Gadgetopia

The Last Question — Isaac Asimov: I’m not much for science fiction, but something compelled me to read this story tonight.  Perhaps because it was short.  It will take you 15 minutes to read.

I realize Asimov was an atheist (or something close to it), but this strikes me as somewhat religious tale.  I guess it could be read different ways, which is perhaps the point.

“[…] All the energy we could ever use, forever and forever and forever.”

Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. “Not forever,” he said.

“Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert.”

“That’s not forever.”

“All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Twenty billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?”

Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. “Twenty billion years isn’t forever.”

If the concept of entropy interests you, we had a great discussion a couple years ago about Perpetual Motion and the Religion of Physics.  I just noticed that someone mentioned this story (but forgot the exact title, apparently) in the comments.

I love my Kindle, but there’s one thing that’s…icky, about it.  One thing that confirms all the background fear and dread I had about transitioning from actual paper to ebooks.

The Kindle strips out all the tangible character of a book.  In doing this, it eliminates the mental “markers” I retain about a book after I’ve read it.

When you remember a book you read, you’re of course remembering the content of the book.  But there are also physical markers about the book you remember:

• The typeface, including the size
• The color and tactile feel of the pages
• The cover — the content of it, the colors, the way it fades and ages, the beating it took as it got tossed around in your car, etc.
• The weight of the book, it’s dimensions, and how it fits in your hand

These things all combine to “set” the book in your mind.  These tactile reminders help the book to occupy a place in your head.  They help give the book a personality – a character.

With a Kindle, you get none of this.  The fonts, colors, weight, dimensions, etc. are all same.  One book looks just like another one.

I purchased Wikinomics and Here Comes Everybody at the same time.  I read them back-to-back, overlapping a bit.

To this day, I can’t separate the books in my head.  When I think of a concept in either of them, I can’t figure out which one it was from.  Granted they were about similar topics, but I still think that if they had been actual books made out of paper, each with their own personality, I would be able to isolate them more readily.

Does this mean I got less out of the books?  Not at the time I read them for sure – I remember being glued to my Kindle on multiple airplane trips reading Shirky’s book in particular.  But looking back on them, do they occupy a less readily available place in my mind because of their Kindle-imposed homogeneity?  I suspect they might.

I love my Kindle, and it’s a net positive to own one, but in the sense of what I’ve written above, the Kindle can be a little depressing.  It’s also made me understand that there’s more to a book than just the words in it.  Books have personality — they have character.  And at least some of this is conveyed by things that the Kindle can’t reproduce.

The Kindle DX Costs College Students $1050.60 More Than Traditional Textbooks: Here’s an analysis of the dream of having textbooks on a Kindle.

Turns out, there’s a problem — e-books cannot be sold back like regular textbooks. This drastically inflates the actual cost of Kindle-based textbooks because you now have only one place from which to buy them: the publisher.

The National Association of College Stores conducted a study that found that students spend on average $702/year on textbooks. This equates to a total expense of $2808 on textbooks over a 4 year college experience. It is also important to note that e-books are already available and contrary to popular belief, textbooks will not be $10 – publishers and authors still want their share. E-books were generally around 70% of the price of the regular print textbooks at the college bookstore and could not be sold back.

I bet textbook publishers are drooling over this. They’d fall all over themselves for even 70% of something with no secondary market.

For perspective on textbooks (elementary and secondary, rather than college), read this article about the apparently creative and intellectual bankruptcy of the textbook writing process.

“Who writes these things?” people ask me. I have to tell them, without a hint of irony, “No one.” […] senior editors look for up-and-coming academics and influential educational consultants to sign as “authors” of the textbooks that the worker bees are already putting together back at the shop.

Inside Secrets to an iPhone App: My friend Carla wrote a book.

How one person created the app Gratitude Journal for just $500…Everything you need to know to bring your app idea to life…A complete step-by-step guide on how to create a killer design…How to successfully outsource development at a price you can afford

She wrote an apparently pretty successful app for the iPhone: Gratitude Journal.

Packt Author Website: Packt Publishing has released a Web site for authors thinking about writing a book. Lots of information about how the process works.

This new website is designed to be a one-stop resource for potential authors, covering all aspects of developing a book title – from the initial idea, right through to the editorial and publication processes that drive a book to market.

Good idea, because book publishing is such an opaque process. I’ve always been a big fan of Packt, for reasons like this.

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write: this entire article is an interesting look into how e-books and Google’s digitization efforts will change how we read. But this section stuck out at me — in the digital world, the concept of “pages” breaks down.

