I’m sorry, I can’t resist posting this.

My mom said she wanted a case for her Kindle 3 that comes with a built-in stand so she could stand it up to read while eating.  I sent her some links from Amazon to show the options and she chose one and I ordered it for her.  A few days later she received it and told me it was no good because it “has an unremovable band about 1 1/2 inches down the kindle which interferes with reading … so what should I do.”   Here’s Amazon’s picture of the case:

Yeah.

To be fair, she did eventually work it out on her own.  Well, she is 90.

As expected, Amazon announced a tablet computer yesterday under the Kindle banner.  They announced two new Kindle dedicated e-readers as well.  But their biggest announcement may be their new web browser – more specifically the technology behind it.

(all images via Mashable)

This is the Amazon Kindle Fire, a 7 inch tablet running Android that will sell for US$199.  It has a dual core processor, ultra-strong Gorilla Glass and has built in WiFi.  On the other hand, it has no built-in 3G capabilities, no camera and no microphone and has only 8 gig of RAM, non-expandable.  Its main purpose, at least for the first generation, seems to be as a content consumption device – specifically as a front end to the Amazon store.  No big surprise there.  You get free cloud storage via Amazon for streaming music and movies.  It can also do email and games and presumably run thousands of Android apps.  It is, at least for the time being, US-only.  The lack of 3G and the small amount of on-board memory are of course a big part of why the price is so low but these are also big drawbacks for me.

Overall, I think this stands the best chance of any non-Apple tablet of gaining a strong foothold in the market because it’s the first tablet I’ve seen that isn’t trying to just copy the iPad.  It is just what I expected from Amazon – that they would look at this in a different way.

Meanwhile the e-ink Kindle loses its hardware keyboard, gains a much-needed touchscreen and shrinks down in size.  The Kindle Touch will retail for US$139 with 3G and $99 for WiFi only.

And then the bottom (pun intended) of the line Kindle is just $79.  It doesn’t have a touchscreen – if you want to type, you have to negotiate an onscreen keyboard via the few provided buttons on the device.

One thing to note about all of the prices above is that those are devices that by default stream ads across the bottom of the screen, the so-called “special offers.”  An ad-free Kindle will cost you $30 more.  An ad-free Kindle Fire will run you an extra $40.

Amazon’s new Silk browser for the Kindle is said to be lightning fast because it splits the workload between the device it’s running on and Amazon’s EC2 cloud service.  Mashable reports, “In a demonstration at its press event in New York, Amazon loaded 53 static file images, 39 dynamic files, 30 Javascript files and three Flash files within seconds.”  Yes, for those who care, it runs Flash.

So the question I’m asking myself is, would I buy one?  I have no interest in the e-ink Kindles at this stage.  I find the Kindle software on my iPad is more than enough for me and my Kindle 2 has been gathering dust for months.

The Kindle Fire is another story.  Here’s how I look at it.  I’m able to buy content from the U.S. iTunes store because I maintain a U.S. credit card and a U.S. shipping address.  iTunes never bothers with geo-checking when I go to make a purchase; it simply looks at the address on my account.  In some ways, Amazon functions in a similar method.  I can get at their U.S. eBook store (a larger selection and cheaper prices than the international store) again because I have that U.S. card and address.  But when I’ve tried to purchase MP3s from them, they geo-check and the sale doesn’t go through.  This has happened even when I’ve used a VPN that makes it appear as if my computer is in the U.S.  (My VPN provider may have gotten smarter lately but I haven’t tried this in a long time – why go to all that hassle when I can get the same stuff, usually at the same price, via iTunes?)

So while I’d love to get my hands on that Amazon Silk browser and like the idea of sometimes going out with a smaller tablet (and I can get around the WiFi only by tethering to my iPhone), it’s the not knowing if the content streaming would work outside of the U.S. that gives me pause.  So while it’s tempting to order one now (and have it shipped to me via a friend in the U.S.), I’m going to hold off until I’ve read more about it.

I’ve just finished reading Patti Smith’s book, Just Kids, the Amazon Kindle e-book edition.  Even though I’m a huge fan of Patti’s, when the book came out the description didn’t seem that interesting to me and I didn’t go for it.  But I kept running across references to it and decided to give it a shot.   I’m glad I did – though getting the Kindle version may have been the wrong thing to do.  More on that later.

