Posted by Scott Laird
Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:53:00 GMT
So, after thinking about it a bit, I went out and ordered an Amazon Kindle ebook reader. It arrived last Tuesday, just in time for me to take it with me on Wednesday’s flight to California. The Kindle let me leave 5 lbs of books at home and cut a couple inches off the thickness of my laptop bag, which was a pretty substantial improvement over the previous week’s flight.
Over the past 5 days, I’ve read 3 complete novels on it–Thirteen, All Tomorrow’s Parties, and Slaughterhouse 5. All three were purchased from Amazon and downloaded to the Kindle over the air; I’ve also stuffed the Kindle with a few free ebooks from tor.com; their moble editions convert perfectly for the Kindle via Amazon’s free email converter. After reading 900-ish pages on the Kindle, I’m about 95% happy:
- The screen’s great. The print quality and contrast feel slightly better then a mass-market paperback. Yeah, the background’s kind of grey and there’s a very small amount of roughness to the letters, but you have to go looking for it to see it. It’s a 160 DPI display, just like the iPhone. I haven’t clocked myself reading, but it doesn’t feel any slower then reading paper books, and it hasn’t left me with a headache or anything. It’s substantially better then reading novels on a laptop (which I’ve done at least 3 times this year).
- The software’s pretty good. It’s better then anything I’ve seen from a non-Apple, non-Tivo consumer electronics product in years. My only concern is the book selector UI–it turns into a big cluttered mess once you get more than 30 or 40 items on it. I’d love to be able to organize books by read/unread status, genre, etc., but that’s not really possible right now. Instead, you get a list that you can sort by access time, author, or title. It’s okay, but not great. Considering that I could probably cram 2,000+ books onto a SD card in the Kindle’s SD slot, a simple sorted list really isn’t good enough. On the other hand, with a couple dozen files total it’s not a huge issue, and it’ll probably be fixed in a future software update.
- It’s reasonably fast. Waking from sleep takes around 10 seconds, and flipping pages takes a second or so. In either case, it’s not really any slower then picking up a paperback, stowing the bookmark somewhere, and figuring out which page I was on, or simply flipping pages. It’s not instant, but it’s fast enough for now.
- The overall size is fine. It’s almost exactly the same size as a DVD case, so it doesn’t fit into most pockets, but it’s still easy to keep around.
- The next page/previous page buttons are too big. They make it hard to pick the Kindle up without accidentally flipping pages, and they constrain the number of ways that you can comfortably hold it in your hand.
- The DRMed book selection from Amazon is still kind of small (around 130,000 volumes, or the same as a mid-sized Barnes and Noble store), but it’s not horrible. I haven’t had any problem finding books from my to-read list on Amazon’s Kindle store. In addition, a number of publishers have released free books in Kindle-compatible formats (like Tor and Baen. I have 4 or 5 Tor books on mine ready to go when I get a chance.
All in all, I’m happy with the Kindle. It’s Good Enough. As things stand, I’m probably going to switch to buying most of my books in Kindle-compatible formats going forward, partly because they’re more portable, and partly because I’m getting tired of the sheer size and physicality of regular books. I’ve ripped all of my CDs and most of my DVDs and I haven’t looked back. It’s just easier to have them in electronic form, and I’m happy to have the space back that all of the disks took up. I used to have 2 or 3 shelves full of disks, but I still have an entire room full of books. I’d be just as happy if I could get most of them in a DRM-free ebook form, but even DRM-encumbered Kindle files are still an improvement for most of my reading.
Tags books, kindle | 3 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 02 Oct 2007 07:33:15 GMT
Today’s the big release day for Charlie Stross’s new book, Halting State. I had the good fortune to pick up a review copy through work last week, since we’re one of the official stops on his tour schedule (w00t!).
Short review: go buy it. You can thank me later.
Slightly longer review:
Stross is my favorite science fiction (-ish) author right now, and has been for a few years. He’s written a number of amazing short stories, but his novels have been a bit hit-or-miss. The Atrocity Archives is deeply awesome, as is Accelerando (which is basically a collection of 9 of his short stories), but Singularity Sky didn’t really work for me.
Halting State, on the other hand, is the best science fiction novel that I’ve read in years; perhaps since The Atrocity Archives. Like most of his work, Halting State is less scifi then “geekfi”–it’s about people and technology extrapolated slightly into the future.
