Kindle? Not Enough Sparks…

I finally bought a Kindle the other day after finding that they were back in stock at Amazon.com after the Christmas rush.

I was ordering books for a forthcoming trip to Italy, and after putting a couple of high quality Blue Guides into the basket I realised I needed another, less cultured and more practical guide, so looked at the Lonely Planet.

As much as I dislike this series, they are useful for when you need to know about rail connections rather than obscure architectural trivia.

However, just as I was grimacing at the thought of having to lug this 1,000 page monster around when I’d only be checking it for details a few times, I noticed a Kindle version was being offered alongside the traditional book, and at a slightly reduced price.

A quick check revealed that the Kindle was in stock, and suddenly I envisioned the weighty tome being transformed into a small slim grey slab, which could also be stuffed with other documents, the ones I usually print out and staple together. A practical solution, even though I realised I would most likely never be reading novels from the electronic newcomer.

The Kindle arrived a few days later, and now, after a couple of weeks of use (or rather, non-use), I can say that its purchase was a mistake.

The moment I saw it I knew that this device was not going to be as revered and respected as my iPhone 4 or Nikon D7000.

The Kindle is just a very limited device in a medium which is clearly still in its infancy. Sure, its promise and premise are startling, and has potentially the same appeal as the iPod first had : you could have your entire collection with you at all times.

With the iPod, however, you still retain your earlier medium. Your entire CD collection gets processed and stuffed into the device, leaving you with both, the mobile lower quality version, and the full files on your CDs for blasting out on your fancy hifi.

The Kindle is different, and crucially so. That large book collection you’ve been building up over the last few decades isn’t going to appear on your eBook reader, not unless you’re prepared to buy them all again in digital form.

It’s rather like the shafting we all got in the vinyl to CD switchover back in the 80′s.

Perhaps some richer folk don’t mind that, and obviously it is they who are the main target for the device : kids brought up in the digital age wouldn’t be affected, but they don’t read books anyway.

Aside from that, which in itself is something of a deal-breaker, we come to the actual reading experience. The screen is fine, and easy on the eyes. The navigation, however, is horrendous. Clunky and unintuitive, all users of iPhones will constantly find themselves touching the screen, somehow hoping that it has suddenly become touch responsive in order to obviate the awful clickfest that ensues any time you want to locate something within your tome.

Maybe for novels this wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but for reference materials it is annoying.

A few days ago I discovered that Kindle has an app for the iPhone which I dutifully installed and found I could download and read all of my purchased eBooks in style.

What a difference, even though the smaller screen is less pleasing to read: being able to navigate by touching headings, turning pages seamlessly by swiping the screen, having maps in colour and being able to activate links directly in a real web browser.

The iPhone will be coming to Italy, not the Kindle.

I only purchased one other book – a large compendium of poetry, which I thought might be nice to dip into. Unfortunately this was not to be – like most of the shoddy free stuff you can fill your Kindle with, this eBook came with no index or contents page, rendering navigation impossible. The illustrations too were missing, replaced by ugly placeholders.

My regard for the Kindle can be seen in the way I treat it – instead of buying a fancy case, it resides in a tatty yellow paper bag.

Obviously the Kindle has been a big hit in its latest incarnation, and sales of eBooks at Amazon have eclipsed those of paper, but for me the device is of little immediate use.

Perhaps it would be more appealing if, aside from the navigation woes, Amazon were to adopt the policy of throwing in a free electronic version with every real book purchase, just as the surprisingly large number of musicians releasing on vinyl include a free CD or MP3‘s. Then you could enjoy the best of both worlds.

 

TOO MUCH INFORMATION?

I was thinking about the Kindle book reader the other night, wondering whether or not it might be fun to get one seeing as how the price has dropped and it might be yet another nice little gadget to have around. Then I got to thinking that it represents yet another digitisation of the Old World, and I had to wonder whether that was a good thing or not. Previous changes have been in the fields of music and photography, and both transitions were not without their problems.

CDs – well, that wasn’t too difficult : sacrifice the large artwork for a dinky little booklet, but gain a far more durable and glitch-free artefact, and once we’d got past the initially lousy digital transfers there was no going back, really.

