Mike Cane left a comment in response to my post about the Sony Reader. He said he hoped I’d write about the possibilities of socialising books on the Internet. Ever eager to please, here I go…

Book Shelves and Coffee Tables

Anyone who reads books will check out the coffee table or bookshelves of friends when left alone in their living room. You put your favorite books on your coffee because that’s where they look first (and ideally because you’re reading them).

They’ll look at the coffee table when you go to the toilet.

If you leave them for longer, they’ll head for your bookshelf.

They do it partly because they’re bored, and partly because it tells them something about you.

Little tip: If the conversation seems to be dying, nip to the loo. While you’re powdering your nose they will look around for a conversation starter. A choice of coffee table books will catch their eye. When you return they will start a conversation on one of your favorite topics. And it will tell you something about their interests too: why did they choose ‘Book of Boring Postcards’ and not ‘How to be a Better Lover’?

The Internet and Books

In real life the social aspect of books is limited by the amount of time you spent in the water closet. Usually they don’t have time to browse your bookcases because you’re talking to them. Or because, horror of all common horrors, you put on the television.

On the Internet this restriction disappears; they can check out your collection whether you’re on the bog or not. No longer do we need to be constipated for them to scan your bookshelves.

Here are a couple of examples of the beginning of this social book revolution:

A simple list of books

This is Garr Reynolds’ list of books that he recommends (link opens new tab). I’ve been following Reynold’s wonderful Presentation Zen blog for some time so I respect anything he recommends. A list of his favorite books is quite useful to me.

Unfortunately there are a few shortcomings: I can’t easily sample the books, or find out what he thinks about them. There are so many choices, I don’t know where to start. I don’t know if all these books are relevant to me. And if I came across one of these books on another site, I probably wouldn’t remember that Garr Reynold’s recommended it.

A deep list of books

This is a blog by a young entrepreneur by the name of Ben Casnocha (link opens new tab). On the left hand-side of his page is a list of his most recently read books. It includes a little picture of the cover, a link to amazon, a one-sentence review, and a link to his fuller review if it exists.

This is very useful and it’s quite likely that a strong recommendation will have me clicking on that Amazon link.

Amazon

Amazon has already taken the socialising of books to a new level by allowing anyone to write an independent review. These are pretty useful when making a buying decision, but there is a big problem: I don’t trust any of the reviewers. Why would I? I don’t know them. Taken together I get a fairly accurate impression of whether the book is good or not, but what I really want is to read reviews by people I already know and respect.

The problem at the moment is while people link to Amazon, Amazon doesn’t generally link back to the people I want them to. Amazon is weakened for the customer because its databases are all inbred.

A Scenario

I’m reading Seth Godin’s blog and he tells me that he’s brought out a new book. I click on the link and I’m taken to Amazon. There are many reviews, but I ignore most of them because Amazon tells me Garr Reynolds, Ben Casnocha and my neighbour Michael, have all read the book. It links back to their blogs where I find both Reynold’s and Casnocha love it, but Michael thinks it’s dire. Since Michael usually has poor taste in books I take this as the ultimate recommendation and add it to my wish list.

Here’s what you would need:

A central database which contains just a few simple details. It contains your name (or online pseudonym) a list of books you’ve read, a link to a review if you’ve done one, and choices for levels of privacy. Install a plugin into your blog and you can automate the whole process.

Then anyone who respects your book choices has you on their own database. It’s just a database of names and links to their book list.

They go to Amazon. Amazon cross references the book they are currently looking at with their list of book-friends and lists anyone who matches that query.

There’s nothing stopping this happening now; we’re only one step away.

Electronic Books

None of this relies on the use of eBooks, but eBooks would make it easier and even more powerful. Some examples:

• You buy a book and open it up on your reader. It gives you the choice to tell people you own the book. If you decide to publish that information it automatically updates the reference on your personal book database.
• When you finish the book, you can click a checkbox that says you’ve done so.
• If your eBook reader allows you to type, you can write your review while you’re still reading. When you’re done, you just click send and it updates your blog and your personal book database.
• Your friend writes notes and musings in the ‘margins’ of his electronic book. You read the same book and see your margin has a marker in it. You click the marker and it reveals your friend’s comments.
• There is a reference in the book, but instead of having to troll the libraries and book shops, you just click a link. If there is a public domain version it tells you and you can download the reference immediately. It doesn’t even matter if it’s a rare book.
• An option takes you to a list of people who are currently reading the same book as you. It even says who’s on the same chapter. Instant book discussion group.

Not all this will be possible on the Sony Reader, but it will begin the revolution. And really, it’s the software innovation that is slowing us down more than technology.

I don’t know how big the problem is outside Britain, but here the streets are covered in litter. We have people picking it up, but they can’t keep up. We have campaigns to stop it, but they will never work unless the penalties are severe and we increase surveillance to 1984 levels. That would give us clean streets, but… well read 1984.

The reason littering will continue to happen is because we’re looking for the solution in the wrong place.

Policing the random dumping of rubbish will only be effective when the state gives the people the ability to police it themselves. That’s the only way it will be cost effective and it’s the only way we will ever have enough eyes.

A police state says: if you see someone drop litter, ring this special number to report them. People will do that until they realise the men in uniform don’t have the resources to do anything with your report. When they realise that they will stop reporting.

A properly policed state is there for back up. A state that is properly policed says: go tell that litterbug off, and if he threatens you we will protect you. In a well policed state people will have no fear for doing this because they know that kid wouldn’t dare carry a knife with him. They’d do it because every kid they’ve told previously felt ashamed.

