Odds & Sods 1

E-Readers: It'll be a little while before I enter chapter 2 of my Kindle Kronicles, but this article from Wired.com offers a nice pro/con on all of the e-readers currently on the market. E-Book Reader Roundup: Samsung's Papyrus Joins the Crowd | Gadget Lab from Wired.com.

Editors Wanted: Here's an excerpt from a review in today's Wall Street Journal of a history of Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the TV series). What error jumps out at you (but apparently not at the editor)?

"With this world as a backdrop, Henry Gray (1827-61) began climbing the professional ladder at St. George's Hospital in London at age 15. He didn't attend a university before starting his studies at the famed medical school attached to the hospital, and even then he focused on surgery instead of becoming a general practitioner, or apothecary-surgeon, as those doctors were then known. .. If Gray skipped a university education by choice, Henry Vandyke Carter (1831-97) initially went without one from necessity. His family was too poor to send him to college, so in the late 1840s Carter enrolled at St. George's -- Gray, 10 years his senior, was already teaching and working at the hospital -- and studied to become an apothecary-surgeon..."

My Day Job: I'm often asked, "But what you do every day at work, really?" My answer is us, "I usually don't know until I get there." This blog is not about my work, but now I will be blogging at work. Check out Comcast's brand-new blog, where you can see a couple of my postings.

Hot List: I subscribe to a few email services - from Amazon, Fodor, and others - that direct me to neat stuff on the Web or in the physical world. I often get a charge out of Very Short List, which lands in my inbox a couple of times a week. Among the things they've flagged for me recently: rare video of a '70s appearance by George Harrison on Eric Idle's "Rutland TV" comedy series where Harrison plays a pirate; the live performance archives of KEXP Seattle, a station that appears to be right up there with WXPN Philadelphia and KCRW Santa Monica as a live-acts showcase for modern music; "The End," a terrific collection of "end cards" from movies and TV shows -- no clues, you have to guess where they originally appeared; "The Big Picture," a photoblog by Alan Taylor of the Boston Globe, with huge, crystalline digital photos of news events great and small. Fun, and the price (free) is right. (BTW, Comcast Interactive Media owns a similar service, Daily Candy, that focuses on stuff of interest to women.)

The Kindle Kronicle, Ch. 1

I wasn't convinced to try out the original Kindle, but I've now had the Kindle 2 for about a month. On balance, it's a very good device -- not as life-changing as the Logitech Squeezebox, but certainly a keeper. As I live with it, I'll add chapters to my Kindle Kronicle.

The form factor is pretty good. You wouldn't want to hold the bare Kindle 2 tablet in your hands for several hours, but when you wrap one of the available leather covers around it, you can cradle it comfortably like a small hardcover book.

I'm not crazy about the screen size -- it's about 4 3/4" high by 3 1/2" wide, or smaller than the copy hole the a typical page of a mass-market paperback. You can adjust font sizes across six settings (and you can make it large enough not to need reading glasses, even if you're one of us "older/senior bloggers") -- but obviously, the larger the type, the less copy on the screen (at the second-largest font size, you get about 55 words on a page). The contrast of black type on light grey background is pretty good. The screen is not backlit, so you will need ambient light to read, just as you would with a book. Conveniently, Amazon will sell you a clip-on booklight that is adapted to the Kindle 2.

You turn the pages by clicking on a "next page" button that you can hit with your thumb. It appears on both the left and the right edges of the device. (There's also a single "previous page" button inconveniently located in the middle of the left side.) A small number of other buttons let you navigate through a book's contents, do searches, look up definitions, connect wirelessly with Amazon, and so on. I think it will take me a while to get over watching the page "turn negative" when you click "next page" -- the screen briefly flashes black with white type as it resets and calls up the next page -- but I suspect it just becomes part of the rhythm after a while.

I'll be curious to see how these buttons hold up to frequent use. Also, there's a keyboard to let you do searches, annotate your copy, and so on, but it may be the second-worst keyboard I've seen on a device after the iPhone/iPod touchscreen. (I haven't played with the Blackberry touchscreen, which I understand may fall even lower on my list).

Here's what's truly great about the Kindle 2:

* Instant wireless downloads -- you can sample the first chapter for free from just about anywhere, and if you're ready to buy, one click generates a wireless download that's complete in about 60 seconds.

* Huge storage capacity -- you can carry around 1500 books, periodicals, and other documents -- and if you run out of space, you can store the rest in your Kindle account online and swap them out at your convenience. (One long-term question I've got, to which I hope the answer is a simple "yes" -- will all future Kindles and Kindle reader software on other devices be backward-compatible?

* The Kindle online library -- they currently count around 240,000 volumes -- if you're looking for best-sellers, I'd say about 50-60 percent of them are available for Kindle. There are also a number of leading newspapers and a small number of top magazines, including The New Yorker.