The second stage of the music revolution has been different, however. As an audio engineer of sorts I was always aware (and wary) of the sonic limitations of the MP3 format compared to the .wavs of the CD. This didn’t stop me from becoming an early adopter of the iPod, although I always drew the line at actually buying downloaded files, always preferring to have the hard copy CD beforehand. The rare occasions on which I have purchased songs on iTunes led me to realise not only the inferior quality of the files and the lack of artwork, but also the issue of ownership. Buy a CD and you have the music there in your hands forever (or at least until that shiny disk starts to corrode…). Download an MP3, and you are merely leasing it. Change computers more than three times and you’ll find that the song is no longer available to your ears. I lost a few in the migration from Windows to Mac, with no way to get them back save by re-buying.

So this last step I will not take, since for me the losses clearly outweigh the gains. Perhaps the young, brought up on this and not knowing any better, won’t care and will cheerily accept what is obviously a diminution of  both quality and consumer rights.

Next transition was photography. I wasn’t an early adopter here, and only went over to the digital side about five years ago, concerned again that the rendering of light into 0′s and 1′s would result in a reduction in quality. When I finally took the plunge and got my first Nikon DSLR, a D50, I realised that the crappy quality evident in most compact ‘point and shoot‘ digicams was not a concern on the big cameras. Once assured of the quality of the images, I embraced the vastly increased possibilities of digital photography to the full.

The fact of being able to see what you’ve just taken has transformed photography from an elitist esoteric pursuit full of arcane terminology into an egalitarian art form which can be enjoyed by everyone. Rule books can be thrown away, and free experimentation is enabled at no extra cost, a real emancipation.

And now Kindle, representing the digitisation of the book. Aside from my love of gadgets, I can’t say that I ever want to forgo the pleasures of holding a new book in my hands. I understand that the decline of the book is probably inevitable now, since young kids don’t read them anymore, and I find myself spending my commuting time peering into my iPhone‘s diminutive screen to read a whole range of things. I also get the undeniable relief our forests will feel when the book becomes a mere niche product like vinyl.

But still, I don’t think that the sheer convenience of having thousands of reads at one’s disposal can beat the feel and look of a real book. This is one transition I don’t think I can ever fully make.

And all this brings me to another consideration of these changes: is the ready access to vast amounts of music, books, information and images necessarily a good thing? The nerd in me loves the idea of being to carry my entire music library around with me, but after a certain stage was passed in the growth of my iTunes library I was reminded of the lyric to the Devo song ‘Freedom of Choice.’

‘In ancient Rome
There was a poem
About a dog
Who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want.’

Sometimes of an evening, when I’m recumbent on the sofa and looking forward to an hour or so of sonic relaxation, I reach for the iPhone, open the iTunes remote app, and am then stymied by the vast amount of music available to me – around 21,000 songs. It freaks me out a bit. I don’t know what to listen to. Stick to a well-worn favourite, or try something a little less familiar, or even completely unheard? (Such is the amount of undigested material in my collection). Perhaps there are limits to what the human mind can deal with. I find I can handle a collection of 5,000 songs, but not one of 21,000. That I cannot conceive of comfortably.

How then, do the young folk brought up with the internet deal with this overabundance of material? Do they develop a good filtering system that helps them cope with the vast possibilities? And is the easy availability of everything causing it to be devalued? Do the teenagers of today love and cherish the tunes on their MP3s as much as I did the 7″ singles I used to buy once a month or so with my savings?

I don’t really know the answers to these questions, but I understand the importance of not becoming another tedious old git complaining about how things were better in the old days (I don’t necessarily think they were).

However, I do know how amazingly adaptable human beings are, and how the universe itself is built on change, and how it is futile to fight it. The digital revolution will proceed no matter what we think of it: the trick will be to embrace only that which seems to truly enhance life and reject that which does not, although it is often difficult to make this important distinction.

PARDON?

A year ago I damaged my hearing while attending a Shonen Knife gig in Osaka. While I couldn’t really think of a nicer bunch of ladies to lose my ears to, it was a bit of a blow to someone whose life has revolved around music for the last thirty-two years.

Back home, after a series of frustrating visits to non-English speaking doctors, and with no real idea of what had happened or what the prognosis was, one thing was very clear – I could no longer listen to music.

That’s right, goodbye iPod.

For three months I couldn’t listen to any kind of music at all, not even on speakers. It was painful and distorted. And not only my Napalm Death albums: I mean everything.

I had to use my noise-blocking Sennheisser earphones to block out the piercing shrill sounds of everyday urban life that hurt my ears, rather than for music.

