Apple TV: things I’ve figured out since I got an awesome new receiver.

Google, it’s not too late to save Latitude

Not Books, but Doors: Why eReading is a More Immersive Experience

I’ve been reading electronically — phone, desktop (I know), Kobo, Kobo Touch — for perhaps two years now, and I’ve come to the following conclusion as my reading habits have changed.

Electronic reading does a better job of engaging the reader’s imagination than print books do.

It’s also, of course, a more physically pleasurable experience:

• Lighter
• Easier to operate (I’m talking about turning pages, and believe me no one is a better one-handed print page-turner than I am)
• Less likely to wake you up when you drop it on your face when falling asleep reading
• Not going to bedazzle you with glare when reading in bright sunlight (seriously, reading a good e-ink display beside a pool is a world-class experience)

But all of those are ultimately secondary. What eReading is really, really good at is letting you be a creative reader. Reading is the act of imaginatively interpreting — reconstructing — the work of an another person’s imagination. That’s subject to two sets of constraints: the range and ability of the author to express their imagination; and the range and ability of the reader to interpret it, which is to say, to creatively reimagine it on their own terms. Technology is not a neutral factor in that relationship. And electronic readers do a better job of relaxing the second set of those constraints.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about my reading experience over the last couple dozen months.

1. I’m reading more.

Having a vast array of content to choose from means less reading time lost because I’m not quite in the mood for the book that I happened to bring with me. And that’s exactly the point: I can read according to my mood — not have to remember to bring a book strong enough to change my mood. Every time.

So, I’m better read — but also have the ability to start reading something on a spur-of-the-moment suggestion. If I’m at a party and someone says, look, you have to read The Poisonwood Bible, I can start reading it on the bus on the way home instead of the Pretty Little Liars #9 that I was reading on the way there. This possibility, alone, makes me feel better read, because it’s always within reach. The horizons of my imagination feel broader. (It doesn’t hurt that the prices are usually lower.)

2. I’m far less tolerant of poorly written non-fiction.

Perhaps that’s not quite fair: I’m far less tolerant of non-fiction that is written without a distinctive voice, or at the very least some concession to narrative structure. For all the improvements of scrolling and progress indicators, it remains much easier to skim a print book than an eBook. Which means I have to page through the eBook… and if it’s boring I’d just as soon move onto something else. But on an eReader, the abandoned books aren’t staring me in the face in some strange transfiguration of guilt and anxiety. In short: I’m in control of the reading experience — unless the author is really, really good; unless they are actively contributing towards the mutual creative act.

Hannah from Pretty Little Liars

Theodore Dreiser

Perhaps we do lose something in that. “Great books don’t promise to hold your attention,” I remember an English professor once telling a class utterly bored by one of the masters of American literature (probably Dreiser), “but they do promise to reward it.” I suspect that, in a future when electronic reading is the dominant manner of reading, authors who can’t write well will not be able to release ideas slowly. (And if we don’t read Dreiser, we’ll all miss out on some of the more amusing fender-benders of American prose.)

On the other hand:

3. I can concentrate better

Somehow the flexibility of the form — yes, the font size, the typeface selection — means that I can get better terms in the reading relationship. I can take my glasses off but still read without having to hold the device a couple of inches from my face. It’s less about the conditions that I must arrange in order to read, and more about how I can manipulate the content to suit me.

4. I don’t feel like I’m carrying a book around

Because I’m not. I’m not carrying hundreds of books either. At a certain point, having more books than I could list made my device something less like a book, or a compendium, than a portal: a door. That was one of the thrilling discoveries of the first Kobo reader: it came pre-loaded with a hundred free books, which made it clear that this technology was not simply a more efficient distribution mechanism, but a gateway to limitless content. Wi-fi devices have absolutely helped with that too — but they have kept the connection to the wider Internet obscure enough that I’m not prone to jump on Twitter or the web. Reading remains immersive, yet feels connected.

5. The books I have read feel closer to one another

And that sense of connection, crucially, extends to the books I have already read. Somehow the ability to have the complete works (well, not quite yet) of Faulkner, Didion, Murakami, and John McPhee in my bag, at all times, gives me a more holistic sense of my reading life than having them marooned, out of reach, on a bookshelf, where their valences are confined to the sequence in which I happen to have them shelved. The connections between these books are multiple and they continually expand as I — by the sheer act of reading — add to their company. Virtual shelves aren’t the same as real shelves, and the books I have on my Kobo live in the same kind of unregulated relationships to one another than they do in my imagination.