The book focuses in on the relationship between Patti and Robert Mapplethorpe, the often controversial photographer and artist.  It’s the tale of Smith leaving home in New Jersey, coming to New York without a penny in her pocket, living on the streets, meeting Robert and their lives together – at first romantic and then close friends.  It’s not a biography of Smith, per se, though it does mention her early artistic efforts, her poetry readings, how she met Lenny Kaye, how the Patti Smith Group came together.   And it’s not a biography of Mapplethorpe, though we do get to read about him gradually finding his vision.

The relationship isn’t romanticized in any way.  Smith’s prose is mostly short, sharp and direct – perhaps not what you’d expect from a poet.  She is astonishingly non-judgmental about Mapplethorpe.  She writes with no emotion about him going off at night to work as a male prostitute in Times Square, about him deciding eventually that he was gay, about the influence of S&M in his life and work (though not in their relationship).

The passages about their life when they lived in the Chelsea Hotel are inspired.  She effortlessly conjures up the scene at this landmark in the late 60s and early 70s.  She writes about meeting Jimi Hendrix, hanging out with Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter, meeting Salvador Dali, going to see the Velvet Underground at Max’s.   The funniest episode, to me, is the one about the night that Allen Ginsberg tried to pick her up at the Automat and then was crestfallen to discover that she was a she and not a he.

In other words, if these are people who interest you, the book is a great read.

However …. pricing first.   On Amazon, the hardcover edition sells for $14.33 and the paperback goes for $7.95.   The e-book is priced somewhere in the middle at $9.99.   “This price was set by the publisher,” we are informed by Amazon.  Okay, I sprang for the Kindle edition because I could get it instantly and figured that it would still be cheaper than buying it in a Hong Kong book shop.

But here’s the big problem.  Throughout the book, Smith writes about photos that she and Mapplethorpe took together and photos that he took of her.  And you want to see these photos that she’s writing about.  Except they’re not in the book.   I flipped around, I figured they had to be there somewhere.   But, no.   And finally, I got to the last page of the e-book where it says, “Some photographs not available for the electronic edition.”

Try NONE.  Only the cover photo.  It pisses me off to spend $2 more than the paperback edition and get LESS.   Basically Harper Collins came to the front door of my house, rang my doorbell and when I opened the door, they pissed on my shoes.

Now, this is partly my fault.  I knew I wanted the book so I didn’t bother to read the reviews on Amazon.  If I had, I would have seen:

Smith’s book is wonderful, yet Amazon failed to include the wonderful images included in the print edition. If they can include the cover image, what about the remaining catalog?

and

I want to point out that it is published by Ecco, which is a division of Harper Collins, because Harper Collins is no friend of e-books or the people who read them. The e-book versions of this book contain none of the beautiful images of the print version.

and other similar reviews.   I might add my review to those soon.

In summation, great book but shitty e-book.

Who knew Keith Richards would have such a good memory?

His autobiography, Life, came out yesterday.  The advance reviews were strongly positive and so I downloaded the Kindle ebook version last night.   I’m just two chapters in and loving it.

The book is said to cover a lot of ground – everything from his spats with Jagger to how he came up with some of the most important songs and guitar riffs of the past 50 years.   But beyond that, you know what you want from a Keith Richards book and he (and ghost writer James Fox – not the James Fox who costarred with Jagger in the film Performance) give it to you right from the beginning.   And it’s not just Richards telling a young female fan, “Whatever you’re listening to now, they wouldn’t have been there without me.”  And it’s not the bit about his grandfather, who greeted all his friends by saying, “Hello, don’t be a cunt all your life.”

Here’s a bit where he describes touring the American south in the 1960s.  This is the kind of stuff I was hoping it would have, and it does.

And there’d be a band, a trio playing, big black fuckers and some bitches dancing around with dollar bills in their thongs.  And you’d walk in and for a moment there’s almost a chill, because you’re the first white people they’ve seen in there, and the know that the energy’s too great for a few white blokes to really make that much difference. Especially as we don’t look like locals.  And they get very intrigued and we really get into being there.  But then we got  to get back on the road. Oh shit, I could’ve stayed here for days. You’ve got to pull out again, lovely black ladies squeezing you between their huge tits. You walk out and there’s sweat all over you and perfume, and we all get in the car, smelling good, and the music drifts off in the background.  I think some of us had died and gone to heaven, because a year before we were plugging London clubs, and we’re doing all right, but actually in the next year, we’re somewhere we thought we’d never be. We were in Mississippi. We’d been playing this music, and it had all been very respectful, but then we were actually there sniffing it. You want to be a blues player, the next minute you fucking well are and you’re stuck right amongst them, and there’s Muddy Waters standing next to you.  It happens so fast that you really can’t register all of the impressions that are coming at you. It comes later on, the flashbacks, because it’s all so much.  It’s one thing to play a Muddy Waters song.  It’s another thing to play with him.

