booktwo.org

So, I just finished reading a novel on my phone. Stepping up to the plate, I downloaded Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which is a blast, by the way) from booksinmyphone.com and gave it a go.

And you know what? It was great. It was easy to read. It didn’t strain my eyes. It slipped into my pocket when I changed tube trains and it jumped straight back to the right place when I slid it open again. Alex has a few good points on problems with booksinmyphone’s interface, but overall the experience was a joy. I was done in a couple of days - slightly above average for me.

I recently had a go at reading Charles Stross’ Accelerando in the ebook version - a similarly great, near-future novel - and gave up about half way and tracked down a paper copy. And in hindsight, the reason was obvious: I was reading it off a laptop. That’s miserable. Put it on a phone, and it immediately becomes wieldable.

My phone is a Nokia N95. It fits in the hand, but has a nice big screen (pictured right, courtesy, again, of Alex) - about 40mm x 55mm. Comparing that to the 100mm x 160mm block of text you get on the average B-Format paperback page means you get about a third of the line length, and a third of the page height. But once again - it really didn’t seem to affect my reading. I even found myself reading it in bed, even when I’d only started out of necessity when I found myself on a bus without a book.

Does that imply it was better? Well, I’m not going to go that far - yet. My paper books don’t run out of batteries, for starters, and the platform is still suffering from format fatigue (Mobipocket has the best range, but they’re still priced too high, and the free stuff doesn’t cut it), but I’ll definitely be reading more this way. And with the recent news that cellphone novels - books not only read but written on mobiles - are beating out the bestsellers in Japan, I’m not the only one.

So, it’s finally here, and damn, it’s still ugly. Really, really ugly. Go watch the video demos (short one at the top, longer one lower down). But it has some things going for it.

There are a lot of touches I really like, like easy ordering of low-price ebooks direct from Amazon without having to be near a computer. Online back-up of your books is very smart - one customer losing their whole library after dropping one of these in the bath would pretty much kill it. The big page-turner paddles on the side will be good for peoples’ frequently contorted, curled-up-on-the-sofa reading positions, and the dog-ear bookmark is nice and friendly, although the purists will probably hate it.

But there’s a lot not to like, even beyond the let’s-party-like-it’s-1989 styling. E-ink just still isn’t good enough: there’s the ‘black flash’ as you turn the page, and the snail-like refresh speed means they’ve had to put in that scroll-wheel barometer thing in the side, which is not good. The whole feeds thing is a misnomer: you have to pick ‘your feeds’ from an Amazon-approved list (currently numbering 308), which is great if you just want Boing Boing and the NYT, but pretty rubbish if your tastes are more eclectic - and you don’t want to pay 99 cents for the privilege (is that a one-off or a subscription?). And the killer for me is that you can only read your own documents by emailing them to Amazon, who’ll convert them and add them to the Kindle ‘for a small fee’. Whoa. That’s just stupid. It’s also such a waste of the rather clever connectivity hardware they’ve packed in there.

Still, Amazon aren’t making this for me - they’re making it for regular, heavy readers, who are book- and not computer-focussed, which is an excellent decision - they will certainly please more people - and explains the video endorsements from Toni Morrison, James Patterson and others. It’s not for techies. We’ll see if the $400 price tag is attractive to non-techies.

It is, without doubt, the best ebook reader out there because it has the iTunes-like connection to all the books you can get, built in. That’s the USP. But I still don’t think we’re going to see mass ebook take-up any time soon, not until e-ink improves and we sort out a format that can move seamlessly between different devices, like mp3. If I can read it on this, I should be able to read it on my laptop, phone and even TV too.

And could someone please explain why they used ‘profligate’ (adj. utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated; thoroughly dissolute, recklessly prodigal or extravagant.) as their example word from the dictionary? Reminds me of this story.

UPDATE: For more on the Kindle, you could do worse than Buzzfeed’s roundup.

Some people are going to hate me for this, but I think it’s great: The 250GB Book.

I did agonise over cutting up the book. I did reject several others in the charity shop because they were too nice to do it too, even if they were just going to rot on the shelf anyway. I did cut myself several times. Still.

I also recently ordered one of these, and I’m waiting for it to arrive. Any suggestions as to what I should do with it when it does?

Despite my repeated entreaties, no one bought me a ticket for O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference, on this week. It looks like a lot of interesting people, talking about important stuff.

Pleased to see that Manolis Kelaidis’ bluebook project, which I wrote about last year, has made an impactful appearance, and I suspect there’s a lot of similarly cool stuff being discussed.

Places to find out more: there’s the Conference blog, Andrea Laue’s jusTaText seems to be on the ball, as does Jeff Gomez’s Print is Dead, and there’s always Jeremy’s excited Twitter. If you know others, do let me know.

In the meantime, I’ll be over at London Lit Plus…

Back in the summer, I visited the Royal College of Art’s 2006 Summer Show (a longer review of which can be found over at Tom Coates’ plasticbag.org). One project that caught my eye was Manolis Kelaidis’ blueBook project, part of the Industrial Design Engineering strand. Manolis was kind enough to send me some more material relating to the project.

As digital media in the form of portable devices, touch-screens and pervasive wireless networks offer new possibilities for interaction, the traditional book starts to look rather featureless when compared to electronic versions. But the traditional book has many advantages too - not least the comfort of tradition itself. The blueBook aims to find a compromise between these two objects, between the digital and the physical.

The blueBook created at the RCA and pictured here is a traditional book over-printed with conductive ink. This conductive ink creates hyperlinks on the page which, when touched by the reader, activates a processor concealed in the cover of the book. This processor then connects via bluetooth to a nearby computer, triggering different actions.

For example, a children’s book on animals might activate sounds and videos on a screen when the printed picture of the animal is touched. Reference books may contain inline glossaries linked to Wikipedia or Google. Keywords in novels trigger incidental music. Buttons on academic papers connect to discussion forums or send feedback to the author.

Admittedly, most of these tasks are or can be done entirely in software by true ebooks, negating the (currently) high costs of printing in conductive ink and binding circuitry and processors into a physical book. But the blueBook does provide a bridge - for children, for the elderly, for those less comfortable with new technology - to ease the transition from the printed to the digitised book. Such devices are going to be much in demand, and the cost of their production is dropping rapidly.

Manolis has now graduated and is looking into ways to develop and commercialise the book, and tells me he has been talking to major publishers who seem very interested in the idea. He is also working on a tentative business plan for a company that would develop and design such books. However, it looks like that mass-production could take some time so the next stage is likely to be a short-run, specific-application implementation of the technology. We look forward to seeing where this goes.

Nicholas Evans was the blueBook’s graphic designer and it was produced by Book Works. You can see more images in the booktwo Flickr stream. Manolis Kelaidis can be contacted at manokel at gmail.com.