John McPhee: The Non-Portable Version

By amalgamating possibility, your aggregate reading experience, the range of your reading and your interests, electronic readers offer a sort of physical external representation of your imagination. They are a sort of auxiliary imagination. My Kobo Touch, after only a few weeks, houses hundreds of books and hundreds of annotations and highlights; it has measured and marked my progress through novels and essays (and, yes, I earned the insomniac badges along the way). It hasn’t just been a device: it’s been a companion.

Reading merges the content of the page with everything else you have ever read, through the filter of your imagination. It is a cumulative, messy process: it disintegrates the boundaries between ideas, times, places, people, events. It is a process of unseaming the constraints of reality; of unspooling it into the collective and personal reaches of the imagination. And the eReading device is by definition a much better metaphor for that process than physical books. Ideas collide, aggregate, pile into one another. They are sunk within you. They do not remain distinct.

Perhaps this is how the listeners to epic poetry once felt, as the stories that are now The Iliad and The Odyssey were released into the collective ether. Perhaps physical books were a transitional media.

So that’s where I’m at. Admittedly other things have conspired to bring me there. I’m not at a point in my life where I still strongly feel the need to display my books around me as an expression of my refinement and taste, and in any event it’s rare that a book changes me in the way of a Slouching Towards Bethlehem or Light in August: my imagination is more robust than it was when I was 21, and I’ve already discovered many of the books most likely to change me. What’s more, the limitations of urban living have somewhat necessarily curtailed my ability to endlessly collect books.

But still: I’ve fallen out of love with shelves of trade paperbacks, and back in love with something that feels closer to the experience of reading itself.

Reading a physical book still retains its pleasures: there is absolutely something thrilling about a gorgeous hardcover, something that feels like a communion close to the author’s intent. But that’s exactly the point: physical books make you read on the author’s terms; reading electronically takes place more on the reader’s terms. I think that’s a good thing. It makes reading more personal, more democratic, more controversial.

But it’s a huge change — and it could be a generation before authors catch up to it.

Idea for an art project

Unlocking the Pynchon Badge, or Doing it in Public: further thoughts from #BCTO10 on place and reading

Dilettantes: an underserved market segment

Watching Olympics coverage at my in-laws’ while muddling through a cold. Observed through a mucusy haze a few things:

• The provincialism of CTV is astonishing.
• Vancouver’s weather is governed by capricious spirits.
• I have no idea what I’m watching.

I’ve been obsessing lately about one of the principles espoused in The Brothers Heath’s excellent book Made To Stick: approximately, it’s that you’ll be heard best if you listen to yourself with the ears of your audience.

With extremely rare exception there are no sports announcers covering the 2010 games who are bearing this principle in mind.

Just now an announcer said, by way of “offering some perspective,” that mogul skiers move at up to “10 meters per second”. I have no idea what that speed means without picking up a calculator. So much for perspective.

What the announcers do talk about is whether so-and-so’s “program” was “technically challenging” and how “solid” their landing was while at no time speaking to the audience as if it’s the first time they’re seeing human beings do some of these things, which for many of us it undoubtedly is.

(Nature documentaries seem to understand this far better than presenters of sports. I guess because the participants are non-human it’s assumed that the audience needs some help making sense of what they’re seeing.)

Take the luge. For macabre reasons it’s in the spotlight these days. But does anyone understand how this sport works? Don’t most of us suspect it’s not really a sport at all, but a horizontal rebuttal to bungee jumping?

But we also know that we’re probably missing something. We know it’s bad to slow down. We know it’s hard to see what your heels are pointed at when you’re lying on your back. We’ve all tobogganned.

Among the things we don’t know is whether you can steer one of those little sleds. And it’s not clear how weight and height aid or hinder a competitor. We don’t know why some lugers come out of turns cleanly while others rattle against the sides of the track. How to tell when one is luging well or poorly is so elementary a thing that we almost fail to notice that it’s entirely obscure.

But wouldn’t it be cool if there were a channel (even if it’s just an alternative audio track on existing channels) that covered sports with commentary that informed the viewer of the principles at play? I’d seek out coverage of unfamiliar sports (cricket, anyone?) if the announcers told me how to watch what I’m watching.

• How do the rifles in biathlon work differently from a conventional hunting rifle?
• Why do mogul skiers all have those bands on their knees?
• What the hell is going on in figure skating?

