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I’ve jumped on the e-reader bandwagon. I bought a kindle 3 a few months ago, and it was totally worth the $140. Compared to the traditional paperback, it has some downsides, but it also has some serious upsides. I guess I’ll start with the negatives:

Cons

1) Cost. First you have to buy the kindle, obviously. Then, sometimes you have to pay more for the books. There are often books which can be had for $4 shipping from third parties on amazon, for which you must pay $10 (or sometimes a bit more) to get the kindle version. On the flip side, if you do have to buy it at the new price, sometimes the kindle version is a bit cheaper, but not much.

2) Tactile navigation. Sometimes you just want to flip through a book: jump back 20 pages, read a second, then jump back 10 more, etc. Or, you just know by feel about where in the book something is, and you open and start searching. You lose this completely with the kindle. You can go the the table of contents and jump to a chapter, and you have the added ability to do a text search instead of random flipping, but sometimes you just want what I call tactile navigation.

3) Resale/lending. I can’t sell a book after I’m done with it, and I can’t really loan it to a friend. Amazon has just started a new loaner feature, but it is pretty restrictive, and only available on some books (as the publisher wishes). Basically, you can’t do it. Honestly, the only book I’m going to want to sell is the rare high value one.  Loaning is a bigger deal – I’ve already wished I could do this – but still not something I would do enough to really deter me.

Pros

1) Size. Some books are OK to carry around, some are big. More than one is almost always too much. With the kindle, any and all books fit into one slim package, which fits nicely into a cargo pocket, or is light in a backpack.

2) Convience. I never appreciated until I had it how nice it is not to have pages. You can set the reader down in front of you, without having to hold it open to your page. Outdoors when it is windy, there are no pages to get blown around. Page turns are just a button press (on either side of the device). There is never any excessive force required to open the book flat enough to comfortably read near the inner margins. I was surprised just how much nicer the kindle is to read.

3) Display. The e-ink display on this thing is awesome. I wouldn’t even consider an LCD display over this, color be damned. Easy on the eyes, comfortable in any lighting you could read a book in, never have to adjust screen brightness; it is also fine in sunlight. Not to mention the power savings. Interestingly, the display is never off. When you turn “off” the kindle, it just puts up a screensaver image until you turn it back on. You could remove the battery, and that screen will holds its display indefinitely with zero power. The only thing it really needs is color…but most books aren’t printed in color anyway.

4) Battery life. If you leave the wifi off, you can charge it every 3 or 4 weeks. You can travel with it, forget all about charging it, whatever. It is hard to run the battery out.

5) Dictionary. I’ll admit it: My vocabulary is so-so, and I don’t like having to find a computer to look up a word. With the kindle, I just put the cursor on a word I want to look up, and it searches for it in the installed dictionary, giving me quick access to the definition. I use this a lot. It’s handy.

6) Highlighting and search. Also handy is the ability to go back to interesting sections quickly. There are two ways I do this: a) Search the text or b) Save highlight sections. While reading, you can highlight a section, or add a note, and then recall those your notes/highlight sections later. It is kind of nice for someone with a bad memory, like me, to be able to finish a book, then look back at highlights to remind yourself of the interesting bits.

7) Preview.  It’s easy to download the first part of a book, and read that before buying it. This is probably as good a marketing technique for amazon as it is a convenience for me.

Overall, it has been great to have. I’ve played with the sony e-readers a bit, and they just don’t seem as polished. The browsing is not too hot, but it can work in a pinch, and it can even be useful for reading heavily text based sites..news feed, etc. You could also use it to look up a wikipedia page…if for some reason you don’t have your phone.

Hacks

If you do have a kindle, and are feeling a bit adventurous: Install this jailbreak for custom screensavers, fonts, etc.:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88004

I just finished the final excerpt from this book.  There is a similarly titled book by George H.W. Bush regarding the cold war, but that is of no relevance here.  I’m referring the the book subtitled “Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush”, compiled by Joshua Paddison.

I’m generally interested in the concept of history, but the usual fare of historical accounts bores the hell out of me most of the time. A big part of this is that most history is told by some unkown-to-me third-party expert, and I have little to no insight into where this expertise comes from and can’t seperate data from interpretation. The vision of events held in so-and-so’s head just isn’t interesting.

“A World Transformed” is a collection of excerpts from the journals and publications of a variety of contemporaries ranging from Spanish missionaries to merchant sailors, to overland American explorers. Most aren’t famous names you’ll ever see anywhere, but just some guy who happened to sail as crew on a merchant ship, or some unknown padre who kept a journal that survived to this day. All-in-all it makes for a readable, interesting account of life on the west coast between 1770, the influx of spanish missions, and 1848, when the gold rush hit the now American territory.