One geeky side note here: Before we can get too far in this new world, we need to have a technological standard for organizing digital books. We have the Web today because back in the early 1990s we agreed on a standard, machine-readable way of describing the location of a page: the URL.

But what’s the equivalent for books? For centuries, we’ve had an explicit system for organizing print books in the form of page numbers and bibliographic info. All of that breaks down in this new digital world. The Kindle doesn’t even have page numbers — it has an entirely new system called “locations” because the pagination changes constantly based on the type size you choose to read. If you want to write a comment about page 32 of “On Beauty,” what do you link to? The Kindle location? The Google Book Search page? This sounds like a question only a librarian would get excited about, but the truth is, until we figure out a standardized way to link to individual pages — so that all the data associated with a specific passage from “On Beauty” point to the same location — books are going to remain orphans in this new world.

The entire article is a great, futurist look into how books are changing, and what the future might hold.

Consider this passage:

For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music. Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.

Shades of my request that authors write shorter books.

Bought a book today on Amazon. After checkout, I was prompted with the above — for another $9.99, I could get electronic access to my book right away. Additionally, I could do the same for seven other books I had purchased in the past.

(And, yes, I have read “Code Complete” before, and discussed it here a couple times. But I needed seven more copies, because all Blend developers are going to study the book together throughout 2009. I’m totally excited about it.)

Programming books are often too afraid to assume anything. You see huge tomes about ASp.net and PHP/MySQL development that start from the absolutely beginning, to the point of including chapters about what a database is and how it works.

This often drives me nuts. What about people who have come really far with a language already? We’re not looking for a recap — we’re looking for the secret sauce that’s going to take us to next level…and we’re already on level 50 or so.

Put another way, I’m already riding a purple dragon that spits nerve gas and farts nuclear waste. Don’t talk to me about magic short swords.

I encountered this for the first time with Eric Meyer on CSS four years ago. I said this:

In the end, the book wasn’t for me. If you’re a CSS hacker of some repute, you’re probably not going to get a lot out of this book. […] I was really looking for some wicked tips and theories to earn myself entrance to CSS Nirvana.

As you get more and more skilled, it becomes a problem finding books that start where your knowledge ends and go further. That’s not to say you know everything, but you often find yourself skimming through a 1,000 page reference to find maybe one or two tips to add to your arsenal. How many times have you bought a book for a single chapter?

I was prompted to write this post because I was in Barnes and Noble this afternoon and stumbled on More Effective C#, which exactly the kind of book I can rarely find. I started paging through it, and I can safely say my mind was thoroughly blown by about page 20. This is a book that assumes you have Neo-like C# skillz and goes from there. I wish there were more of these.

I think that at a certain point, we’ll see more and more ebooks that cater to the non-beginner. I’m reminded of the two ebooks by Chris Love that I discussed in this post. These are two titles with assume a lot of knowledge and build upon that, without any room for recapping the basics.

If anyone has titles of books that assume a lot of knowledge about a platform and build on that, please comment. I’m curious in finding out what they have in common, who is publishing them, and how they approach and warn the potential buyer of the fact that they’re leaving Kansas by the end of the preface.

I was probably the wrong audience for this book, but that doesn’t make it any less good for someone else.

“Radically Transparent” is about two things: (1) becoming all Web 2.0-ish with blogs, social networks, etc., and (2) managing your online reputation, or that of your company.

Given that I work in this environment every day, there were sections that didn’t reveal much. I know what a blog is, what a social network is, etc. But for someone from a traditional PR background who really needs to get up-to-speed on this, the book presents a good survey of how to make your company as transparent and accessible as possible.

Scattered throughout the book are case studies of things that went wrong in PR-land on the Web. The book starts off with Jeff Jarvis’s series of “Dell Hell” posts back in 2005, and moves on to things like the iPhone price drop, the JetBlue fiasco, etc. These are all PR messes that likely wouldn’t have happened without the Web.

One of the central points of the book is that a lot of good or even neutral coverage of your company or name will offset the inevitable bad coverage. In this sense, blogs and social networks help to “pump up” your non-negative search results, thus displacing what you don’t want in there.

In addition, the book pushes on the idea of being totally honest and open, and trying not to be corporate. A lot of what was in here reminded me of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” of five or six years ago.

Finally, the book ends with a really good chapter presenting a checklist of ways to prepare for the inevitable problem. You need to have a good monitoring system so you can spot brewing PR problems before they explode, and you have to a team in place to respond to issues when they happen.

So, like I said, not a great book for me. But if you’re in marketing or PR, there’s a lot of insight here worth reading.

Words fail me.

Is comprehensive-ness a point for, or a point against, a technical book?

