Uncategorized | No Comments »

I am in St. Louis this weekend, along with my parents, for a visit to my brother, sister-in-law, and four nieces and nephews. I am away from my own desktop computer, and am having to make do with a slightly flaky Ubuntu laptop—and do not quite have either the energy or the facilities to write the in-depth examination of how the PRS-700 deals with different e-book formats that I had intended.

However, I have brought along the PRS-700 (as well as my iPod Touch) and have observed a few possibly-unexpected uses of the Sony Reader—and another flaw or two—along the way.

Display in Sunlight

First, an amendment to my prior entry, in which I talked about how the glare-prone, low-contrast, unevenly-backlit screen of the PRS-700 was harder to read than my high-contrast, well-lit iPod Touch’s screen. I have since discovered one important exception to this rule: direct sunlight. In direct sunlight that entirely washes out the iPod Touch’s screen, the E-ink screen of the PRS-700 is as clear as day.

Of course, how imiportant this is to you as a reader depends on how often you would expect to be reading in direct sunlight. I try to avoid situations where I would have to read in direct sun, so it might not be as useful to me as to someone who was out in the sun all the time.

Photo Viewing with Expansion Cards

The PRS-700 features both an SD (MMC) card slot and a Memory Stick slot. Presumably these are meant to be used to store additional e-books. However, as I discovered on this trip, they have another useful function.

I have with me my Kodak digital camera, which stores pictures onto a 1-gig SD card. On a whim, I took the card out and slotted it into the PRS-700—and I was able to view every photo I had taken so far on this trip. They appear in grayscale, in very low resolution at first—then after about ten seconds, the 700 adjusts and shows them in full resolution. The view is surprisingly crisp.

Yesterday, I was at a birthday party for one of my nieces at a water park, sitting on a chaise lounge near the pool, and the concession stand was at the other end of the park. My sister-in-law took my camera to the concession stand, took photos of the menu, and came back to me. I put the card into the PRS-700 and was able to read the menus that way and send her back with my order.

Presumably, this would also have worked even if I had a Sony camera like my parents’, which stores photos on a Sony Memory Stick.

Loading by Laptop

Even away from my desktop, I discovered I am not incapable of loading e-books into my device. I loaded Calibre onto my laptop (all I had to do was fetch it using apt-get) and was able to convert and load books. (Oddly, Calibre was unable to detect the PRS-700 again after the first time I plugged and unplugged it; in fact, an error message advised me to reboot. Reboot a Linux box? I think not!)

But as I discovered with the file navigator, if I have the book converted already I do not necessarily even need Calibre to install it—the Sony acts like an external hard drive when plugged in, so I would just need to put the book in the database/media/books directory on it.

The Winter of Dis-Contents

I attended church today with my parents and my brother’s family. As is my wont, I located a couple of free e-Bibles and stuck them on the Sony, so I would have an excuse to be seen reading from it.

The exercise of trying to look up verse citations called my attention to a shortcoming of the 700 that I had not noticed as much before: the lack of a “table of contents” function.

In eReader and Stanza, there is a “table of contents” function that I can use to pull up a table of contents from anywhree in the book. This is especially useful for large reference books such as the Bible, where I might need to access any chapter at any time. But if there is such a thing in the Sony PRS-700, I have not been able to find it. (I will consult the manual again when I get home just in case I might have missed it.)

This means that the only way to find a given book of the Bible is to hop back to the beginning and go to the Table of Contents there—if the book even has a table of contents. (The King James Bible I downloaded did not.) This is a disappointing oversight in a device that is otherwise pretty well-organized for reading.

My next column should cover how the PRS-700 does at reading different e-book formats—particularly PDFs. Look for it Tuesday.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Meet Calvin Wheeler – thirtysomething and unhappily married to Karen, his childhood sweetheart, who in Chapter 1 reminds him that the proper name for his unsightly cold sore is “herpes”. A former actor, one-time traffic school instructor, and presently a courier for Healthfirst clinical laboratories, Calvin’s day consists of driving around Stockton, CA and environs making deliveries and pickups at various labs, hospitals and doctors’ offices.

