Shelves, Space, and Sticky Fingers

Here I was thinking about ebooks and along come these two informative posts. Go ahead and read them, they’re pretty short and they outline all the major problems with ebooks today:

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2008/06/its-the-other-s.html

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/do-you-own-tree.html

I love books. I’m not much of a collector of anything, except for books. The problem is all the shelves are overflowing. The obvious solution is ebooks of course, but there’s just something about a printed book. The other solution is to just clear out the old books. My wife is good at passing books along; that’s an interesting idea that seems to be going well so far.

Do ebooks work for you? They sort of do for me. Mostly on my Palm. When I purchased my palm awhile back I also picked up the LDS PDA Library for the scriptures and the included iSilo license. Of course that library has a lot of titles included so now I find myself usually reading something on the palm as well as a real book at the same time. This way when I’m home I read the real book and when I’m at the doctor’s office or the auto shop I can read the palm (I can’t include the dentist office anymore, ever since I switched to Dentist Dave they get me in too quickly). I enjoy reading on the palm more than I thought I would. It doesn’t hurt my eyes at all and it’s quick to navigate around. I haven’t really looked into purchasing more ebooks for the palm, but I’m guessing it’s not easy or as cheap as it should be.

For work we have a subscription to Safari Books Online which includes mostly tech books along with a few other categories that interest me like personal development. It’s great for reference purposes, but absolutely horrible to read through a book. It works by allowing you so many slots on a bookshelf (based on your subscription level), I have 5 slots and some books take up more than one slot. Once you place a book on your shelf you can’t remove it for 30 days. You can search your books and add bookmarks, but it doesn’t remember the last page you had open on the books. This is an astonishing oversight. Especially when every other ebook reader I’ve seen or used can at least do that much. It does have an option to go directly to the last book you had open when logging in, but it simply doesn’t work; no matter how many times you check the box. It also makes it very hard to print out any significant portion of a book. There’s also little support for offline reading.

With all the recent news on touch screen devices and support in Windows 7, the only part that really interests me is that coming out of OLPC. Check out this photo (the device doesn’t exist yet by the way):

This a pretty compelling idea. The OLPC project has come under a lot of fire for not delivering on it’s promise of a $100 machine (the current version is $188), for slow sales, and for OS direction problems (switching from Linux to Windows). But I think they’ve done a good thing by setting a high and worthwhile goal and working hard towards it. The new laptop, the XO-2, will have a major focus on reading. Most of education spending, especially in poor countries, goes towards books. So the idea is be able to buy a $100 or $75 laptop with capacity to hold 500 books instead of buying each book at $20 each. You get all those books plus a full computer geared towards learning and interacting. It’s a great plan and I hope they can pull it off. I also hope it includes a cleaning cloth; I know what things look like after my kids get a hold of them.

Maybe we’ll see the ebook market come around yet, but it sure has been dragging it’s feet.

Read more about the XO-2 here: http://blog.laptopmag.com/first-look-olpc-xo-generation-20

An Acquired Taste

In college I took an artificial intelligence course. It was optional for computer science (CS) majors like me but oddly it was required for information systems (IS) majors. The end result was a strange mix with some students very interested in the subject and others who weren’t so interested. The instructor broke the class into groups and each group was assigned a topic to research and then present to the class. At the end of the presentation each group gave out an assignment to facilitate deeper understanding of the topic. Never in all my school years did I witness a larger divide between two groups of people. The IS majors wanted to give out a research paper as their assignment; at this the CS majors revolted. Why did we revolt? Because creating a program is incredibly fun, while writing a research paper is not. This is hard for non-programmers to believe, but it’s true. Most people seem to view programming as tedious and boring when in reality it’s an engaging creative process. Programming is like combining a logical puzzle with a creative construction process. In the end you have built something new and useful, something akin to an intricate, functioning clock. It is extremely satisfying.

But this isn’t about programming, it’s about the merits of writing. Even as a lifelong reader it somehow took a long time for me to discover the immense value of great writing. Perhaps it never sunk in just how difficult it can be to convey clear concise meaning on paper; not to mention uplifting, engaging, and informative. Some seem to do it so effortlessly. A great writer opens doors of understanding, shares insights that expand our horizons, entertains with humor and imagination.

Writing is now something I enjoy and look to as a way to understand and organize my own thoughts and even to generate new ideas. If this interest came naturally it certainly didn’t manifest itself in school assignments. Perhaps I’m the only one that agrees with Paul Graham on this, but it sure seems the traditional academic approach is less than ideal.

I found Richard Light’s book “Making the Most of College” very interesting. In it their research found that courses with more writing were more engaging for students. A review from MIT indicates that this may only be true in liberal arts programs; they just couldn’t see writing superseding science and engineering. My experiences, as sampled above, support MIT’s viewpoint. On this however I have a theory; writing is a creative process and we’re hard wired to create things. Those not actively engaged in some sort of creative process can look to writing to fulfill that need. Certainly we learn better by doing instead of just absorbing, but this goes beyond that. Through writing we’re able come up with new ideas or express old ideas in a new way or maybe just in our own way. Thus writing is a universal medium of creation, a way to to produce something tangible and useful. Even those engaged in highly creative processes need a way to share ideas, learn from others, and keep track of what they’ve already learned. Those that can attain great skill in writing to complement proficiency in a profession or area of interest are extremely valuable and quite rare. In following software development blogs there are a lot of people that share incredible ideas but only a few that are truly great writers.

My circular thought arcs here are a little confusing; is it writing or programming? Were the IS majors right in that a research paper would have been most helpful? The answer is no, to learn about programming the best thing to do is program and furthermore an assigned research paper is not really the type of writing that I’m referring to. Honestly, when was the last time you were inspired by a research paper? Inspiration really is what we’re dealing with here. When I read something great it inspires me to do more and be better. It also increases my desire to write because I will learn something from writing and maybe someone else will find what I write to be useful.

So my intent here is to share experiences, record my own learning processes, and explore new ideas; all in the hope that it proves useful, at least to me.