After Hours

The news of interest this week is Amazon’s launch of their eBook service, Kindle. Newsweek published an article about it on Monday and Amazon made the Kindle available on Tuesday. From the technical and use perspectives, it’s intriguing. It looks as though Amazon has arrived at a good physical design: The feel is reported to be ideal, the electronic paper is easy on the eyes and, since the device is focused on only a handful of tasks, interaction seems simple and intuitive.

It’s interesting to note that on Nov 20, 2007, the Kindle had received 275 reviews as of 8:30AM. On Nov 21 at roughly the same time, the review count totaled 438. Given the launch happened this week, I am not sure how useful the reviews are. Even at both counts, the reviews average to 2.5 stars out of 5 with a 40% rating the device with one star and the remaining 60% being evenly distributed from 2 to 5 stars. Really, though, the reviews seem to be based on speculation (some outright wrong) or based on the Amazon provided documentation. But it is entertaining reading.

I have some mixed feelings about the thought of going to a completely digital format. I like the tangible. It’s perhaps an artificial comfort but one that I can’t deny. Also, the habits from years of pre-internet activities make the potential paradigm shift uncomfortable at best. This isn’t to say a digital world isn’t without its advantages but it is certainly a trade off.

In thinking about whether or not I would find a Kindle worth purchasing, I started to weigh the pros and cons of a tangible library, one with physical books, versus the Kindle-brary.

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copyright O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Ambient Findability
by P. Moreville
2005 O’Reilly Media

Rating:

This review was several months in the coming. To be honest, I found the book difficult to engage at first.

The first four chapters of the book were difficult to experience. The tone of the author was a bit self-indulging in the sense that the discussions seemed to be unnecessarily drawn out and the examples and references felt to be a tapestry of hip: quoting William Gibson and Chrsitopher Alexander, including various du jour technologies and well as the liberal sprinkling of buzzwords. One extreme example was the term ‘ubicomp’. It was never defined in the text. There was a specific mention of ‘ubiquitous computing’ but it was after several instances of the abbreviation and the formal connection between the two was never made (or so is my recollection).

Starting in chapter five and through chapter seven, the book’s focus shifted enormously and the discussions went from cool technologies to the impact of socially defined metadata. That is, information on the web is tagged (classified) by any user (folksonomies), rather than experts (taxonomies), via bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, blog aggregators like Technorati that catalog tags bloggers use on their posts as well as vendors like Amazon where users tag items the service sells.

If the book had developed the content of chapters five through seven, dropping the glamour of the previous chapters, most of which didn’t particularly go anywhere, it would have been a better read.

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