* The voice-reader feature -- could be a breakthrough for people with disabilities... and I see a day when my favorite Wall Street Journal stories are read to me while I commute to the office. I read that, over objections from some publishers and authors, Amazon has decided to give them the ability to authorize or prohibit the use of the reader for the works they own. I hope they'll be inclined to opt-in -- after all, the reader is cool, but it's not going to replace John Lithgow or David Sedaris or Barack Obama's unique voices.

What needs improvement? In addition to some of the features mentioned above:

* A shortage of reference books -- the Kindle 2 will be a terrific way to bring cookbooks along when you're at the beach house, or travel guides when you're visiting a couple of countries and don't want to carry 10 pounds of bulky guides... right now, however, Kindle is short in both of these categories, and in others like music buyers' guides (though they do have "1001 Recordings to Hear Before You Die," which, unfortunately, I bought in paperback the day before my Kindle 2 arrived). Frommers, Time Out, Lonely Planet -- get with the program.

* Not enough public domain stuff -- when I tried out a Sony e-Reader last year, they offered me 100 free books from a large, predominantly public-domain library the moment I signed up. No such thing with Kindle 2 (unless I missed an e-mail somewhere)... searching the free public domain stuff on the Kindle site seems deliberately difficult. I did manage to find the Bible, the Koran, some Yeats poetry, Machiavelli, Mark Twain, Homer, Henry James and a few others... I'll let you know how the translations and chapterizing are. Where are the gazillions of public domain volumes that Google has put online?

* Newspapers and magazines -- I'd like to see the price of The Wall Street Journal bundled with my daily print paper and my wsj.com subscription... I'd like to see The Economist and The Atlantic and a few other quality "keeper" magazines.

An interesting development since my Kindle 2 arrived was Amazon's decision to release Kindle software for the iPhone (the device with my least-favorite keyboard). I may give that a try on my iPod Touch, but I can't see it as a replacement for serious reading.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be reading some books on the Kindle 2 for purposes of preparing a couple of speeches. I'll be interested to see how the features that let me pull quotes and insert my own comments work -- that may be key to our long-term relationship.

Creating the (Almost) Perfect Internet Music System

The secret to a perfect world is having the right music playing at the right time. Thanks to the Internet, perfection is within reach.

Earlier this year, I purchased a device called a Squeezebox (which, of course, immediately appealed to me because of the play on words with the musical instrument with which I've shared five decades of my life). It's made by Logitech, best known for their mice and keyboards. You can purchase one of these devices through Amazon:



Squeezebox accesses Internet radio either directly through an Internet connection or by wireless connection to your PC or Mac. You can easily program your Squeezebox by using the Squeeze Network website. It gives you ready access to hundreds of over-the-air and Internet radio stations around the globe, as well as subscription online services like Last.fm, Rhapsody, and my particular favorite, Pandora.

Pandora is available for free (with ads) or by subscription (for $36 a year, ad-free). The service allows you to create an endless number of "radio channels" based on your preferences for particular artists and songs. Based on elaborate automated analysis of musical artists, songs and styles (they call it the Music Genome Project), and your own thumbs-up/thumbs-down ratings as you hear songs, Pandora learns your preferences (much as Amazon or TiVo) do and populates your channels with songs and artists that meet your preferences.

If your musical tastes are pretty straightforward (alt-rock, pop, jazz, hip-hop, punk, etc.), you can find a large number of pre-assembled stations or to quickly put together several of your own. If your tastes run a broader gamut, it can be more of a challenge. I had great success assembling a Leo Kottke Radio channel that brings together many of my favorite folk-oriented guitarists (Kottke, John Fahey, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Jorma Kaukonen, Doc Watson, Norman Blake, and on and on). Pulling together an Africa Radio station was tougher, as only about a third of the artists I searched for are currently available on Pandora. And certain classes of artists (e.g., the ruminative jazz from ECM Records) are thin because of limits on Pandora's ability to license music. In total, I've got nearly 100 radio channels on Pandora, from "Alternative One Radio" (Iron and Wine, Sufjan Stevens, Of Montreal) to "Jazz Ruminations Radio" (Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, Bill Evans, Brad Mehldau), from "Jazz Vocal Solos Radio" (Chet Baker, Jamie Cullum, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dorough) to "Sigur Ros Radio" (Sigur Ros, Slaraffenland, Efterklang).

But taken together, the Squeezebox plus Pandora is something close to sonic heaven.

Since I'm a Mac user, I do have one gripe -- while Squeezebox lets me access all the MP3 music in my iTunes directory (whether from discs or downloads), the Apple folks won't let Squeezebox users access their iTunes music downloads... another good reason not to buy from the iTunes Store.

Squeezebox is one a handful of good Internet radio alternatives on the market -- the Sonos system is particularly impressive - but if you already have a good whole-house audio system, or your coverage needs are simpler, the Squeezebox brings the world of Internet radio anywhere in your home at a great price.