Archive for the 'Reading' Category

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Amazon CEO Says Kindle Will Salvage Long-Form Reading

Published by Jarred on May 3, 2008 in Books, Business, Consumer Behavior, Gadgets and Reading. View Comments

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, recently sent out his annual letter to shareholders [warning: PDF file]. I’m not a shareholder [yet], but the letter is currently linked on the Amazon homepage.

Bezos writes almost exclusively about the Kindle, the e-reader created and sold by Amazon that seems to be constantly going out-of-stock. While the whole letter is interesting and informative, I found that one paragraph in particular clarified something about the Kindle that I hadn’t though about before: the Kindle not as the harbinger of informational ADD, but as the savior of long-form reading as we know it. I especially like the term “information snacking,” and you’ll probably see me use it more and more here on the blog.

Here’s the paragraph in its entirety*, and I’ll leave it at that for you to ponder and comment on:

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books. Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning.

Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry—I’m convinced it makes me more productive—but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop.

As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.

I realize my tone here tends toward the missionary, and I can assure you it’s heartfelt. It’s also not unique to me but is shared by a large group of folks here. I’m glad about that because missionaries build better products. I’ll also point out that, while I’m convinced books are on the verge of being improved upon, Amazon has no sinecure as that agent. It will happen, but if we don’t execute well, it will be done by others.

* I broke the paragraph up into four pieces to make it easier on the eyes (and brain).

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user etech.

Movie Review: Helvetica

Published by Jarred on March 14, 2008 in Art, Design, Movie Reviews and Reading. View Comments

I’ve had another red bundle of Netflix joy buried in my mail pile for well over a week. So last night as I did some ironing, I popped Helvetica into my MacBook and away I went into the world of typography; a world that I had previously never given two seconds of thought to, but now have come to appreciate as one of the great underrated artistic mediums.

I can’t remember exactly how I first learned about Helvetica. I remember reading brief reviews about the film right when it came out, but I guess I saw it mentioned recently on some blog… or maybe Netflix recommended it to me.

I have to admit that I did get a little bored at times, but that could just as well be due to me sometimes concentrating more on the wrinkles in my shirts than on the images and words in the movie. Even though I was giving it less than 100% of my attention, I can definitely say the film was particularly well made.

The history of Helvetica was fairly intriguing, as was the way in which the filmmakers transitioned from interview to interview with examples of the typeface in everyday life.
It really is amazing how ubiquitous this one font is. Seriously. It’s everywhere. Even our Tropophilia logo above is composed in a variation called “Helvetica Neue UltraLight.”

But what was even more fascinating to me was the way in which the various typographers described their personal attitudes both towards Helvetica and their chosen profession. Some were in love with the font. They praised its perfection, or its simplicity, or its boldness. Others associated it with globalization, with over-standardization, even with the Vietnam War. Others said it was overused and has become dull, while others say that it’s undergoing a revival. Some say it’s timeless, others say its time has come and gone. Who knew all this controversy existed over a font?

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Whoa whoa whoa…. dunces?

Published by Jarred on March 5, 2008 in Culture, Education and Reading. View Comments

The Argument 

A week or two ago, author Susan Jacoby wrote an opinion essay in The Washington Post called: “The Dumbing of America.”  The tagline for her article: “Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces.”

Jaconby introduces her three-part argument:

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

She goes on to flesh out her argument by discussing how video (and all other “digital media”) reinforces the continuous shrinking of our attention spans and the general disintegration of our reasoning and intellect.  Indeed, she segues into what she observes to be an ”erosion of general knowledge” among Americans.  She reports that

nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”

One can’t help but point to the unfortunate episode from the Ms. Teen South Carolina pageant as an illustration of Jacoby’s point.

Finally, she concludes that Americans are comfortable with their lack of intellectual drive.  She sees this as “a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse.  Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism.”

My Take 

Jacoby makes some good points in her column.  Arguably, people are reading less.  We rely more and more on gadgets and the web to be our second brains.  Americans do exhibit a certain ignorance about the rest of the world and what happens in it.  And I can personally attest to a shortened attention span.  But I disagree with the foundation of her argument, the smugness with which she delivers it, and her general lack of ideas for solving the problem she has highlighted.

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Conversation about the future of books

Published by Jarred on January 17, 2008 in Apple, Books, Business, Consumer Behavior, Culture, Gadgets and Reading. View Comments

If you haven’t noticed, there is a great discussion taking place in the comments of my last post.  Several readers are chiming in with great insight about the Amazon Kindle, books, and reading in general.  Check it out, and join in!

Steve Jobs on Reading

Published by Jarred on January 16, 2008 in Apple, Books, Business, Consumer Behavior, Culture, Gadgets and Reading. View Comments

[Taylor, I pinkie-swear I won't write about Apple or Steve Jobs after this post for at least one month.]

I won’t go into detail about what happened at Macworld yesterday. I leave that to the multitude of other bloggers who are on the ground in San Francisco. But something was definitely in the air, and it was a pretty great event. If you want to catch Jobs’ keynote, see here.

In an interview with the New York Times following his presentation yesterday, Steve Jobs put in his word about several initiatives being undertaken by his competitors. He had this to say about the Amazon Kindle, the web commerce giant’s e-book reader that marks its first foray into physical products:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

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