Raging tinnitus twenty-four hours a day. Even the voices of interlocutors sometimes caused me to wince in agony.

Imagine that, for a man with 18,653 songs in his iTunes library and a passionate desire to create music as a major driving force and means of expression in his life.

Twelve months later and things are immeasurably better.

I am rarely troubled by the horrendous distortion that previously afflicted me, and the tinnitus in my left ear is barely noticeable, even at night.

Recently I’ve found I can listen to the iPod again, albeit at the lowest volumes.

Some chart thingy designed to show something about hearing loss...

I can sit down and enjoy music on speakers again. The first time I found I could do that I cried like a baby.

My hearing is still not as it was – I suppose it has been permanently damaged in some ways. I can never go to concerts again. I still have to put earplugs in at the cinema. Some frequencies, particularly bass ones, are still problematic.

One surprising, and positive, consequence of my sonic difficulties has been my return to the techno genre as my main channel of musical creativity.

Stephen Patrick's astute observation...

See, like Beethoven, there was no way hearing damage was going to stop the muse from visiting me. And fortunately just before my ears were shredded, I’d started to get serious about learning Apple‘s superb Logic Pro 9 music software. Beats Beethoven‘s old Bechstein any day.

Even at its worst, I found that I could still compose using this software without having to use headphones, with just the minimum of volume over the iMac‘s internal speakers.

Recording the kind of alternative rock I’d been doing for the last decade or more was out of the question, since this necessarily involves headphones and relatively high volumes to enable backing tracks to be audible over amplified guitars or bellowed vocals.

And so I was forced out of necessity to return to techno, a genre I had been an early convert to, but had not dabbled in since 1997.

And so do old deaf bastards...

How great, then, to be able to discover once again the sheer joy in the organic process of creation that is in many ways much more fluid and open-ended than the composition and creation of guitar-based rock.

What’s the difference? Well, in rock you are pretty much bound by the need to fully shape the song before you begin recording. Only then can you begin to program the drums, followed by the rest of the instruments and vocals track by track. Once arranged, there’s little scope for experimentation.

Not so techno. Here, the composition is simultaneous with the recording : you actually write the piece as you go along, taking whatever twists and turns you feel like along the way.

Logic Pro's ES2 synth, not a spaceship's control panel...

The starting point is different, too. Instead of working up from a set of lyrics or a melody, in techno your inspiration could be anything from a particular synth sound, a drum beat, a bass line or a sample.

You record a bar, then loop it, then think what else would go well with it. Rinse and repeat, and the piece unfurls almost magically, new sonic ideas and discoveries sparking the imagination to further experimentation, cutting and pasting to taste.

Rinse and repeat - you dirty long-haired fuckface

Rather than a formal composition, the techno track is more like a free-form collage unbound by rules or convention, spontaneously created, morphing as it grows, finally reaching completion at that mysterious moment when it just suddenly feels ‘right.’

Does that mean I’m done with alt rock?  No way! The ears can now perhaps stand a bit of headphone usage, but for the time being I’m happy to remain within the anarchist-friendly medium of electronica.

GOODBYE, WINDOWS! (Sort of)

I’ve had three computers since 1998, the year in which I entered the wonderful time-wasting world of the PC. Although that’s not strictly true, since as a young lad I was there in the early days of Sinclair ZX 80s and dodgy Texas Instruments models, programming primitive beat boxes and rudimentary games before giving it all up for over a decade.

Anyhow, that’s an average of one computer every three years, so of course, last December it was time for my lovingly hand-crafted AMD-powered hi-tech bundle of cyber-goodness to cough, splutter, and go belly up. Fortunately, the cough and the splutter were picked up by my radar-like sound engineer’s lugholes, and a Big Hard Drive was hastily connected to the shuddering white beast, with just enough time to pull the entire contents from the smoldering ruins, thus preventing a serious descent into mental disarray for your humble narrator.

Oh Lordy, three weeks without a computer! Three weeks of having to sneak in all awkward-like to ‘Media Cafes‘ and book a couple of hours in a tiny overheated cubicle among fat pimply adolescents whacking off to jazz flicks and cheapskate fresh-off-the-boat gaijin furiously emailing their mate Baz in Spalding. And, unprotected by lovingly trained Beyesian filters, having to sift through 500 plus missives concerning the size of my manhood before accidentally erasing the one ‘real’ email which was probably offering me some fabulously remunerated sinecure in Tahiti.

