There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Thanks, Kung Fu Monkey.

The first distinctive thing about it is the display. Rather than using the LCD or OLED screens that are common on laptops and cell phones, the Kindle uses electronic paper, a display made up of thousands of tiny capsules filled with black and white particles that can be dragged to the top or to the bottom electronically. It functions (and looks) a bit like a high-resolution Magna Doodle.

This screen provides a couple of advantages: first, it gives the kindle a distinctive, book-like appearance. Though the 800×600 display isn’t quite as high-resolution as print, it looks very good, and the four gray scales allow for some basic graphics and diagrams to be included (and some lovely screen savers). One might reasonably wish the background color were a purer white, rather than a light grey, but the constrast ratio is still very high, close to that of a newsprint. Second, the electronic paper display is extremely power-efficient. Because it only draws power when it is changed, the Kindle can run for up to a week on a single charge — something unheard of with emissive displays. Third, because it is reflective, it can be read in all the same conditions one could normally read a book — bright sunlight presents no problems. (The ironic flip side of this advantage is that you need a book light to read it in a dark room.)

The second distinctive thing about the Kindle is that it has a built-in wireless data connection that runs over Amazon’s Whispernet service. Amazon subsidizes the service through device and electronic book sales — it doesn’t cost anything to use. It’s built on the cellular phone network, and therefore has excellent coverage, though the bandwidth is fairly limited. However since it’s used primarily as a delivery mechanism for textual content, that’s rarely a concern. One can use the device to grab a sample of a book from the Kindle store nearly instantly, and can download an entire purchased book within about a minute.

According to the hackers, the software that runs the whole show is largely Java on top of Linux. However, as a user, you’ll never be aware of the fact. The system is controlled with an easy-to-use system of menus which are almost entirely accessed through a little scroll wheel. I gave Kathy (who will be the first to admit that she’s no big fan of technology) 20 seconds of instructions on how to use the scroll wheel while we were driving to San Antonio last week, and she, without further help, kept herself entertained for the two hour car ride downloading sample books, reading, and exploring the device — an impressive testament to its ease-of-use.

There is currently no SDK for the device, so one is limited to running the applications that Amazon ships with it. Amazon has hinted that they might consider creating an SDK in the future, but hasn’t made any official announcements yet. Even so, the Kindle is quite functional. One can, of course, buy and download books from Amazon’s library at rates substantially lower than what one would pay for a hardcover edition. Amazon also has a conversion service where you can send a variety of document types to a special email address and have them converted into a format viewable on the Kindle. It costs $0.10 to have the document sent to your Kindle over Whispernet, but is free if you use the included USB cable to put it on the Kindle yourself. Since the Kindle registers itself as a standard mass storage device, you can transfer files to it easily using a computer with Mac OS, Windows, or Linux with no additional drivers.

Amazon also includes several experimental applications, including a music player, a human-backed question answering service, and, most interesting, a basic web browser. While the browser doesn’t support a lot of advanced features, it works well for browsing well-formatted content, and is even quite usable for some web applications. I’ve been able to update my Twitter while walking home, though haven’t yet convinced it to display my RSS feeds in Google reader. Though the browser isn’t as good as Mobile Safari, its reliance on the cellular network means that I can use it in many more places than the iPod Touch, which relies on having a wireless access point nearby.

While the Kindle has a lot to recommend it, it’s not perfect. The display takes about 3/4 of a second to refresh when you move from page to page. It’s very easy to hit the Next Page and Previous Page buttons by accident. It’s rather homely. Purchased books are wrapped up in DRM. And it’s expensive.

However, by taking advantage of its unique place in the book selling market, Amazon has managed to create the most viable electronic book yet. For the traveler, the reader, or the person who needs convenient access to a reference library, it’s a very compelling product — and a lot of fun.

• Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical: Shane Claiborne, the author of this book, is an interesting cat. He’s passionately devoted to the idea of living according to Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament, especially with regard to the poor and disenfranchised. I particularly enjoyed his accounts of time serving alongside Mother Teresa and as a peace emissary in Iraq. He also is engaged in some of the intentional community stuff that I get worked up about from time to time, and so found a particularly receptive audience in me. Stimulating and well worth the time, even if you don’t agree with Shane’s conclusions.
• Little Brother: Cory Doctorow’s latest, in which a teenage boy runs afoul of the Department of Homeland Security and, after being released from a secret detention facility, decides to try to take the DHS down using a variety of interesting technology and tricks and teaching the reader about them along the way. A very-near-future dystopian novel in the vein of 1984 or Brave New World, I found it very compelling reading. One of the great things about Doctorow’s work is that he makes it available under a Creative Commons license, which means you can download and read his book for free! [Exercise for the reader: compare Doctorow's insistence here that privacy is vital to a free society with David Brin's insistence that privacy is a lost cause and visibility should be embraced instead in The Transparent Society.]