I used it think it was an advantage — the bigger, the better — but as I get busier and my company accelerates, it’s increasingly a liability. I’ve started to be greatly attracted to smaller books — or thinner books, more accurately. I’m more and more interested in concise books that cover a more detailed point than broad monsters that try to hit every base.

Who has time to read them? Two years ago, I embarked on Bob Boiko’s “The Content Management Bible, Second Edition.” This is roughly the “War and Peace” of content management. Amazon puts it at 858 pages, but I remember being something like 1,100. And it was larger than a trade paperback — I don’t know the format, but combine the page size and the page count and you have a book that I could easily beat someone to death with. I would say that it’s physically the largest book on my shelf.

I loved the book, and I have something of a sense of accomplishment for reading it. I still remember the moment I finished it on a flight from Los Angeles to Omaha that got diverted to Kansas City because of a thunderstorm. I flopped back in the seat, wide smile on my face. I think I was sweating.

Still — there’s no way I could read this book again today. It just wouldn’t be an option.

The book was an attempt to cover everything to do with content management, and it got very broad. There were several hundred pages in the middle, for example, discussing general project management applicable to projects far beyond content management.

Contrast this to two books I’ve read in the last six weeks:

• Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web
  216 pages, but lots of screencaps

• Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged
  214 pages, but the page size is smaller than normal, and the type size is big

Given the qualifiers I listed there, both of these books would clock in at less than 150 pages in a standard trade paperback with a standard type size.

I get excited when I see books like this with a subject I’m interested in because I’ll get so much more out of them. I’ll walk away with 10x the comprehension than a massive book that has bitten off more than it could chew.

Sadly, there’s an economy of scale that means the larger book is more likely to get printed, which is too bad. From a price-per-page perspective, smaller books are probably vastly more expensive for a publisher. My suspicion is, however, that smaller books sell better, though I know there are people that know the true answer to that question.

I’m wondering how eBooks are going to level the playing field.

Chris Love wrote the other day about “The 7 Virtues of Reading eBooks”. He has just written two ebooks for the WroxBlox series, and they look good because they’re short (40 and 50 pages) and they cover very concise topics:

• Leveraging httpModules for Better ASP.NET applications

• Leveraging httpHandlers to Stream Custom Content in ASP.NET

These are two topics that would be single chapters in larger books. If you look at the economics of it, the publisher comes out ahead. These ebooks are $7 each. Seven dollars for one chapter? That’s good money for a publisher that doesn’t even have to print the book, and — here’s the important point — I’m much more likely to buy one of these than look for the information in “ASP.Net Unleashed” which clocks in at a svelte 1,490 pages.

I’m working on a book deal right now. I’m finishing the proposal this weekend, and under the “Format” section, I have this:

[Book title] will be a very short trade paperback — absolutely less than 100 pages. Its size will be one of the main selling points. Our target reader does not have the time nor the inclination to read a 400-page technical book — they need to get up-to-speed quickly and can’t devote more than a half-dozen hours to reading about the subject.

Yep, I’m going to keep this baby under 100 pages if it kills me. Given my target audience specifically, and the IT crowd in general, the size of this book will help sell vastly more copies than it ever would if I started throwing more content into it.

So, authors, write shorter books. Please. I’ll buy more of them.

I’m pretty saddened to say that I just didn’t get this book. I’ve known about it for a couple years, and finally read during downtime in Chicago, but I just didn’t get it.

Peter Morville, of course, wrote the Polar Bear Book (I’ve read all three editions) and is a legend in the information architecture world. This book was supposed to be a natural segue from his first book. But it couldn’t have been more different.

There was just nothing actionable in this book. It’s short — just eight chapters or so — and Morville goes on and on about one subject: there’s a lot of information in the world, and finding something is getting tougher and tougher. He has all sorts of examples, many of them fascinating.

But, when it was over, I was left saying, “Yeah, and…?” Besides many anecdotes, stories, and little vignettes about interesting findability issues, Morville didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff out there. Yeah, finding stuff is tricky. And yes, there are some really interesting technologies around based on this problem. And…?

Additionally, the writing style was annoying at times. It’s very informal, sometimes to the point of stream-of-consciousness. There were times when it seemed like a rhetorical flourish was more important than actually making a point.

I loved the Polar Bear Book. And I idolized Morville when he was running Argus. But “Ambient Findability” left me completely deflated.

Programmers Don’t Read Books — But You Should: Jeff Atwood criticizes the concept of reading a book on programming:

If programmers don’t learn from books today, how do they learn to program? They do it the old-fashioned way: by rolling up their sleeves and writing code — while harnessing the collective wisdom of the internet in a second window.