Love it.

I’m off to New York City on Thursday, staying for just four nights.  Some might question why I’m going to spend 32+ hours in transit for such a short visit.  The answer is that having started a new job halfway through the year, I don’t get a lot of vacation days this year and I prefer to bank a bunch of days for a relaxing trip to some beach somewhere around December or January.  (Still debating on Thailand vs. Vietnam.)

I’m flying Cathay, and even in economy you get a video screen with a fair number of entertainment options, although it’s always possible that they won’t have anything screening that I want to see.  (Just checked – I’ve seen Iron Man 2.  That leaves me with Sex & the City 2, Nanny McPhee, A Team.  Yikes.)

Being the gadgetaholic that I am, I’ll be boarding the plane with my Kindle, 64 gig iPad and 32 gig iPhone.  I’ve got 4 books on the Kindle that I haven’t read.  A couple more books and some magazines on the iPad, not to mention a dozen movies and that will leave room for around 20 gigs of music.  The iPhone will be stuffed to the brim with music.  Hmmm …. 50 gigs of music, is that enough to choose from?  Fortunately my 160 gig iPod classic still works.

I’m taking advantage of the trip by buying a bunch of used stuff via Amazon and some other things that either don’t ship internationally or just get very expensive with international shipping and having it all shipped to my mom’s place.  (You can’t combine shipping on this used stuff unless you use a forwarding service like OneNow.com.)  I’ll be going to NYC with an almost-empty suitcase and returning home with an overflowing one.  Still have no clue what I’m going to buy my gf there and actually have no clue what to get for my mom as a gift.  (Off to Mong Kok later today to check around.)

My mom, at 89 years old, is a budding gadgetaholic herself.  She’s had her Kindle 2 for a year now and is debating on upgrading to the Kindle 3.  The smaller size and weight and better screen seem to add up to compelling reasons for her to upgrade.  The problem is that if she gets the $139 WiFi only model, she doesn’t know how to use File Manager to transfer downloaded files to the Kindle (and if I teach her, she’ll forget two days later).  So she could get the $189 3G+WiFi that works the same as the one she has now.  But she doesn’t want to spend the extra money.

And that’s about all for now.  Except to share some recent photos (all taken with my iPhone).

Interesting shop in Kennedy Town:

This is vaguely interesting.  In Sai Kung town, there’s a shop called Patsy House.  They’ve been here for years, maybe decades, and you can buy anything from a plug adapter up to a refrigerator or LCD TV from them.  They’ve got great and friendly service there and I am guessing just about everyone around here loves this shop.  A year or so back, they moved out of their back alley location to the main street, near McD’s and Star$’s.  Soon thereafter, a similar shop opened in their old location called Patsy Group.  I figured they still had the lease there and were now operating two shops in town.  But it seems that’s not the case.  The new shop just stole their name to try to get some of their goodwill for free.  Sleazeball jerkoffs. Here’s the “Statementn of Clarification” (sorry, a little blurry).

The sign for the free shuttle bus between Cyberport and Chi Fu.  No broads allowed.  Makes for a far less interesting ride.

Speaking of Cyberport, here’s something parked in the Cyberport garage that you don’t see every day in Hong Kong – a Cadillac!  (Well, I guess if you own it or you live near this guy you see it every day.)

Last but not least, decorations in town earlier this week for the Mid Autumn Festival.  Wish I had a different camera with me that night; it was charming stuff.

Well, to varying degrees.

Setting goals:

Got the above on Boing Boing.  Go to Boing Boing to get the credit & link to creator.

Spicy soda?  This company is making soda with chili and wasabi.

Go to The Awl to get the link.

Amazon says that for every 100 physical books they sell, they sell 180 eBooks.  And without giving away any numbers, they also say that since the iPad came out, the Kindle is selling at a faster pace.

When I was a teenager, I devoured “underground comix.  R. Crumb was (and remains) my favorite but my #2 was Gilbert Shelton and his Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (and the Fat Freddy’s Cat spin-off).  According to Never Get Out of the Boat, someone is scanning the old comix and putting them online.  Funny stuff, or at least it was funny when I was much younger and much higher.

