Category Archives: Books

What I’ve been reading. Simple as that.

Amazon Kindle 3G – initial impressions

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O2 Xda Zest phone sitting on top of an Amazon Kindle 3

O2 Xda Zest phone sitting on top of an Amazon Kindle 3

On Tuesday my Amazon Kindle 3G + Wi-Fi arrived. And there was much rejoicing.

Why I bought a Kindle

For a few years now I’ve wanted an eBook reader to make my growing collection of geeky books in PDF more portable.

I have a laptop, but it’s not terribly practical with its brightly glowing screen and its fan-assisted knee warmer.  And as any reader of Jakob Nielsen will be able to tell you: reading on computer screens is tiring and about 25% slower than reading from paper.

My Psion Series 5mx has a PDF reader but it’s not being developed now and so doesn’t support the latest version of PDF files.  My Windows Mobile phone does support the latest formats, but the screen is so small that it makes reading PDFs cumbersome with all the scrolling that’s required.

So I wanted something in between a laptop and a PDA, that would support PDFs and wouldn’t put too big a dent in my wallet.  The new Amazon Kindle 3G + Wi-Fi seemed to promise all of that, so I pre-ordered one.  It arrived two days ago.

Initial reaction

When I unpacked the Kindle I tried to peel away the cellophane instruction that was telling me what I should do next (plug it in!), until I discovered that it wasn’t a stick-on film it was the screen itself.

Of course! The Kindle doesn’t need power to maintain an image on the screen, it just needs power to change the image.  Genius! and a perfect introduction to the quality of the E Ink technology.

Cover

Close-up of how the Kindle is secured to the leather cover

Close-up of how the Kindle is secured to the leather cover

The first thing I did was fix it into the chocolate brown Kindle leather cover that I also bought.  I decided not to pay £20 extra for the one with the built-in light as I rarely have to read in the dark, what with us having electric lighting in the house and everything.

The Kindle feels great in your hands; the slightly rubberised feel to its casing makes you feel confident that you’re not going to drop it easily.  Once the Kindle is secured into the case it just feels great, like you’re reading a classic, leather-bound book.  It’s a very tactile experience.

First use

I plugged it in, switched it on and very quickly got to grips with the basic functionality: selecting a book and navigating through the pages.

It feels quite intuitive and I love the feel of the qwerty keyboard: the keys are quite rough like very fine sandpaper which I guess makes them easier to use than similar-sized smooth keys on which your fingers might more easily slide off.

Clarity

I can’t compare the Kindle 3 with earlier models to judge whether it does offer “50% better contrast than any other e-reader” or “crisper, darker fonts”.  But what I can say is that it just looks great.  And everyone I’ve shown it to today has commented on both the clarity of the text and how easy it is to read, even when held at strange angles and from a distance.

Connection to PC

Of course, what I really wanted to do was check out how my PDFs would render on the Kindle.

The power cable comprises a USB cable (it looks like USB A to Micro-B) that plugs into a … well, a plug.  Unhook the plug and you have yourself a USB cable.  It took seconds for Windows 7 to recognise the Kindle as an external drive.

Screenshot of Kindle folders on a Windows 7 machine

Screenshot of Kindle folders

The Kindle contains four directories:

  1. \.active-content-data
  2. \audible
  3. \documents
  4. \music

I dragged and dropped about 300 MB of PDF files into the \documents directory, ejected the Kindle from Windows and lo-and-behold! there they were.

Collections

eBooks can be organised into what the Kindle calls collections, which is like organising your files into folders or directories on your PC; books can be assigned to more than one collection. This makes it easier to find your books, and cuts down the clutter on the home screen.

Screenshot of my Kindle home screen

Screenshot of my Kindle home screen

Once organised into collections you can still view a list of all your books by title, author or most recent.

Reading eBooks

While most of my books are in PDF, I have a few eBooks in either .Mobipocket or Amazon’s proprietary .AZW format (which is based on the Mobipocket standard) which allows the text to be resized. There are eight possible sizes ranging from tiny (30 lines per page) to enormous (5 lines per page).

Showing viewing options on the Kindle 3 while reading an eBook

Showing viewing options on the Kindle 3 while reading an eBook

With eBooks the typeface (regular serif, condensed serif or sans-serif), line spacing (small, medium large) and words per line (fewest, fewer, default) can be adjusted, and text-to-speech can be turned on enabling the Kindle to read out loud the text on the page, either through the built-in speakers or via the headphone socket.

I spent about 30-45 minutes sitting reading an eBook the other day and it felt really natural.  It really is the quality of the screen that makes all the difference: it really does look like ink printed on light grey paper.