Do you have any recent favorites? Post them in comments! I’d love some good summer reading.

Playdate with my dad pg 1

“OOOOOOH” this is going to be fun I said gleefuly on an early summer morning.  I am going on a very long play date with my dad. “It is going to be so fun” I said. First we went to a place called Peter Pan’s Mini Golf. I got a black putter with shiny new ornge ball. My dad got an ornge putter with a Shiny yellow ball. I got almost every hole a hole in one but two of them got hole in twos and one hole in three. one of the holes had a hill and I got a hole it two on that one. It was so fun at the mini golf place. Next we went to a very fun place called kid town. they have more mini golf, basketball, three playgrounds and a singing area (which you know I did not go on). First I played basket-ball. It made me so tird that I had to drink almost a gallon of water. Then I went back and played some more. Next I went and played on the playground for a very long time. my dad look lots of pictures of me.

Playdate with my dad pg 2

Next we went to a resaruant called the Alamo Steak house. I found a gum-ball machine and if you got a black gum ball you got a free meal and guess what!? I got one of the black ball’s so we got a free meal and I chose the all you can eat buffett. I nearly barfed because I ate so many fries! Next we went to go swim in the San marcos river. I was collecting rocks for my collection. I found a heart Shaped one and gave it to my dad. Next we played with water guns and water balloons up in the grass. I acidentaly knocked my dads glasses of his head but luckily he found them in the tall green grass. next we went to mr. gatties and ate pizzia. It tasted very good. Next we went to the game Room. I had one hundred tokens and i bet you can’t guest how many tickets I got!? four thousand eight hundred thirty seven. i got a pool table, lava lamp, glow in the dark things, a pretend samiri sord and too-tsie Rolls. Next we went home wathch pirates of the caribean and went to bed.

• First mass-market use of electronic paper for a display. I wonder what the resolution is like? Ah, 800×600 with 4 levels of gray. (By comparison, the iPhone is 480×320, though it’s smaller and full color.) The screen refreshes in the video are kinda wacky. Pros: high contrast, shatter-resistant, low power draw. Cons: you need a booklight to read your electronic book! (Thanks to Mark for pointing that out.)
• I really like the idea of being able to buy and have a book available in a minute or two, especially given that they appear to be selling for much less than their hardcover equivalents. Yay, cheap!
• They tout the ability to read blogs, but apparently only those that Amazon chooses. I hope they update it to support any RSS feeds, though given that they have to make enough money on it to pay for the wireless service they supply, that may be challenging.
• I wonder what the headphone port is good for? Are there audiobooks in its future? Text-to-speech? Nobody seemed to use it in the videos.
• There’s a USB port and another port or two I wasn’t able to immediately identify on the bottom of the thing. It should be interesting to see what the Internet hackers are able to do with the gadget.
• The decision to use a cellular network is an interesting one. Pros: coverage everywhere, low power. Cons: because piggybacking on someone else’s data network costs them money, they’ll have to pay for that somehow. Thus, free content (such as individual’s weblogs) will be hard to come by.
• You know what else this ought to connect to? Allrecipes.com. I’d love to have a giant virtual cookbook on my kitchen counter.
• The “Email a Word file and have it sent wirelessly to your Kindle” feature is pretty cool. Nice to have easy access to reference copies of your personal documents. Seems like Doctors and Lawyers would really dig this aspect of it.
• 256MB of internal storage seems a little paltry, but I guess if you’re storing compressed text, it would go a long way.
• Maximum operating temperature is 95°? So much for using it outside in Texas summers.
• I expect the Amazon content will have DRM slathered over it. It would be very nice if one could also put one’s own content (like Project Gutenberg texts) on via the USB port without wrapping it up in some wacky rights management scheme.
• It sure is homely.

Thanks for all of your stories, words and wisdom, Madeleine. May they enrich many generations to come.

If you have an interest in this sort of literature and listen to podcasts, it would be well worth your time to take Escape Pod for a test drive.

P.S. I don’t remember where I came across this podcast. If you tipped me off to it and I’m dissing you by not acknowledging that, let me know and I’ll remedy the oversight!