And now a serious one – The Washington Post series on Top Secret America – “A hidden world, growing beyond control.”  I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing but what I’ve read so far is fucking scary shit.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

Now I lost the link but earlier today read a decent interview with Anthony Bourdain, fluffing for his new book, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.  (The link is to the Kindle edition.)

The interview promises that this is a sequel to his first best-seller, Kitchen Confidential, that it covers the 10 years in his life since it was published and he went from an obscure chef to a famous travel writer and TV host.   For me, Bourdain is the man.  Decades on drugs and earning peanuts working in shitholes, cleaning up his act, writing away in his spare time until his talent was recognized.   And I envy the way he envisioned a lifestyle for himself and then made it happen.   What better life than traveling the world, eating in some of the finest (and some of the least fine) restaurants, and getting paid roughly US$1.5 million per year to do so?

So yeah, I’m looking forward to reading this.  Hopefully I can make some time, I’m up to my eyebrows with work-related books at the moment and precious little time for those, though I suspect this will be a quick (and hopefully memorable) read.

Amazon.  Sigh.  Retail price on the print edition is $27.   Amazon price for the print edition is $15.  Amazon price for the e-Book edition is $13.   “This price was set by the publisher,” says Amazon on the product page.   Okay, I get the book instantly and save some shekels on shipping.  At least I won’t have to go through what I went through the last time I popped for a Kindle book only to find that I couldn’t read it using the Kindle app on my PC or iPad.

Well, if I’m gonna make some time to read it, no time like the present.

At least that’s how I see it.

Just bought an eBook from Amazon for my Kindle.

The book I bought was something work-related.  The list price on the physical book is US$35 bucks.  Amazon’s price on the physical book is $23.30 and the Kindle edition is $19.22.   Okay, only a $4 savings but I figure I’ll save on the shipping and the waiting time.  (Okay, if you must know, the book is “Team Leadership in the Game Industry” by Seth Spaulding.)

And so I click on “buy.”  Without noticing some of the small print first.

I’ve been using the Kindle application on my iPad.  My Kindle has been gathering dust on a table.  I pick up the iPad, start the Kindle app, go to archived items, select this new book and get a pop-up message – “This item is not available on Kindle for iPad.”  I go back to the Amazon web site and check the product page and I see something I missed before – “This title is for Amazon Kindle devices only.”

WTF?  I mean really, this is how Amazon is going to compete against Apple?  I thought they were saying that they are device-agnostic as long as people are buying books from them.  Obviously that ain’t the case.  So to Amazon Digital Services, Course Technology PTR (publisher of the physical book) and Delmar Learning (publisher of the eBook) or whichever one of you made this shitty decision – bite me.   Jeez louise, I might as well go back to those links about how to strip DRM from Kindle files and convert this thing to a PDF.   I’m honestly gob-smacked that they’re doing this.

Just checked, of course the title isn’t in Apple’s eBook store.

I’ve now had my iPad for just over 24 hours.  One of the things I’m most curious about is how it functions as an eReader, especially in comparison to the Kindle.   Since Amazon’s Kindle application is available for the iPad, I can access all of the e-books I’ve previously purchased on Amazon on the iPad.  I have not yet purchased any books from Apple’s iBook store.

The iPad is noticeably heavier than the Kindle.  The WiFi iPad weighs 1.5 pounds (0.68 kg) while the Kindle weighs 10.2 ounces (0.289 kg).  That might seem insignificant but I can tell you that when lying in bed, holding the reader with one hand, my hand never gets tired with the Kindle but my wrist starts acting up after 10 minutes of holding the iPad.  I should mention that at night, I use a clip-on light for reading with the Kindle; clearly this is not necessary with the iPad.

The Kindle’s e-Ink screen may seem dull by comparison but it’s easy on the eyes.  I can read for an hour without my eyes feeling tired.  I haven’t had a chance to read on the iPad for that long a period of time yet.  The Kindle app on the iPad allows for 3 different color schemes – black text on a white background (which is very bright), white text on a black background (I can’t imagine anyone preferring this) and black text on a kind-of-sepia background (which is my preference so far).   Like the Kindle itself, the Kindle app on iPad allows you to adjust text size – apparently one can also change the fonts using iBooks.

So here are some side by side comparisons.  Right now I’m reading The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins, a business book.

(The above is a jpg from the Amazon site.)

Side by side viewing pure text, the differences are not that huge.

But this book has lots of graphs and charts and I found them almost impossible to clearly read them on the Kindle, so much so that I was thinking I might have to go out and buy the physical book despite having already spent $10 on the eBook.

