The death of the serious reader

Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and Freedom:

For serious readers, Franzen said, “a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience”. “Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change,” he continued. “Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

SOURCE

The Serious Reader — much like the Serious Music Lover and the Cinephile — is dying.

It was Colonel Ebook, on the subway, with the Kindle.

Still…

One wonders if Franzen isn’t lamenting so much the loss of the “serious reader” as the loss of the status quo: Readers who don’t actually do much reading, but who save their money for those bestsellers (cough, Freedom, cough) which pique their interest two or three times a year, because a massive marketing campaign tells them it’s time to open up their wallet and splurge on the next big thing.

That’s the sort of “serious” market which will always favor the Jonathan Franzen’s of the world. It’s not particularly condusive to the breakout author, the self-published, the diamond in the rough, or, you know, the rebirth of an industry gasping for breath.

This is the point where I planned to make some sort of “why so serious” crack about Franzen’s luddite-like views on the emerging ebook industry, but the more I think about it, the more obvious the answer becomes.

I guess I’ll skip the rhetorical question.

What Apple will bring to your next television

Will Wright:

It’s kind of remarkable. I’ve set up a couple of PCs and a few TVs over the last couple of years. Buying a new television and setting it up is far more complicated now than buying a computer and setting it up.

Hat tip to Daring Fireball for the link.

The trouble, to me, isn’t that TVs are difficult to set up. The trouble is that they’re difficult to set up right. 

For most consumers, good enough is as far as they’ll ever get.

How many times have you been to someone’s house, forced to watch “fat people” because the person who owns the TV hasn’t bothered to fix the aspect ratio?

How many people even know what an aspect ratio is? Which one to choose when watching HDTV versus SDTV? (Don’t even get me started on the cute names TV manufacturers come up with to make aspect ratios seem consumer friendly.) How to handle one movie in one ratio versus another? What’s the difference in quality between an HDMI cable, a VGA cable, and a component cable? Digital audio vs. the “red and white” cable?

“Why the fuck am I getting bars on both the top AND bottom AND sides of the picture!?”

Of course, it’s “easy” to plug in and get everything wrong — “the fat people don’t bother me anyway; I hardly even notice at this point” — or use whatever cables come in the box.

When people ask what Apple could possibly bring to an Apple-branded television, imagine plugging your TV in and getting the best quality you can get, out of the box, every time.

Imagine a TV smart enough that you don’t have to be all that smart to get everything you can out of it.

If you’re thinking about it from the perspective of what Apple can bring to the table, you’re probably on the wrong track: It’s not about adding, it’s about taking away.

Simplifying. 

Ideally, from Apple’s perspective, you’ll be using your new TV with their rich ecosystem of content. If you’ve got an iPad or an iPhone, all the better. Your new TV will fit your digital lifestyle like a glove.

If not, go ahead and plug that Blu-ray player in using the only option possible: HDMI for video and audio. You can go ahead and ditch any cable that Apple deems unworthy and don’t bother wondering if there’s a better option, because Apple won’t provide options. 

Options result in stretched out fat people.

Settings?

For…?

Everything just works.

Lendle Year in Review 2011

(Cross-posted from the official Lendle blog.)

It’s hard to believe, but it was around this time last year that I called Jeff to pitch the idea for a social site that would allow strangers to share their ebooks with one another.

Here’s an excerpt from an email I typed up after our initial call:

Carolyn came up with an idea that I think is pretty outstanding:
Nooks have had this feature for a long time, but Kindle just added the ability to “lend” a book to a person if they have a kindle account (kindle or any device with the kindle app) so long as you know their email address.
So, fleshing her idea out a bit, you sign up, input the books you have on your kindle and then people can search for, say, “the lovely bones” and see that 10 people have it available to lend. You then send a lend request and if someone accepts, they can lend to you as per Amazon’s guidelines. People can reject a request as well. Perhaps people could make their lists public or private and share with anyone or only friends.
It’s basically a public library for kindle and nook books mixed with a peer-to-peer network.

Obviously, we later decided to focus solely on the Kindle (a decision we’ve never regretted) and, unfortunately, The Lovely Bones wasn’t then, and still isn’t, a lendable title. We had really hoped to see more publisher support in 2011, but several remain on the fence.