Not news, clearly, since it has become a best seller and has been all over the place, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I picked this book up in Ventura on the way to the beach because I needed something to read. I finished it the next day. It starts out with an interesting first hand account of growing up in a rural farming village in Malawi in the ’90s, then living through a famine year in 2001, before it gets into the events which really led to the book. This kid, after dropping out of school for lack of money, figured out he could build a windmill out of (mostly) bicycle parts to light his house (and eventually to pump irrigation water for his family’s farm).  He learned what little he knew about electricity from library books. Eventually the right people take notice, and he ends up invited to a TED event in Tanzania, where he begins to see a whole new world outside of his village (including his first google search).

I’ve been on a bit of a Swedish mystery kick recently. Just finished “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”, after waiting months for its (English) release since finishing the second book. I got completely sucked into all three of these books. They’re very good! There’s also a movie just released in the US of the first.

While I was waiting for the final in the Stieg Larsson series, I figured I would try some other Swedish fiction – since I’m in kind of a “Scandinavia (and Greenland!) is cool phase – and read a couple of the Inspector Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. I had previously read Depths by the same author quite by coincidence, but I didn’t find it at all interesting and never finished it. However, The Wallander books seemed highly recommended on the interwebs, so I thought I’d give them a chance. I’ve read the first two, and they’re OK; certainly interesting enough to finish (and maybe even buy the next in the series). But not great. They don’t keep me up nights, by any means.

I stopped by a Barnes and Nobles on a recent trip to Orlando, looking for something to read on the plane ride back home. I ended up walking out with “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments”, by George Johnson (Amazon). Although I could have saved $10 getting it on Amazon (why does anybody buy books at a place like B&N if they aren’t in a hurry?), I don’t regret it. It proved to be a short and enjoyable trip (the former perhaps being a requirement for the latter) through MORE than ten groundbreaking science experiments over the last four centuries, describing how many of the basic facts we now take for granted about our world were tweaked out by clever and persistent experimentation. He tells a great story, without overwhelming it with too much tedium to put you to sleep, but enough that I felt like I knew what was going on.

Although physics dominated, Johnson’s list covered everything from Galileo rolling balls down tracks and his clever mechanisms for timing them in order to discovere basic laws of acceleration, to William Harvey opening up the mysteries of the heart, to Millikan measuring the charge of an electron (and showing that charge was in fact carried by discrete particulars in discrete amounts), and even Pavlov and his salivating dogs made the list. It was an enjoyable, enlightening, and inspiring read. It makes me wish for the chance to discover some hitherto unknown fact about the universe that no human had ever before seen. It also made me appreciate some of the things that seem obvious now but weren’t always so obvious.

I’ve long thought that gasoline (and petroleum products in general) should be taxed a lot more than they are. People love to talk about the need to ween America off oil. You know, CO2 emissions, dependence on less than stable, not always friendly, developing nations, and all that. Every presidential candidate says it. But you can’t just say it and make it so! If you want to make alternatives more attractive, or if you think there are costs and risks embedded in the use of gasoline not accounted for in the price, the cost has to be increased! Yet, in the last Virginia Gubernatorial race, both candidates were promising explicitly NOT to raise gasoline taxes (I for one would have gladly voted for anyone willing to come out in favor, but the truth I’m afraid, is that most would not).

I was pleasantly surprised to hear Alan Greenspan, in his book, “The Age of Turbulence”, advocating a gas tax of $3/gallon or more.

I come very reluctantly to taxes as an alternative way to accomplish what competitive markets could do. But while oil markets are high competitive in the developed world, the market approach is clearly vulnerable in a world where a single act of terrorism can shut down massive chunks of oil production and cripple the global economy. There is no insurance, or hedging strategy, that can defend against that. We often forget that to function effectively, a competitive market must be voluntary and free of significant threats of violence, and that trade must be unencumbered. Remember, markets are not ends in themselves. They are constructs to assist populations in achieving the optimum allocation of resources.

And I really liked this:

I consider the argument that gasoline tax hikes are politically infeasible irrelevant. Sometimes the duty of political leadership is to convince constituencies that they are just plain wrong. Leaders who do not do that are followers.

He also advocated an increase in nuclear generation, which I think is great. The fear of nuclear power is significantly overstated.

There is, certainly, a short term economic cost to any increase in fuel pricing, just like there are losers for every economic shift (“Creative destruction”, to borrow Greenspan’s term). But, the fact is, it is going to have to happen, sooner is better than later, and talking about it won’t do it. America burns one out of every seven barrels of petroleum produced worldwide on its highways! That is a big chunk that could be significantly decreased fairly quickly.

On a related note: Greenspan is a really smart man, with a lot of experience, and his book is definitely worth a read. He covers everything from history, to current events, even looking a bit towards the future. It is a bit long, and has taken me a while to get through, but it has been more interesting than the couple other books I set aside in favor of it.

“The Age of Turbulence” at Amazon.com