In this case, it’s set in 2014-ish Scotland, newly independent from England. It all started with a police call. The caller, panicked, reported a theft. Something about a bank robbery, which made the police operator sit up and take notice, until the caller started blathering about orcs and a dragon. They didn’t send anyone out to investigate until the second call, which still had orcs and the dragon, but sounded more insistent. The detective follows the address provided and ends up in the middle of nowhere, at a former nuclear command bunker surrounded by expensive cars, to discover that someone did rob a bank. Not a brick-and-mortar bank, though–this bank’s is inside of a MMORPG. The total take? About 120 million Euros, once you count the ebay-able value of the missing goods and the hit to the newly-IPOed “in-game economic stabilization” company. The dragon blew the doors off of the bank and the orcs grabbed the loot. They escaped into a portal to another MMORPG where the bank’s managers don’t have root access. The cop’s stumped–how do you investigate this? You can’t dust for dragon prints. So she logs back into CopSpace to see what she can find…
By the time Stross is done, he’s wrapped up gaming, gamers, virtual reality, cryptographic security, in-game economics, the nanny state run amok, mobile phones, and something much more sinister then any of the characters expected to find.
Just go read it, and thank me afterwards. Or thank Stross, that’s probably more appropriate.
Tags books, stross | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 24 Oct 2003 18:35:19 GMT
Amazing–a book on role-based access control. Enhanced security models like RBAC and MAC have been making their way into Unix and Linux for years, but I still haven’t found a good introduction to either model. Maybe this is finally it. The Linux Journal reviews it:
A good overview of implementing RBAC in the enterprise for students as well as corporate-level decision makers. [Linux Journal]
Amazon has it for $79, or £55 from amazon.co.uk.
Interestingly enough, the UK Amazon has an ebook on HIPAA and RBAC that I didn’t see when searching on amazon.com. That’s strange because HIPPA is a US thing, not a UK thing. I’m not particularly interested in HIPAA, though, and I prefer paper books.
Posted in Books, Computer Security, Computer System Administration, Work | Tags books, rbac, security | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 20 Oct 2003 07:02:09 GMT
I finally finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. I can’t believe it took most of a month to read it, but I’ve been juggling kids, work, house cleaning, and a few other projects, and I never seem to have time to read any more. All in all, it’s an interesting book, but it’s not at all what I was expecting. Most of his previous works were more or less science fiction, up until Cryptonomicon, which was more “geek fiction” then anything else; it’s frequently called SciFi anyway though, because no other description fits it any better. Before Quicksilver, I’d have ranked Cryptonomicon in his top three, along with Snow Crash and Zodiac (I’m probably in the minority on Zodiac, but I liked it). Some days, I like it better then Snow Crash, and other days it’s down to number 2 or 3, but it’s always up there somewhere.
Now Quicksilver has jumbled things up a bit. First, it’s even less SciFi then Cryptonomicon (although there’s always the Enoch problem in both books). At least it fits into an identifiable genre–it’s clearly historical fiction (err, mostly–Enoch). But, it’s geeky historical fiction, where technical and philosophic advancements mean at least as much as political events, but the two are starting influence each other, as science begins to emerge and the modern world starting being constructed.
I’m going to reserve final judgment on Quicksilver until I’ve had time to read the rest of the set–The Confusion is supposed to be out in April, and System of the World is due out late next year. Quicksilver is clearly just Act 1; at the end you’re aware that he’s spent a lot of time setting up events that are going to take a long time to resolve. Except, since it’s historical fiction, it’s obvious what’s going to be happening–of course Charles II died, leaving the throne to James II. Of course William of Orange took it from James. Of course it passed from William and Mary to Anne, and then onto Sophie’s offspring. Any history book (or Wikipedia) will tell you that. Somehow, though, Stephenson manages to make all of that as interesting as the gold hunt in Cryptonmicon. So, even though he managed to leave characters hanging in the most irritating places at the end of this book, I’m looking forward to the next installment in the set. Even though I already know how it’s going to turn out.
Posted in Books | Tags books, quicksilver, stephenson | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 14 Oct 2003 23:00:47 GMT
Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt’s The Pragmatic Programmer is one of the best programming books that I’ve read in years. Dave’s talk at last year’s Ruby Conference was one of the highlights of the event for me. Now, they’re back with a pair of new books:
It’s been a busy couple of months here as we prepare to launch our
new book-printing imprint, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. We spent the
year writing the first two books, Pragmatic Version Control and
Pragmatic Unit Testing. [PragDave]
Time for two more entries on my to-read list.
Posted in Books, Computer Programming | Tags books, pragmaticprogrammers, programming, ruby | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 01 Oct 2003 22:49:36 GMT
I’ve been slowly working my way through Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. It’d be a faster read if I actually had time to sit down and read it–as it is, I don’t think I’ve managed more then 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading in over a week. So far, it’s proving to be a fascinating read, but not for the reasons that I expected–the history in this book is really the fascinating part. I’m not sure how historically accurate all of it is (I should really check when I’m done), but the way he presents the origin of the scientific age is deeply thought-provoking.
Posted in Books, Personal | Tags books, quicksilver, stephenson | no comments