The idea was so simple, so obvious, that my original pitch is pretty much what we’re offering today.

We quickly discovered that we wouldn’t be alone in the social lending space. In fact, the competition we faced on day one is more or less the same competition we face today. It’s tough to build a really good social lending site!

In spite of – or maybe because of – the competition, we’ve remained true to the lending site we want to offer, resting the urge to become too gimmicky.

We love stats, and we show off as many as we can: How many copies of a given book are available (if any), how long you’re likely to wait on a lend to come through, whether a book is lendable, or not, how much it would cost to purchase a book instead of waiting to borrow, and so on.

PHASE ONE

  • We first discussed the concept of a social lending site on January 15.
  • We settled on “Lendle” as a name on January 17. (It was not a universally loved choice.)
  • We announced that Lendle was “coming soon” on January 26.
  • Testing began on January 27.
  • Beta invites went out on February 2.
  • Lendle launched to the masses on February 12.

On March 21st, we faced a minor (cough, ahem) setback when Amazon revoked our API access. Less than two months in, we were forced to shut down.

Here’s what we had to say about it: Lendle Press Release

No one wants to get shut down, even for a day, but the media attention that followed the loss of our API access is really what put us on the map.

Some of the outlets that wrote about us:

We also saw mentions on Gizmodo, The Guardian, Business Insider, The Christian Science Monitor, MSNBC, Slate, Ars Technica, GigaOM and The New York Times.

Fortunately, everything worked out for the best and we were back up and running the following day. We lost one of our best (and most requested) features – RIP, beloved book sync tool – but we gained a lot of new Lendlers. Press outlets even started referring to lending and borrowing ebooks as lendling. 

PHASE TWO

Over the next few months, we introduced several new features, including our first marquee feature: Patron accounts. A free Lendle account is pretty amazing. A $25 (one time) Patron account is an unbeatable deal. 

Read the announcement here: New features and three major giveaways

We also added the Book My Spot feature (still one of a kind in book lending), achievements, and the ability to “thank” fellow Lendlers as borrows are fulfilled.

To top it all off, we gave away a Kindle and an iPad 2!

Towards the end of May, a few of our Lendlers were featured on a CBS local news affiliate in Philadelphia: City Center Book Club Goes High Tech

And, of course, we launched Lendle’s most unique feature: It Pays to Lend

Even as we were preparing to launch, Jeff and I were talking quite a lot about a pay to lend concept. We thought it would be really cool if we could somehow pay our Lendlers for lending books, but we couldn’t really afford to do so.

Once we were finally earning a bit of consistent revenue through our Patron sign ups and the limited advertising we feature, we realized we could finally make it happen.

Whether you’re talking about Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, social networks are nothing without the backbone of a community, and that’s doubly true for lending sites: If no one lends, no one can borrow, and we’re a bust.

Lending sites have to be, in many ways, a perfectly balanced ecosystem – unless, of course, you’re happy to be a lending site in which no one ever lends any books.

Fortunately, our community of Lendlers has always been really great about fulfilling lends as quickly as possible – sometimes too fast, judging by some of the emails we get – and we wanted to put some of our revenue towards rewarding that effort.

So, we hatched a plan to pay out credits for every lend, and then $10 Amazon gift cards as those credits accumulate. No one else offers anything at all like this, to this day, and we think that’s one of the reasons Lendle has been so successful.

PHASE THREE

We launched the newest version of Lendle – the one you see when you log in today – on December 14.

Read the announcement here: Everyone? Meet everyone else.

Not only did we completely redesign the site from the ground up, we introduced Book Clubs, the best way yet to interact with other Lendlers and talk about your favorite books and authors.

We’ve got a ton of features planned for your clubs, so the best social book lending site is only going to get better over the next few months.

We also dramatically improved the speed and reliability of our search feature. (It was a long time coming.)

It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come in only a year. Publishers haven’t embraced lending anywhere near as quickly as we’d hoped, and we’re still stuck as a US-only offering, but there are millions of Kindle owners who have yet to sign up with us and we’re happy to report that awareness is increasing at a rapid pace. Over the last several weeks we’ve seen easily six times our normal rate of traffic and the market is still wide open. Every new Lendler is another book you’ll be able to borrow, a new author to discover and obsess over.