Navigation through the pages is via the forward and back arrows on both the left- and right-hand side of the Kindle; although once secured into the leather cover left-handed users I imagine would have to bend the cover back on itself (the kind of action that is drilled into you from an early age that you should never do with a paperback), or remove it from the cover altogether … or, I guess, use the buttons on the right-hand side of the Kindle.

Reading PDFs

Thankfully reading PDFs was just as easy as reading standard eBooks.

Of course, the whole point of PDFs is that the author can determine how they look and that they will retain their design regardless of the device they are being viewed on.  This means that the viewing options are reduced to just zoom, screen contrast and screen rotation.

Screenshot of PDF reading options on the Kindle 3

Screenshot of PDF reading options on the Kindle 3

Depending on the size of the text I’ve found that reading some books with the fit-to-screen option and a 90° rotation is best. Depending on the size of the original page, the navigation keys will then shift your view from the top to the bottom of the page before moving on to the next page.  It really is very impressive.

I just wish that there was a keyboard shortcut for rotating the screen.  On the Kindle 1, I’ve read, it is Alt + R, but on the Kindle 3 this inserts a number ’4′ into the search box.

No support for PDF bookmarks

Here’s my biggest niggle with the Kindle, though, when using it to read PDF documents: it doesn’t appear to have support for PDF bookmarks.  This seems to me to be a huge failing, as it is often the way that I navigate around large PDF documents when viewing them on my PC.

I hope that Amazon address this in a future update.

Crashes

And speaking of failings: my Kindle has crashed about 5 or 6 times since I received it, and it has rebooted itself once.  I’m hoping that the latter was a software update, I’m currently on version 3.0 (515460094).  eBookvine wrote about the freezes and crashes yesterday.  Mine have happened while browsing the Web and viewing long, complicated PDF documents.

[Update: I upgraded to the latest OS and that solved the crash problem.]

I do wish manufacturers would include instructions on how to soft- and hard-reset their devices. On the Kindle 3 you hold in the power switch for 7 seconds to reboot it, and for 15 seconds to reboot (soft reset) it.

For a hard reset you need to hold the power switch for 20 seconds, release it and then hold the Home button while the Kindle is rebooting.  A screen appears asking you to type “RESET” into an input box which starts the factory reset.

It’s inconvenient, but it’s not enough to put me off using it.

Shortcut keys

A few shortcut keys I’ve found useful:

  • Alt + Shift + G
    Takes a screenshot (think of ‘g’ for ‘grab screenshot’)
  • Alt + Shift + M
    Play Minesweeper (press G within the game to play GoMoku)
  • Alt + Home
    Open the Amazon Kindle Store
  • Alt + Q, Alt + W, Alt + E, etc.
    Pressing Alt and the top row of keys will produce numbers 1-9 and then 0.
  • Alt + G
    Screen refresh
  • Alt + B
    While reading a book you can toggle user-created bookmarks
  • Menu
    Pressing Menu on the Home screen will show you both the time and available memory.

Burning to get my hands on an Amazon Kindle 3G

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Right-hand holding an Amazon Kindle (e-book reader)

The Amazon Kindle 3G in someone else's hands

Probably like a lot of people of the geek persuasion, I have a lot of e-books: articles, books, cheatsheets, leaflets, manuals. I have e-books about CSS, design, Flash, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, microformats, MySQL, PHP, regular expressions, RSS, servers, WordPress, XML and a whole lot more.

The only problem is: if I want to read them then I’m tied to sitting in front of my PC, lugging my laptop around, or peering at the tiny screen of my mobile phone and scrolling left-right-up-down for dear life. So for a couple of years I’ve been looking for an e-book reader that would adequately handle PDFs as well as standard e-book formats.

I think (I’m hoping) that I’ve found the answer in the new Amazon Kindle 3 that will be released this week (27 or 28 August, if I remember correctly).  I have had mine on pre-order since 30 July; before they pre-sold out!  I’ve ordered the model offering both WiFi and 3G.

A full review will follow shortly after receipt.

Who needs a Kindle?

In the meantime, here’s a parody video I discovered about the Kindle.  Excuse the rude reference near the beginning of the video if that offends you.

I’m now five-shelves of books lighter

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Piles of books and rubbish on my study floor

Piles of books and rubbish on my study floor mid-clear-out

Okay, so whose bright idea was it to try to simplify life a little and get rid of books that I haven’t even opened in years?!

In the end, this afternoon I cleared out five shelves-worth of books which will be donated to charity shops in St Andrews tomorrow afternoon.