I don’t know if it comes through in the photos above, but the resolution seems higher on the iPad.   And reading on the iPad means you can take advantage of multi-touch and enlarge the charts or images as much as you’d like.  On the Kindle, you can click on the image to “zoom” but the zoom is not adjustable and the result is usually no more legible than it was before the zoom.

This to me represents a big win for the iPad over the Kindle.

Another book I’m reading right now is Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.

This book is filled with cartoon-y graphics.  They look better on the iPad.

The end result is more pleasing on the iPad although in this case, not that big a difference overall in terms of comprehensibility of the book itself.

Note that after using the iPad as a reader for awhile, when I went back to the Kindle, I forgot “where” I was and tried selecting menu items by touching the screen.  Obviously reaching out and touching something is more intuitive than going through a series of button pushes.  This is even more relevant when it comes to placing a bookmark by a relevant passage – with the Kindle, you can use control-B or select menu, scroll down to bookmark and then press enter; with the iPad just touch the screen once to have options appear and then touch the screen on the bookmark icon.

So overall, when it comes to pure text, the Kindle wins for me because I believe the screen is easier on the eyes and the weight is easier on the arms and wrists for long term reading.  But for anything other than pure text, the Kindle app on the iPad wins hands down.

The differences are even larger when it comes to PDF files.  Trying to read PDF files on the Kindle is a disaster.  Reading them on the iPad is a joy, thanks to a $0.99 app called Good Reader.  Unlike the PDF reader built into Dropbox, Good Reader handles massive PDF files with ease, including having the ability to search the text.  The original iPhone version of this app required you to use a separate application to send PDF files to the iPhone.  They’ve now updated it on both platforms and it’s a simple matter of drag and drop the files from Explorer into iTunes.   And the result?

Again, you can use multi-touch to zoom the text.  I didn’t even bother to load this file onto the Kindle, it would have been a waste of time – of course the graphic would have been grey instead of color and the text would have been so small as to be totally illegible and not re-sizable.

Last thing for now, a quirk with the Kindle store.  Rework is $9.99 in the U.S. Kindle store and $11.99 in the international shop – a $2 surcharge is built into every title to cover the “cost” of downloading the book over 3G but this surcharge applies regardless of how you purchase the book.   My Kindle is registered in the U.S. with a U.S. address and credit card, so I can access the U.S. store.  But using the Kindle app over WiFi, signed into my U.S. account, Rework would have cost me $11.99.  I went back to my PC, bought the book for $9.99, downloaded the file to my PC and transferred to the Kindle via USB.  I then went to the iPad and the Kindle app, selected “archived items” and was able to download the book to the iPad over WiFi for free.  I don’t understand why Amazon would charge that $2 surcharge for a WiFi download even if it detects via my IP address that I’m outside of the U.S.

I’ll be posting more reviews and thoughts on the iPad later on as I continue to test out other apps.  I can say that last night, sitting in a bar, doing email and Twitter on the iPad was a pure joy, a seriously improved experience over doing the same tasks on the iPhone.   I have encountered one minor bug so far – sometimes when I connect the iPad to my computer, iTunes thinks it’s an iPhone and tries to delete all of the iPad-specific apps from it.  The first time this happened, I didn’t catch it in time (because I wasn’t expecting it).  So then I had to reconnect, reinstall those apps and then go back into some of the apps and get them set up again.  A minor inconvenience but an inconvenience nonetheless.

This is not good news for people who read eBooks.  The New York Times reports today that Amazon has sent a detailed list of demands to publishers who want Amazon to continue selling electronic versions of their books.  These include locking the publishers into restrictive three year contracts.  A couple of months ago, when Amazon was in a dispute with publisher Macmillan, they temporarily removed “buy” buttons from all the Macmillan books on their web site.

While Amazon today has 90% of the eBook market in the US, they are clearly anticipating heavy competition from Apple’s iPad, which will hit stores in 15 days.  Apple has signed deals with 5 of the 6 major American publishing houses to sell eBooks in their new iBookstore.   Apple’s contract, interestingly enough, states that publishers cannot allow any other retailer to sell eBooks at a lower price than the price on Apple’s store.  I wonder if this is even legal?

Far from pushing prices down, prices for eBooks are rising.  Most best-sellers will now cost $12.99 or $14.99 rather than the $9.99 price that Amazon was trying to standardize.

In the battle between Amazon and Apple, the first loser will be the consumer.