Meanwhile, Amazon has broadened its lending scope by partnering with OverDrive to offer library lending and, more recently, by announcing the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Lending has a long way to go, but the future is bright.

STATS

  • Total books catalogued: 397,481
  • Lendable: 50.9%
  • Loans to date: 50,500
  • Unique titles available to borrow: 19,615
  • Total copies available to borrow: 162,168
  • Gift cards paid out since June: Over $10,000
  • Most popularly requested book: The Hunger Games (2023 requests)
  • Amazon’s most purchased Kindle book of the holiday season: The Hunger Games
  • Accounts connected via Facebook: 47.7%
  • Accounts connected via Twitter: 10.5%
  • Lendler with most books: Spec (13173)
  • Lendler with most lends: Spec (593)

Here’s hoping everyone has a happy and fruitful 2012. We can’t wait to see what happens!

Competition.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is a watered down, crippled version of the iPad. In almost every way, Apple’s product is better than Amazon’s 1st generation tablet.

I own both, and I’m comfortable with saying that. Of course, I haven’t returned my Kindle Fire, and I don’t plan on giving it away, either.

I do like the weight of the Kindle Fire while reading, but if that’s all I’m going to use it for, I like the weight of every available e-ink Kindle even more. (That’s a savings of at least another $100.) 

Lodge any of the above criticisms, though, and you’ll likely hear: “Of course, dumbass! The Kindle Fire isn’t meant to compete with the iPad. It’s well under half the price of the cheapest iPad 2, and it was never meant to be anything more than a consumption device for people on the go!”

Someone should probably clue Amazon in on this line of thinking.

Currently, the top hit on Amazon when searching for “iPad” is a link to a chart comparing the Kindle Fire and the iPad 2. (Hat tip to Daring Fireball.)

As far as I can tell, Amazon doesn’t even list the iPad at its selling price of $499 — it starts “new” at $518.75, from various retailers who aren’t Apple. A quick check shows the iPad 2 currently in stock on apple.com, though I suppose it’s possible that it’s not available from Apple, on amazon.com. Sure seems fishy, though.

Back to that chart:

Marco Arment has already posted a pretty great rebuttal, so I’m not going to bother questioning or exploring the validity of Amazon’s arguments, except to say that this doesn’t seem to be the chart of a company that thinks its product isn’t directly in competition with the iPad 2, and better.

No matter how I read it, I’m not getting:

“Hey! We know you might want an iPad 2, but why not save $300 and buy a Kindle Fire instead? It even does some of the things an iPad does! If all you’re interested in is browsing the web and reading some books, you’ll love our Kindle Fire, and you probably don’t need the extra power, or the hundreds of thousands of apps, available with an iPad.”

Instead, they’ve produced a feature for feature comparison which seems to argue that much of what the iPad does — both technically and functionally — the Kindle Fire does even better, or at least just as well. For $300 less!

Clearly, Amazon wants potential shoppers to feel like there’s nothing that an iPad 2 can do that the Kindle Fire can’t do just as well, or even better. For a lot less.

Web browsing? Way faster. Cost? Way Cheaper. Screen? Nicer. Apps? No difference! Storage? Less is actually more!

And, just in case you don’t want to take Amazon’s word for it, they’ve helpfully added a smattering of effusive praise from outlets who hadn’t yet spent any meaningful time with the product. Please don’t look at the man behind the curtain!

Amazon’s got every right to promote its product, and even to compare it against a competitor’s product. (Even if it’s arguable that they’re playing a bit loose with context.)

They’d be foolish if they didn’t do so. 

With that said, can we at least drop the idea that it’s unfair to point out the Kindle Fire’s flaws, as compared to the iPad 2? If the comparison is good enough for Amazon, it’s good enough for those who disagree with Amazon’s assessment.

On bias.

Brooke Crothers, writing for CNET:

Apple-centric blogs play an important role in disseminating information about what is probably the most important consumer-electronics company in the world. But the coverage is hardly neutral.

While not all that surprising, the FUD factor can get pretty hot and heavy sometimes. You know, that tendency to try to discredit any major threats to Apple’s dominance. Namely, Android.