I had to be ruthless. I find it really hard to throw away books because there is usually something of me in them (for many books I remember where I was when I carefully selected that particular book, what I was hoping to get out of them) and for many there is something of them in me, a part of who I am today is because of something that I read in those volumes.

And then there are the books that I bought or acquired (freebie hand-me downs from retired clergy) that interested me at the time or reminded me of something that found really interesting at university and was keen to follow up … but never did!

Strangely, between the initial weeding out of my bookcase and my packing them into boxes to take to charity a few of them crept back onto my shelves.  Saved for another purge in a couple of years time.

It feels good, though. No regrets.

Future rounds of my patented game “Win it or bin it” will feature: PCs and accessories, games (board and computer), videos, DVDs, guitar sheet music, and folders of who-knows-what that have sat on my shelves for the last 10 years.

Transcending CSS

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Transcending CSS

Transcending CSS: the fine art of web design by Andy Clarke is one of the best books about cascading style sheets (CSS) that I’ve read in a long time.

As a designer Andy Clarke has produced a book that’s far from the hundreds of other dull books on CSS which are packed full of dry code examples and pages and pages of text. This is a beautiful and colourful book, filled with hundreds of images, that takes a real-life approach to designing sites and writing accessible HTML and CSS code.

While this book isn’t aimed at beginners, it assumes that you have at least a good, working knowledge of XHTML and CSS, it is very easily read and if you’re looking to get into modern CSS layout methods then this book could be an inspirational introduction to the subject. Because of the design of the book it’s also more accessible than Jeffrey Zeldman‘s excellent Designing with Web Standards, now in its second edition.

The book is organized into four main sections:

  1. Discovery
  2. Process
  3. Inspiration
  4. Transcendence

Discovery

In the first part of his book Andy Clarke introduces us to what he calls Transcendent CSS, that is code that looks to the future, building on current web standards to create accessible, cross-browser-compatible websites, rather than relying on outdated layout methods such as non-semantic tables.

He argues for web standards, acknowledges that not all browsers display the same design, advocates that web designers use all available CSS selectors and semantic code, use CSS3 where possible to look to the future, avoid using hacks and filters, and to use JavaScript and the DOM to plug any gaps in CSS.

One particularly useful exercise is where he takes real-life examples and shows how he would present these in XHTML, in a section entitled “translating meaning into markup”. His examples include a horse race, marathon runners, a taxi rank, books on a shelf, and a museum display of mediaeval helmets.

Process

Having set the scene over the first 100 pages (lots of pretty pictures on the way, so don’t worry!) Clarke explores a usable process for designing with web standards. It’s quite a good introduction to certain elements of information architecture, such as wireframing/grey-boxing and usability.

Taking the example of a design for Cookr! (his made-up recipe website) he adds mark-up to the design to show you how to best mark-up and organize the XHTML and CSS code. It’s a very visual and practical approach which is strengthened by excellent explanations of what he’s doing and why.

Inspiration

In the third part of the book Clarke moves away from code and gives us an insight into where he finds inspiration for website designs. And it’s not just from other websites but newspapers, magazines, buildings, streets … anywhere really.

This section offers a good introduction to grid and layout theory, and his advice about keeping a scrapbook of inspiration examples is really helpful, either a real scrapbook or something online like Flickr. He finishes off the section exploring why design is more than just creating attractive visuals.

Transcendence

In the final section Clarke brings it all together in some practical examples of how to take particular designs and mark them up using semantic XHTML and CSS. Of particular note is his extensive and creative use of lists for marking up particular content.

This section has the best explanation of relative and absolute positioning that I’ve read in any book on CSS. It’s really worth buying it just for that.

He finishes off the section with a look ahead to what CSS3 has to offer. I’m looking forward especially to the :nth-child pseudo-class which will make creating zebra-stripes on tables easy (currently available via hand-coding and jQuery), multiple background images for elements, and multicolumn layouts (currently available in Firefox via the -moz identifier).

Conclusion

I found this a really inspiring book which got the balance between code theory and practical design application right. I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who’s looking to improve their CSS coding or simply wanting inspiration about how to take their CSS to the next level.

Available on Amazon UK.

The Present Future

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Book cover for The Present Future

While reading around the subject of Jesus saying:

“You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
(Luke 12: 56)

I picked up this book off my bookshelf: The Present Future: Six tough questions for the Church by Reggie McNeal.