[…] I lay part of the blame squarely at the feet of the technical book publishing industry […]

But then he goes on to promote his programmers bookshelf, and explains that you should just be buying better books:

The best programming books are timeless. They transcend choice of language, IDE, or platform. They do not explain how, but why. If you feel compelled to clean house on your bookshelf every five years, trust me on this, you’re buying the wrong programming books.

And that’s the key. Buying books about languages and syntax is perhaps a bad idea, since they change so often. The best books are about concepts — timeless bits of information you can use for years across multiple languages.

I read obsessively. I read about my trade more than anyone I know. In the last month, here are the books I have read, either in whole or in part. These aren’t books I haven’t just thumbed through for reference (that list would be in the dozens). Rather, these are books I found a quiet time to read in order actually learn something in a deeper sense.

• Peopleware
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
• Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web
• Practical Subversion
• Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture
• Writing White Papers
• Painless Project Management with FogBugz

And that’s just in the last month.

I have to read about this stuff. I can’t stop. And I share Jeff’s opinion that the true higher calling is to books that drench you in concepts rather than syntax. These are the books that extend you beyond just keeping up with your day-to-day job. I get a little thrill when I find a book about a transcendent concept that I’m interested in. A book that I think will make be a better developer over the long term.

Later in his article, Jeff lists his top five programming books — the books he thinks every programmer should read. You’ll have to click through to see the list, but I was gratified to see that I’ve read four of them.

For my two cents, the best book I’ve ever read on programming and the one that I should just plain force everyone at Blend to read is Code Complete by Steve McConnell. I don’t care what language you code in this, this book will make you better at it.

Let me ask you for your opinion here: do you think that the computer book sections at your local book store are shrinking?

Five years ago, the local Barnes and Noble in Sioux Falls had a majestic computer book section. I don’t know the official names for these things, but it was at least two rows, filled on either side — four or five shelves long.

Then things started shrinking. A whole row-side disappeared one day, replaced by science books. Then a year or so later, another row side vanished, replaced by philosophy books. Today, the computer book section at my Barnes and Noble is half the size it was five years ago — one row-side, perhaps four vertical units long, and maybe three on the other side.

This weekend, I’ve been in Kansas City for a soccer tournament. The KC metro area is almost two million people, comprised of about 50 cities. Compare this to the Sioux Falls metro of just over 200,000 people.

I’ve been in two Barnes and Nobles here. Both were at least double the size of the Sioux Falls store. One was an urban-style store in The Plaza comprised of four stories — more vertical than horizontal. Both impressive.

Total computer book shelves in either of them: four. Seriously — one side of a small row in each case.

Why is this?

Steve Souders is Yahoo’s “front end engineer.” He’s the guy who wrote the article we discussed a few months back which brought us back to all those old “tricks” that make your Web site load faster.

Consider this: say your page takes 700 milliseconds to load from request to final render. As developers, we tend to obsess about the server-side time involved with this, but there’s a good chance that’s only, say, 300 milliseconds or so. This means over half the time is spent getting the page to the browser, and rendered in the browser. It’s this time which is a much juicier target for optimization than the back-end of the app.

But we tend to ignore this time. We tell ourselves how awesome we are that we can get a page “out the door” in 3/10ths of a second, meanwhile our users are sitting around waiting for four stylesheets and nine background images to load.

Souders rolls up his prior article and expands on it quite a bit to lay out 15 rules of good front-end engineering. Simple things like:

1. Reduce HTTP requests
2. Minify Javascript
3. Add an Expires header
4. etc.

The Expires header is interesting, and plainly obvious. You can make all your Javascript and CSS completely cacheable on the client, so that their browser doesn’t even ask for it from the server. Yes, we’ve all done If-Modified-Since headers, but even those force a GET request to ensure the target isn’t new.

Souders advises configuring the Expires header so the browser doesn’t even ask for the page. This isn’t new, but I’ve always been reluctant to do it because I feared that I couldn’t get the client to refresh their cache when I really need them to. The solution? Use your file names to “version” your Javascript and CSS to ensure the browser will refresh it when you need it to — when you have actually changed something. Did you ever wonder why all of Yahoo’s page components include the version number in their filename?

It’s a short book — less than 200 pages — and you could read it from cover-to-cover in an afternoon. In a way, it will bring you back to the days when we all had dial-up and we had to squeeze every last bit of performance out of our pages to avoid 10-second page loads, before the fat pipes of broadband made us all lazy.

Odds are that you could make a handful of changes to the front-end of your app that would be worth dozens of hours of re-engineering on the back-end to get your pages to render faster.