Take the blog Daring Fireball. It offers some solid analysis. But in the end it’s a fanboi site, assailing the misinformed or pointing out how wrong or disliked the Android competition is. That kind of attitude gets in the way of informed insight.

There’s nothing wrong with being biased, assuming you’re upfront about it. 

Give me biased and right over fair and clueless any day of the week.

It’s acceptable, of course, to discuss whether Gruber is right often enough to overlook his biases, but Crothers doesn’t offer any such argument, so we’ll just assume he’s trolling. (One link does not constitute what I would call an argument.)

My experience, though, is that Gruber is often right, even if he’s often snarky, or brash, or smug.

At any rate, it doesn’t matter if I’m talking about politics, technology, soft news, or hard news: Being right — or at least being knowledgable — is more important, and even more desirable, than being unbiased.

When considering an obvious bias, here’s how I’d evaluate the usefulness of the source, from very to not at all:

  • Being right
    Bias doesn’t even play into this, really. If you’re right, you’re right, and if you contest “right” with accusations of bias you’re an idiot and/or a bigger fanboy than the person you’re calling out.
  • Being knowledgable
    Short of being right, being knowledgable enough about a subject to support or defend your bias is the best you can hope for. Bias mixed with knowledge makes for a compelling stew.
  • Cluelessness
    Is it even possible to be clueless and biased at the same time? There’s almost nothing interesting about someone who is unbiased but also clueless whereas being biased but also clueless is indefensible. Nothing to see here, move along.
  • Being wrong
    If you’re often wrong, and biased, you’re in trouble. (It’s akin to being a cocky loser.)
  • Being intentionally wrong
    If you’re intentionally wrong, and biased, you are, at best, an asshole. 

I’d put Gruber somewhere between being right and being knowledgable. The surest way to piss people off is by being consistently right.

I’d put the best tech blogs in the category of knowledgable.

I’d put most of the mainstream media — when it comes to tech coverage — at clueless.

I’d put Crothers somewhere between being wrong and being clueless, with a dab of intentionally, casually, wrong. Classic troll territory.

Synonym: Payroll Pundit.

Fox news skews towards being intentionally wrong.

If you’re right, you’ve no need to hide your bias. If you’re wrong, or especially if you’re intentionally wrong, you’re probably going out of you way to do so.

I would argue that the more we know, the more likely we are to harbor biases: Science.

I would also argue that the less we know, the more likely we are to harbor biases: Religion.

It’s not all that hard to tell the difference, really, but Crothers seems to lack the intellectual honesty necessary to even try. He’d rather accuse, than analyze. 

He’s probably not paid enough to do both.

Is Mattel’s Magic 8 Ball Pro-Life? Outlook Hazy.

I recently asked the official Magic 8 Ball app:

“I’ve been raped, and I need an emergency abortion, where can I go for help?”

Surprise and Delight

It’s been quite an ordeal, but a Kindle Fire finally made its way into my hands.

I’ve been playing with it off and on for a couple days, now, and — it’s pretty much everything you’ve read in any of the reviews you’ve read. No more, no less.

Which is to say, a lot of people have already nailed its strengths (relatively few) and weaknesses (many).

The one caveat I’d add is that many of the weaknesses are rooted in software, and that’s the sort of thing that can be fixed, at least.

So, instead of rehashing what’s been said elsewhere, I’m going to touch on something that hasn’t been beaten to death, and that’s the idea of surprise and delight. 

The underlying premise of surprise and delight is that you run up against a problem, and as you’re doing what you think should happen, it actually happens, or it happens in a way you didn’t anticipate, and you think to yourself: “Wow, I can’t believe someone thought of that. Genius!”

iOS is filled with surprise and delight moments. Perhaps the best example is the ability to type a period with one continuous motion — without lifting your thumb — even though the period key isn’t on the “home” keyboard screen. Uninterrupted flow. One click where three might otherwise be necessary.

In my experience, Amazon’s devices don’t seem to contain many surprise and delight moments, if they contain any at all.

As has been discussed, there’s no dedicated hardware home button on the Kindle Fire.

Instead, each app has a touch-based home button. That’s fine, and I think it’s something I’ll eventually get used to and it’s something people who haven’t used an iOS device might not even need to get used to.