Wow! Well there’s an author who doesn’t miss with any of his punches! It’s a book written with courage, insight, humour, honesty, a passion for Jesus Christ and a desire to see the Church move beyond its seeming current obsession with preserving the current status quo and moving towards being a powerful missionary movement: to face the future with imagination and courage.

While his focus is on North America, I’m quite sure that the picture McNeal paints in broad brushstrokes about the “current church culture in North America” can equally be said about the church here in the UK, if I understand correctly what the likes of John Drane have been writing about the situation this side of the Atlantic.

New reality #1: The collapse of the Church culture

Here’s what McNeal says on page one of chapter one:

The current church culture in North America is on life support. It is living off the work, money, and energy of previous generations from a previous world order. The plug will be pulled either when the money runs out (80 percent of money given to congregations comes from people aged fifty-five and older) or when the remaining three-fourths of a generation who are institutional loyalists die off or both.

Please don’t hear what I am not saying. The death of the church culture as we know it will not be the death of the church. The church Jesus founded is good; it is right. The church established by Jesus will survive until he returns. The imminent demise under discussion is the collapse of the unique culture in North America that has come to be called “church.” This church culture has become confused with biblical Christianity, both inside the church and out. In reality, the church culture in North America is a vestige of the original movement, an institutional expression of religion that is in part a civil religion and in part a club where religious people can hang out with other people whose politics, worldview, and lifestyle match theirs. As he hung on the cross Jesus probably never thought the impact of his sacrifice be reduced to an invitation for people to join and to support an institution.

Powerful, challenging but also exciting stuff. As fearful as I was about the Luke 12 passage a couple of days ago, I’m now going to look forward to putting this sermon together in the next couple of days.

You can read a little more on the Amazon UK website; you can currently buy the book on Amazon for as little as £6.15.

I think I’m in a Douglas Coupland novel …

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JPod - Meet Generation XBox

Last night I began to wonder if I really am an autonomous, free-thinking human-being and not just the creation of a 20th/21st-century literary genius.

Yesterday, late-afternoon, a few minutes before five, I checked my email. There was one from our Acting Director informing us that today (Thursday) Registry would be running progression. This basically means that all our students will be moving on a year in our databases, awaiting matriculation (that’s ‘enrolment’ if you’re a North American reading this).

To celebrate that fact I decided that today I’d listen to only progressive rock. So I cleared my MP3 playlist and started compiling a playlist of only prog artists (both prog rock and prog metal), amongst whom were:

  • A Perfect Circle
  • Amplifier
  • Faith No More
  • Fish
  • Frost
  • Genesis
  • Iron Maiden – A Matter of Life and Death
  • Marillion
  • Meshuggah
  • Opeth
  • Pink Floyd
  • Rush
  • Tool

I saved the list, shut down my computer, switched out the lights and left the office. Which is when I then began to question my ontological status.

It came as violently and unexpectedly as a Blue Screen of Death. I stopped walking and stared vacantly in front of me, deep in thought. Tourists bustled past me.

“I must be a character in a Douglas Coupland novel!” I muttered disappointedly to myself. “Like someone in Microserfs or JPod. That’s exactly the sort of thing they’d do.”

I don’t remember reading about myself in Microserfs, but as I’ve not finished JPod yet there is still time to read about myself there. Maybe I’m part of a new novel. Maybe I’m just part of some back story, or from a discarded JPod chapter.

Maybe it’s not a Douglas Coupland story I’m in. Maybe this story is much, much bigger. Maybe I’m the creation of an evening bigger genius, whose story started way before the 20th century was even thought of.

On that philosophical note, I’m off to work now to be progressive.

Books of choice

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Books on my desk at work.

One of my friends, Kenny, always teases me that no matter where I go my desk always looks the same; in other words, it is always laid out the same way. And he’s right, but there’s a good reason for that: it works for me.

One of the parts of that system-that-works-for-me is a small collection of reference books that I always have to hand. At home they are on a shelf next to me, at work they are on my enormous desk.

At the moment these are my reference books of choice:

At the moment the least used of these are the SQL and PHP Pocket Reference guides, and the most used are the Definitive Guides for XHTML and CSS, and since I’m debugging code for a website launch Celebrating Common Prayer is also getting a look in once or twice!

My close-at-hand collection of books at home is completely different:

A shelf of books at home.

Mostly Scottish Episcopal Church books — Code of Canons, liturgy, and the Red Book (contacts) — a bible (NRSV) and Revised Common Lectionary, an English dictionary and thesaurus, a copy of Getting Things Done and two copies of the Visual Quickstart Guide for WordPress 2.

So now you know! What are your close-at-hand books of choice?