library. So I never said they weren't gonna build new libraries. I just said they'd be consolidating the older ones as time went on. I mean, it could take decades. I guess maybe I wasn't specific about my anticipated time frame, but you know, I honestly think that it's going to be, it's going to be a while, but I still think it's inevitable. But in the meantime, enjoy the new library. And frankly, Caboolture had a new library built three years ago. So, you know, not just, not just Toowoomba. Thanks to everybody who sent in a follow up, much appreciated. (laughs)