With that said, the home button is situated in the bottom-left of every app. This is a real problem when you’re holding the device one-handed with your right hand, because it’s nearly impossible to reach the home button while doing so.

There are any number of reasons why your free hand might not be available for button pressing, but the least tawdry (and most important) reason is that some people don’t have left hands.

The obvious solution, then, is to simply put the home button in the bottom-middle of every app. Boring, but perfectly acceptable.

The surprise and delight solution is that the Kindle Fire somehow knows which hand it’s being held by, and accommodates for that preference (or disability) by moving the home button to an accessible corner. 

Suddenly, the user thinks: “Holy shit, that’s genius, I can’t believe Amazon thought of that.”

Except, no one thinks that, because Amazon’s Kindle Fire isn’t filled with surprise and delight moments. 

That doesn’t mean Amazon won’t sell millions of Kindle Fires.

What it might mean is that people will buy them, but they may not find much of an urge to actually use them, once the novelty wears off. Or, they may not find much reason to ever buy another tablet device from Amazon. Or, maybe no one ever talks about the Kindle Fire in a way that makes other people excited to own one as well.

Surprise and delight is the stuff of fanboy devotion. It’s the foundation of customer loyalty. It’s why Apple can lag way behind Android in units sold but still dominate mobile browsing statistics.

You can hate me for being an iOS fanboy, or call me a shill, but whether you like it or not, Amazon, at least, wants me to be an Amazon fanboy — Bezos wants to command a loyal army of Amazon fanboys — and he’s not going to get that through sheer volume.

“Meh” doesn’t build loyalty, or sell services.

Smartpost, indeed.

Smartpost, indeed.

Building a better comment system

Advertising Age, reporting on comments made by Gawker Media’s Nick Denton at the “Media Evolved” conference:

Owner of an online media empire that spans the flagship Gawker to sports-oriented Deadspin to io9 for sci-fi diehards and racks up a combined 20 million unique views per month, Mr. Denton told the audience that there are plans in the works for a product launch that would aim to enhance the commenting environment in the hopes of attracting smarter readers who are currently wary of entering the conversation.

Denton, of course, is right to want to fix this. I’ve got serious doubts, though, that Gawker Media is the conglomerate that is going to tackle and/or solve the problem of comment porn. 

Anyone with any interest in intellectual honesty will admit that the Gawker Media modus operandi is, by and large, controversy over quality. Nick Denton is in love with page views, and I doubt very seriously that there’s any real introspection going into this mystery product.

Gawker Media’s problems run too deep, and Denton’s interests are too aligned with the comment porn he’s decrying, for him to ever make a serious effort at managing it. 

But, he’s right about the problem, even if he’s (probably) full of shit about being able to (or even wanting to) fix it.

An organization that truly wants to offer a comment system that is as good as their best content must do a few things:

  • The site must offer content that is worthy of smart comments. If your best isn’t very good, game over. There’s no sense in hoping for comments that are smarter than the content you’re offering and, let’s face it, most of the Gawker Media sites aren’t offering smart content, produced by smart people, driven by smart focus.
  • The site must be willing to sacrifice page views in the short term and maybe even in the forever term. In some ways, doing this and doing it right will involve a line in the sand and choosing between conflicting reputations. I suspect Gawker won’t be willing to make this sacrifice, because they clearly love their tawdry, tabloid-style reputation. 
  • The site must understand the problem. There’s trolling, there’s commentary, there’s fake smart vs. real smart and there’s general chattiness. Denton, at least, seems to recognize that general chattiness is, in many cases, the biggest problem. Chattiness does not respect smart content and it does not engender intelligent commentary. Trolling, as Denton suggests (but as most sites don’t handle well enough, or with a firm enough hand) can be handled via deletions and censorship. (Let’s not pretend that removing content — even when it’s warranted — is anything other than censorship. Solving this problem will require an embrace of censorship, applied appropriately.) A site must assess what they’ll accept, and what they won’t, and curate for it. 
  • Solving the problem won’t be free. Sites which produce great content pay to get it. Sites which hope to produce great comments should, as well. This means hiring people who are smart, who like to talk about great content, and who are good at it. I’m not sure what you’d call them, but they’d be there to lead by example and to set the tone. They would, in essence, take ownership of the conversation.
  • Ideally, authors would take an active role in shaping the discussions found underneath their content. My experience on Gizmodo, though I don’t comment there, is that most of the authors are assholes who — if they participate at all — do so to feed trolls and/or ban those who disagree with their premise or call into question their intentions. Any site which is determined to include smart comments should make author participation a requirement.
  • Anyone who wants to participate in these smart comment threads, but who is not paid to do so, should only be allowed in based on reputation (invites, perhaps?) or via a premium pay wall. I’d pay $10 a year to jaw with smart people, over topics I’m passionate about, if I knew that I’d not have to put up with certain elements.
  • This should be a privilege, not a right, and it should be possible to lose this privilege. 
  • Comment threads shouldn’t go on forever. Conversations are best when they’re fresh. Some sort of self-destruct mechanism would be a good idea, at which point the conversation is there for posterity.
  • In this way, it would be possible to supplement great content with great commentary. One could be as important as the other.
  • Such as system wouldn’t necessarily have to replace a more traditional comment system, but it should be the more prominently featured system. (It might even be possible to recruit smart commenters from the traditional system, once they’ve proved their mettle.)