Calvin hates his job and hates his colleagues even more: they’re all fat, stupid, ass-kissing, job-stealing or, in one case, afflicted with an hilarious speech impediment. Calvin amuses himself with violent road-rage fantasies, listening to ‘The Collection’ (his eclectic set of driving tapes), and by making ‘calls’ to an imaginary talkback program – the Don Olsen Show on KGY News Talk Radio – where Don (a kind of Super-ego) critiques Calvin’s life. And then there’s Sarah, the beautiful young nurse who brightens Calvin’s afternoon visits to Dr Wilkins’ office in Pine Grove. Sarah is Calvin’s soul mate, even if she doesn’t know it yet. She’s going to share his life.

And what a life it will be. For Calvin isn’t just a courier, he’s a writer. Dragged along by Karen one year to the Bay Area’s annual Renaissance Pleasure Faire, Calvin conceived of his masterwork: a colossal fantasy epic entitled ABRACADABRA. In its vast scope and universal appeal it promises to be a kind of Lord of the Rings for the new millennium. Or so Calvin hopes. Seven years in the planning, he has boxes of notes, whole folders of ideas, concepts, characters and plot points, even designs for the inevitable merchandising tie-ins. But he doesn’t have an ending. He doesn’t even have a first draft, if he’s honest. But he’ll start writing soon, if he can just find a little creative space.

Calvin is a born fantasist, soothing difficulty and disappointment with dreams of retribution. Held in this mundane-but-hopeful stasis, his life might be tolerable. But the centre cannot hold. His marriage is ending, his job is on the line, and his widowed mother has shacked up with an abusive former dockworker on disability. When even ABRACADABRA starts to slip from his grasp, Calvin finally crosses over. Fantasy and reality begin to commingle, with violent consequences for everyone…

Red Asphalt borrows its title from a series of videos produced by the California Highway Patrol. I was understandably disappointed to discover they aren’t actually a CSI-style spin off from the sorely missed late-70s TV series CHiPs, but rather a set of gory instructional films designed to terrify teens into driving more safely. It’s an apt choice for a novel that’s both funny and frightening but not as effective as it might have been.

This is a novel of competing energies: the desire to amuse, to thrill, and to explore the inner workings of a collapsing mind. These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive goals (Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club manages it), but it’s a strange combination that Cherney doesn’t pull off. He calls this a “thriller”, but it doesn’t read like one (up until Chapter 22 of 27, at least). For the bulk of the novel there is nothing from the thriller’s stock-in-trade: no suspense, no compelling action, no cliff-hangers, no red herrings, no villain, no ticking clock, no goal. It’s structured more like a novel of psychological realism, charting Calvin’s mental disintegration from the inside. That’s an appealing branch of fiction, with Evan S. Connell’s The Dairy of a Rapist and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho being two of the better known examples. But the persistent comic tone prevents Red Asphalt moving very far in their direction. Cherney clearly loves the laughs and can’t help going for them. A natural comedian, his style is irrepressibly humorous. A good eighty percent of this novel is given over to comedy: specifically Calvin’s amusing and cliché-ridden monologue, focusing mainly on the hideousness of other people (mostly women). Calvin is funny. But psychological collapse isn’t, and the relentless and largely misogynistic joking seems at odds with the underlying theme.

And what is that theme? Lurking beneath the guffaws, I think, is a serious argument about creativity. Calvin finds himself in a predicament no doubt familiar to many aspiring writers: crushed by a personal and professional life that gets in the way of the masterpiece; or, more commonly, using the planned masterpiece as the comforting one-day-I’ll fantasy, a ‘dream sanctuary’ that makes the present life more bearable, with the added benefit of endlessly deferring the real attempt at writing and thereby any possibility of failure. At one point, Calvin says: “Without magic, there is nothing.” But as his life crumbles around him, Calvin concludes that “magic” is nothing more than the lies he has told himself to get by. If you never risk anything to follow your dreams, if you never make that choice, inaction becomes a choice in itself. And the price you pay is everything.

That’s a strong theme for a novel, so it’s a pity this isn’t a more coherent one. The comedy of the first two-thirds left me only mildly amused. The action and violence of the final act were exciting but didn’t amount to much. Where the novel does shine is in the turn: at Chapter 21, it makes a sharp left from one mode into the other, traversing a short patch of smooth, jet-black realism that is not only well expressed but beautifully dramatized in two sequences that make me think Cherney has untapped potential as a screenwriter. Coming home to an empty house, Calvin collapses in front of the TV only to be confronted with a monstrous truth about his creative work. Staggering out into the night, he falls into the kind of humiliating confrontation fate seems to save up for those moments in which we’re at our most vulnerable. It’s perfect. When Cherney ditches the wisecracks and constructs a sequence with resonant emotional depth and darkly comic pathos, it works brilliantly. This brief respite was the high-point of the novel for me, the essence of Cherney’s story and the distillation of the things I suspect he’s actually most interested in: self-deception and indolence; the frustration of our powerlessness in the face of other people’s stupidity; the apparent injustice of unmet expectations; the agonies of creativity; and those cauterizing moments when fantasy and reality collide.