Why not let informed audience members contribute the audio track as a sort of real-time audio blog? Let fans recruit and train new fans. Feed curiosity and grow the sport. You can’t make an aficionado in an hour but you can convey an illusion of understanding, and that’s enough for us dilettantes.

Am I the only one?

Buzzed

A couple of us have been using the newly enable Google Buzz feature in Gmail. What’s Buzz? It’s kind of hard to explain.

Just a little off (to) the side (of gmail)

Got it? Alright.

I love that my non-twittering friends are now not only privy to my tweets (a dubious privilege, indeed) but able to respond at length without having to join Twitter themselves.

Not only this: they’re now able to converse with one another in the course of commenting. This is gold. When they said Buzz was like writing a message without a “To:” I wondered initially how that was different from Twitter or a Facebook update. I get it now.

With Buzz I can do what I thought I’d be able to do with Wave before I used it and got confused, frustrated, and finally bored.

I haven’t checked on my Wave account in months (has it been months?) but I’ve checked in on Buzz a dozen times already, not counting the emails (are they emails?) that alerted me via my Android phone that someone had commented on something in Buzz.

Of course I’ve checked in a bunch of times: it’s email. We all have email. Specifically, we all have Gmail.

If Wave has failed to take off it’s because it’s

• in need of some enterprising gang (Basecamp, can you hear me?) to build a killer app on top of it so we don’t have to Wave in the raw and
• requires another signup and the inconvenience that comes with migration.

By anchoring in Gmail, Buzz removes signup and migration pain in one step. And it’s got just enough functionality to make it interestingly messy, but not enough to overwhelm.

Buzz isn’t perfect right now but I won’t get into my quibbles with it because they’re boring, obvious, and probably already fixed and being tested as I write this. And I won’t say “this will fundamentally change email” because prognostications are just as boring as complaints.

But I will say that I think sharing stuff on the internet with my friends just became a little bit easier and therefore made the internet a little bit more fun.

The Tale of Two (Data) Cultures

Back in 2006 Google’s Marissa Mayer shared her Nine Notions of Innovation with NewsWeek. Number six was “Don’t Politic, Use Data.”

Last week Joe Wilcox wrote an excellent piece on the decade that wasn’t at Microsoft. He included this point…

That’s another problem — and I’ve heard about it so many, many times from Microsoft employees: Most every technology decision must be justified by some data point.

Google. Microsoft. Both have a data-driven cultures but one is functioning and one isn’t.

You could conclude from this that Google is  destined for the same-fate as Microsoft — analysis paralysis. It is only a matter of time. But I am keen to see if Google can overcome this problem. Instead of having a bun fight with metrics, I wonder if improved data-flow within teams — that ambient awareness you get from twitter — can mitigate this outcome.

Getting my hands dirty

I’ve been living the startup life and have come to terms with no longer being able to “comp last year”. It’s a game of grow, grow, grow, where sheer volume and customer headcount matter only slightly less than fussy old concepts like margin, and rather than comp last year by 2%, you’re aiming to be 2 orders of magnitude bigger by next year because there is no last year, and even if there was it’d be a sure sign of trouble if you could use last year to tell very much about what’s going on now.

A year after starting this blog (and a month into my new job) I’ve resolved to roll up my sleeves and learn how to deal with data.

Also, when my boss asked me for figures including median and standard deviation I got sweaty palms and goobered up my company iPhone.

So I bought a book; my usual stress response when confronted with my own ignorance. It’s an O’Reilly (my first, I think) from their “Head First” series, which seems to be geared towards impractically-educated people such as myself who are thumbing through night school course catalogues but not quite convinced that this subject is worth the scheduling commitment or risking entanglement in group assignments.

I worked through the first chapter last night (it was good, but you really do need a pencil handy). If I knock off 2 chapters every week I’ll be done before March.

Fast and Loose Retailers/Data-Driven Culture. Oil/Water.

Flickr: Ross2085

The New York Times is featuring a rather empty article about data in retail whose thrust is basically more data = more opportunity. Uh yeah. The trend I am seeing with retailers — and my visibility here is more limited than it used to be — is an analytics or CRM vendor sells a retailer a data package that is tailored just enough for the purchase to make sense to the company’s executive but the package isn’t tailored enough to yield any intelligence to make better decisions. The mid-level users that need the intel are left saying WTF? That is an old management pattern but seeing it happen hurts my insides because the opportunity is really amazing but is being fumbled so badly. Creating a data-driven culture has to start with the analysts. Hopefully they know what to ask for.