Category: Technology

Conversely, the PC software for the Sony Reader absolutely sucks. It looks remarkably like someone was hired to clone iTunes, and did so without ever understanding the ways in which iTunes is good and bad.

You can’t drag content directly onto the Reader; you have to copy it into the Library, then copy it from there to the Reader. The interface is custom and non-standard — the menus don’t look like Windows menus, and the dialog boxes aren’t Windows dialog boxes. The Preferences dialog box has one option: “Check for updates automatically”. If you sort a list of books by author, it’s sorted by first name rather than last name. The Status window doesn’t tell you the titles of the books which are being converted/added. You can’t create new collections (playlists) directly on the Reader; you have to create them in the Library and move them over.

The Store is its own category of awful. The front page doesn’t give you a link to new releases. When you do get to the New Releases page, there are no dates next to the titles. There’s no RSS feed for new books, either. You can’t use the mouse wheel to scroll through lists of titles. The Browse Categories page has a list of categories and subcategories; in most cases, there are no actual books in the main categories. You have to go to the subcategories to see books… but you can’t click through to the subcategories from the Browse Categories page. You have to click to the category page, then to the subcategory page. There’s no way to indicate your interest in a book you’d like to see in the store.

I could go on. But it’s a pretty grotesque interface. Fortunately I still love the Reader a lot.

The MacHeist thingiemabob is coming to an end. In this case, thingiemabob is defined as “a big publicity/marketing event for small Mac developers.” The salient information is that you can get a bundle of nine applications for $49.

Of the apps in the bundle, I find Delicious Library and Newsfire to be fairly significant; that’s DVD/book/game cataloging and a very good RSS newsreader. There’s also a personal information manager, an OS level skinning application, a game of your choice, an HTML authoring program, etc. Check out the list for yourself.

I am being fairly self-interested about this; if they raise $100K for charity, TextMate will be unlocked, and I like text editors. 25% of the purchase price is going to charity, and they’re just over $50K right now, so another four thousand purchases would do the trick.

There are no free weblog clients for the Mac. I don’t deserve a free weblog client, but I’m not sure there are any weblog clients I want to pay for, either.

Hm.

The Sony Reader continues to impress. I’ve read two complete books on it now, thanks to the $50 credit you get at the store when you buy it, and the thing just works. It’s readable. When I’m reading an book on the screen of my computer, I tend to skim. With this thing? Not so much.

I’ve kind of given up on using it as an RPG library for now, because PDF is not its best format. But I don’t feel a twinge of regret at that, because it’s so darned cool otherwise. Yesterday I was eating lunch and I finished the book I was on. Instinctive thought: “Oh, damn, now I have no book for the rest of the meal.” But no, I had 20 more books, and no additional weight. I mean, if you put me in a bookstore and said “you can get that book on paper or on the Reader,” I might well choose the Reader.

The optimal format for these things is Sony’s own BBeB. S. pointed out Manybooks, which is mostly Project Gutenberg books, but they provide everything in BBeB format as an option. Nice. They also provide just about every other ebook format you could ask for.

RTF is an excellent second choice, and once again I find myself heading over to see what Baen can provide outside of wretchedly vile conservative SF porn. (See also the Baen book in which the SS comes back to save Germany from alien invaders.) Still, they have a good free library, plus there’s an archive of the Baen CDs. The latter had permission to redistribute explicitly granted, so it’s nice and legal.

I’m hoping one of these days Tor gets more serious about Baen-style ebooks. It’s gotta happen soon.

Anyway. Yes. Good device. Love it to pieces. More later.

Commentary on the Sony Reader (which you can get at Borders in the Cambridgeside Galleria right now, if you don’t feel like waiting till December for it to ship online):

It’s better than any e-book experience I’ve ever had. The form factor is superb; it’s a smidge larger than a normal paperback, and much thinner. There’s very little distraction from the screen. The screen is excellent — e-ink is way easier to read than an LCD screen. The only quibble I have is the flash when you turn a page. I think it’s just how e-ink works, and I think I’ll get used to it, but it’s a tad annoying right now.

It is not a magic bullet for reading PDFs. In particular, gaming book PDFs will probably be too big to read on the screen. World of Darkness was illegible, as was everything else I tried except Dogs in the Vineyard. That PDF is formatted for smaller pages, so it’s not awful on the Reader. But it’s not great, either. The best bet for publishers who care would be to release PDFs formatted for the screen size, which may be a problem for books with lots of tables and such.

Also be aware that a lot of game publishers don’t put a rational title and author in their PDF metadata. Most users never see this; the Sony Reader relies on it for the list of books on the device. This is sort of irritating — I want to be able to click on the title of a book in the Sony Connect software and edit it. However, PDF Info allows you to edit metadata on the PC side, which solves the problem. I haven’t found a free program that does it on the Mac, although I haven’t looked very hard yet, but since you have to use a PC to get files onto the Reader it’s sort of a null point.

Yes, the Reader plugs in with a USB cable but it doesn’t show up as a storage device on the Mac. That’s a shame. You could copy files over to a SD or CF card, and then move the card to the reader, but then you don’t get the nifty categorization functions. This may not actually be a big deal to me, though. We’ll see. In the meantime, that’s why my Mac dual boots.

Since Sony is being fairly relaxed about people hacking the Reader, I expect we’ll see Mac support from the community sooner or later. See also this forum.

All in all, me and S. are very happy with ours. Light, easy to read, not too much of a pain in the ass, and yeah. It’s a rocking device even though I want native Mac support and a couple of tweaks.

From one of Raph Koster’s posts on GDC:

Patrick Dugan asking a panel of academics whether the cultural shifts brought on by massively multiplayer games may include damaging our conception of the nation-state as a key form of personal identity. Academics don’t quite know what to say.

Even I know what to say to that. “Yes.” Rambly thoughts ahead.

Personal identity is increasingly fluid; the ability to put on an impenetrable mask ensures that. Hm. Rereading the quote, I wonder if it wouldn’t be more appropriate to say “tribal identity,” though. You could say that’s a subsection of personal identity. I tend to reject that as necessity, though; it’s one potential aspect of personal identity. And precision requires that we distinguish between the aspect and the whole, no?

Yes.

Anyhow: tribal identity. Are you a San Franciscan, or are you a member of Fires of Heaven? Both, maybe. Which is more important? It’s another way of forming NGOs, of playing identity politics. Which are pretty important in MMORPGs. If WoW is the new golf, it’s also the new sandlot baseball field, and the new singles bar, and the new late night campus coffee shop.

Question not yet resolved: does tribal identity solidify on a counterscale to personal identity? I’d think probably yes — we haven’t yet figured out how to have slippery faces within tribes and maintain community cohesion. (You can say community wherever I say tribal, by the by.)

One of the strong, under the radar drivers in community forming on these things is TeamSpeak/Ventrilo. Both these programs create a virtual space where you can voice-chat; in my experience, guilds keep the servers up all the time and they’re used for far more than just tactical coordination. They’re a new social channel. And voices are much more coherent and consistent than the faces we wear while we’re playing.

Then again, voice filters exist and will be more useful as time goes by. So I’ll leave predicting the future to people who get paid for it.