These are rich veins of humour that Cherney could tap in future work. It’s humour of a much more subtle and sophisticated kind – along the lines of Rick Moody or Will Self – than the broad attacks and snide one-liners he has Calvin deliver here. But Cherney might be up to it. In his first novel’s finer moments, he clearly demonstrates two qualities that, for me, make the best comedy and the best literature endure: insight and empathy. I look forward to seeing more of them next time around.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

I’m at the show this morning and I stopped by the Ingram booth to say hello.  They told me that, from their viewpoint, the show has been very successful on the digital end.  They said that last year people were asking them to explain what all this digital stuff was, but this year people seem to know all that and are talking about implementation.  They said that they are getting a lot of interest from hardware manufacturers, so Amazon may be seeing some competition in the future.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Here’s a shot of Sarah Wendell (left) from Smart Bitches, and Jessica Kennedy from Books Reviews by Jess. I’ll be at the Net Galley booth #4077 at noon on Sunday.

The final panel I attended was on, and by, book review bloggers.

The panel included Stephanie Coleman-Chan of Stephanie’s Written Word, Jennifer Hart of Book Club Girl, Candace Levy of Beth Fish Reads, Natasha Maw of Maw Books, Julie Peterson of Booking Mama, Amy Riley of My Friend Amuy and Dawn Rennert of She is Too Fond of Books. It was given in one of the largest rooms and it was packed. Standing room only. They gave out a list of some book blogger directories to help publishers and marketers find target blogs. The panel was also recorded. If you keep your eye on Book Club Girl they will post the recording and also links to the directories, as they didn’t have enough handouts. Keep checking here.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Here’s the view from the ferry that I take from New Jersey over the Hudson to New York.  The ferry terminal is only 2 blocks away from the Javits Center so it makes for a pretty good commute.

Not only are books on display, but also book accessories.  Here is a booth from Periscope, who makes a book light for the Kindle and regular books as well. You can find it here, by the way.

Downstairs is another floor that is composed of primarily children’s book publishers.  Very strangely, it is also the venue for contract publishers, primarily from India, China and Korea.  These poor guys are all intermixed with the children’s book people, so you see, for example, a rather lost looking group of contract publishers from India in their booth surrounded on one side by a Barbie booth and on the other side by a booth full of kids’ puppets.  It’s funny and sad, and if I were them I’d want my registration money back.

Yesterday I posted from a table down on the floor that had an Ethernet cable – not from the press room which has now lost its air conditioning, if it ever had any, and is not hot as hell.  When I packed up I left my Logitech Bluetooth mouse on the table and didn’t realize it ‘till I got home.  Just for fun I went back to the table, which is in a high traffic area, and much to my surprise it was still there.  I guess book people are pretty honest.  It wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds at CES.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

I’m not sure if the Sony e-reader app, in the eBook Libary, can replicate this view in ePub.

But oh how nice it looks with The Gate House, a book in Sony’s proprietary BBeB format. The reader needs to treat ePub the same if it doesn’t already.

Notice the efficient use of the landscape-oriented screen on my desktop. Software developers should consider similar arrangements for netbooks, especially those you can’t use in a tablet mode.

For desktops, please show mercy and add scrolling via a mouse wheel, a little detail that Sony apparently forget. Click on the image for a detailed view.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

You can find a 15 minute interview with me over at the Kindle Chronicles.  It was fun to do it and Len Edgerly is a really nice guy.  Here’s Len’s blurb:

Paul Biba, co-editor of TeleRead and a way-early adopter of eBooks, back when he was a globe-trotting corporate lawyer.  He explains why he considers these early days of the eBook revolution so exciting, and why he and TeleRead owner David Rothman disagree on whether we should be afraid that Amazon will gain monopolistic power over the eBook industry.

Uncategorized | No Comments »