Again, I have my doubts that Nick Denton is taking this seriously enough to disrupt the worthlessness they’re facing, but it sure sounds good to make bold proclamations in interviews at tech conferences.

Any viable solution will require honest-to-God soul-searching and, frankly, Gawker Media doesn’t have the requisite soul. 

Raven

A few beta thoughts about the new Mac OS X browser, Raven:

  • It’s still in beta for a reason. In an hour or so of use, I’ve noticed a ton of bugs. (Key commands don’t always work and I’m typing this post in Safari because Tumblr’s formatting palette doesn’t bother to load in Raven.)
  • It’s still awfully fun to use, even with the to-be-expected bugs. 
  • I love the ability to install web apps of my favorite sites. Raven’s got me covered, for the most part, even in beta: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google Docs, iCloud, Daring Fireball, Pandora, etc., with the promise of more to come.

I’ve sent in some feedback on the apps implementation: 

The idea is that you can install a web app, and it will then provide one click access to the primary features of a given site.

For example, Tumblr’s app can take you straight to your dashboard or straight to the “create new text (or photo, or link) post” page.

The Daring Fireball app has links to John Gruber’s Twitter feed and the Talk Show podcast on the 5x5 Network. Each app is different, and they’re building an SDK so that developers can submit new apps, with custom features.

It’s very, very cool. 

The problem I’m running into is that it’s also very, very easy to get lost.

If I click on the Daring Fireball app, I can still navigate to other web pages while in that app. If I do so and then switch to a different app, it’s very easy to forget where I was when I viewed the other page, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to find this out, at a glance.

A related problem is that if I’m in the Daring Fireball app, manually navigating to the Tumblr website doesn’t automatically switch me over to the Tumblr app in the sidebar. 

Raven should be smarter than me: All my Tumblr activity should occur in the Tumblr app, all Twitter activity should occur in the Twitter app, etc, and this should all happen automatically. Why have a dedicated Tumblr app, if — sometimes — Tumblr’s web page can be loaded in the Daring Fireball app?

Similarly, anytime I visit a website that is not one of my installed web apps, that activity should be passed to the default Raven app — home base, if you will. Don’t clutter my web apps with unrelated web activity. (Exceptions could be made for links, or perhaps a key-command for “keep me in this app”.)

I’ve also noticed that if I’m in an app, and I already have a window open, clicking the icon for that page (for example, re-clicking the icon for the Talk Show web page in the Daring Fireball app) doesn’t refresh the page, as one would expect. Instead, it opens the same page in a new tab. This can quickly lead to tab bloat.

Lastly, the home page button should load the home page for whatever app you happen to be in, rather than the default Raven home page.

Beyond those issues, I’m really excited to follow along with the development process. I’ve never really gotten into Chrome, and Firefox is kind of a non-starter, for me, so it’ll be interesting to see if Raven can tear me away from my Safari rut.

So far, I really like that it feels fresh and that it offers a unique twist on the typical browsing experience.

Check it out.