But a feeling had been a-growing these past years. Already an avid iPod devotee before the stinking herds were let in on the secret, I had begun to cast admiring glances at the Apple products, their sleek and sexy forms calling out suggestively for a sea change. Or was that a sex change – my typing skills are rudimentary, dear people.

And then in a rush it was upon me and I could contain myself no more. Why avail myself of a reeking ugly and cheap Dell PC, when I could solve my computer woes by plunging in at the deep end and going all Mac? Why go through all that hassle with language-specific Windoze operating systems and heinous activations when a multilingual non-phoning home Apple product would do the job, and look much more coffee table too?

In short, it was the perfect opportunity to make the switch – the sexy new iMac had just been unleashed along with the new Leopard operating system which seemed slick and user-friendly, and then I discovered that the new Intel-based Macs allowed a dual boot with Windoze which would mean that all my nerdy wargames could still be enjoyed on the new Apple rig! Yippee!

And so now, dear readers, I type this upon my 2.6Ghz dual core CPU 2GB RAM 20″ shiny screened iMac, wirelessly connected to the internet, smiling smugly in a slate grey Armani jacket as I find myself part of that small but growing band of creative cognoscenti who have thrown off the shackles of the Gates and are now basking in the brushed aluminium glow of the Jobs (so to speak).

Hallelujah!

ALL PODS ARE NOT CAST IN THE SAME MOLD

The word podcasting recently entered the Oxford English Dictionary, or some such. For any Cro-Magnons reading this, this new lexical item is made up of pod, from Apple’s recently ubiquitous iPod music player, and cast from the verb broadcast.

It’s basically a species of radio show to which listeners can subscribe via the internet, and have software automatically download and install the latest episode into your portable music player.

What’s so great about that? Well, for very litle cost, the average git in the street now has a potentially global platform from which to launch his rantings, and this is precicesly what thousands of people are now doing.

Even better is the fact that as we speak, it is still an anarchistic free for all unsullied by the corporate greenback, a wide-open egalitarian forum in which anything goes. That’s right, there are no regulations – the dead hand of government has not yet forced this new media into the narrow confines of a freedom-limiting straight-jacket.

The downside of this is, of course, that 99% of all podcast are shite. How do you find the good ones? Well, both your iTunes software and websites such as Podacast Alley have ways to search via categories, as well as a ‘Top Ten’ based on downloads, subscriptions and votes.

There are two main types of podcast: professional programmes offered by mainstream media outlets such as the BBC or National Public Radio, and amateur shows, which constitute the vast majority.

The latter are often hampered by crap audio quality and crap contents – or more accurately, lack of contents. After a brief sampling of these amateur works, it seems to me that most of them are entirely self-referential: a typical ’show’ will consisted of two or three people engaging in a bit of idle banter, then going through the emails and voice mails sent in by the listeners in reaction to the previous programme. Hello? Where’s the beef?!?

However, this type of podcast is infinitely preferable to the nerdcast, which will typically consist of a narrowly-themed programme hosted by a lone anorak. He will drone on in a monotonous voice into a cheap microphone, ploughing his limited furrow without regard to the sanity of his listeners, and there will at no times be any humour involved.

I’m currently subscribed to four podcasts, three of which are amateur, one is (allegedly) professional:

[1] Anarchy X – this features two blokes in California with left-wing views who, besides the politics, are not averse to amusing non-PC anecdotes and hefty doses of humour. Very high audio standards, too.

[2] The Ricky Gervais Show – supposedly professional (although the audio quality doesn’t sound like it), featuring the rather forced ravings of The Office star Gervais and two of his mates. It’s lightweight and daft, but perfect for that early morning dose of low-brow to help us make it through the commute.

[3] Military History Podcast – firmly in the nerdcast camp in that it is totally humourless, has poor production values and features one geezer droning on. It is, however, quite good if you happen to be a military history nerd like meself.

[4] Nobody Likes Onions – this is quite clearly a largely content-free self-referencing podcast, but what (occasionally) makes it interesting is its total disdain from all things PC and the all-round nastiness of the main man, a 25-year old American comedian.

At the moment I don’t subscribe to anything put out by the BBC, since they’re only offering a paltry few podcasts, none of them even remotely interesting to me. Now why isn’t the omnibus edition of the Archers available, goddammit?

Perhaps soon, I may be entering the world of podcasting myself…