When people start respecting authority again, littering will reduce significantly.

And people will start respecting authority again when they find some to respect.

The Internet browser Firefox is my favorite piece of software. Now I’ve made the move from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer I will never go back. The reason is simply because Microsoft won’t make IE open source. There would be no point, since they wouldn’t really own the software any more.

As a very amateur programmer I don’t have the skills to use the source code and create something I really like, so having the code doesn’t make any difference to me. But other people having the code does. They create wonderful plugins, which I can pick and choose to create my perfect browser.

If they shipped my browser to anyone else, they would think it was awful. If I received this browser as it is now just 6 months ago, even I would have thought it awful. But for the me right now, it is absolutely perfect. It has everything I want, and nothing I don’t want.

Firefox is the future of software.

Firefox works because it isn’t one product. It’s millions of products. And most importantly, it’s really easy to customise and keep up-to-date.

And remarkably it’s totally free. But that’s what makes it remarkable.

Linux will eventually take over practically the entire operating system market for the same reason. It’s not at that stage yet. If it’s now easy to use, I don’t know because it’s not easy enough to transfer.

But it’s much easier than it used to be.

I can download the software, burn it to CD, and try it out without installing it. Perfect. Except it doesn’t automatically work with my wireless card.

This isn’t the fault of Linux. In fact I had trouble setting it up on Windows — though it was Windows 98 at the time. But Windows wins out because I’ve already gone through the trauma and got it working there. I don’t want to have to go through that again, and while I stay with Windows I don’t have to.

I want to move to Linux because I know there are going to be big payoffs like there were with Firefox. But Linux isn’t quite Firefox yet.

But when it does reach the Firefox state I won’t ever want to move back. Not because it’s more secure or has a better interface, but because it will become increasingly plugin friendly. I will be able to make it my operating system. The changes I make won’t be cosmetic; they will be functional. That can’t happen on a proprietary system like Windows or OSX. It has to be open source.

Software patents won’t matter either. The open community doesn’t have a legal department. It doesn’t care about those kinds of rules. And it’s too widely distributed to police.

Eventually all software will be free because it will be better than anything an individual company can produce. Even specialist software will be free because the people who really make it are the animation studios.

Software is just the beginning, but it’s happening faster than anything else because there are no physical restrictions. If we want an open source world we have to find the technology to lift restrictions like labour and raw material. That’s incredibly difficult but it will happen eventually.

When it does capitalism will disappear.

Whether that happens in 20, 50 or 200 years, we cannot predict. But it’s the in between stages that are going to be really interesting. That’s starting to happen already.

Our economy has changed from one governed by necessity to one governed by desires. But that’s nothing new. The big change now is that more and more people have everything they want… except time.

People are going to start working less for money. More people will opt for part-time work in those non-passion-inspiring jobs so that they can spend time exploring their passions. As long as they can afford to live, they will do it.

But they won’t sit around on the beach for long because that gets boring. They will start doing work they enjoy and offer their output for free.

Eventually we will have a situation where scientists, doctors, computer programmers, politicians and even a different form of entrepreneur will work mostly for no pay, but will spend a day a few hours every week doing the few non-passionate jobs that can’t be fulfilled by robots and other automation.

Where they can they will volunteer because it makes them feel good and because they can afford to.

This is already starting.

At the moment there is a disparity between America and English spellings and the meaning of certain words. It won’t last long. Spellings, and I believe national languages, will start to merge into one international language — leaving cultural slang as the language alternatives.

The cause is the Internet. Television started to do it, but the Internet actively encourages it.

As an example, I’ve just downloaded the new version of my browser (Firefox 2.0). This new version has a built in spell checker loaded with American English. Whenever I type a word like realise it underlines it in red, and tells me the correct spelling uses a ‘z’. I’ve started to add the British versions of spellings, but to be honest I read so many American sites that I’m confusing myself.

And to be honest I don’t think it really matters. It’s not like I’m using text message (txt msg) language which is incomprehensible at times. Neither spelling is better or worse; they’re just different. Why not use some of the American spellings? (Other than because I want to hold onto my British identity.)

There’s actually a problem with us all using different spellings when we are using search engines: different spellings bring up different results. Not too long ago website writers actually had to actively misspell words in order to capture some of the misspelt search queries. Now Google has the ‘did you mean’ feature, that’s less necessary.

This is just the beginning though. Maybe translation software will reach a stage where we can communicate effectively between languages, but translations have never been particularly accurate even when using a human translator. It’s impossible to get the nuances of meaning through in a translation. If we start communicating with each other more, it only makes sense to start sharing a language.

Will that mean we turn to English as the primary form of communication? It happened with Science, but that was mainly because the Church didn’t understand English.

No, in a multicultural world I think we will start to see languages combining more. Well, that’s nothing really new since English is already a hybrid language. But it will become much more so.

I already regularly say math instead of maths, but the merging of British and American English is hardly a big change. The big change will happen gradually, but it will speed up as more and more of us are able to communicate with each other. If I can say enough in Chinese to have a basic conversation I will want to learn more words. But the process has to be two way, or it will just be me learning Chinese.

A cultural shift is something else entirely. A cultural shift has to be driven by something. The Internet will be involved. Multiculturalism will be involved. Globalisation will be involved. But something else must be involved, because the step from Chinese to English is currently far too large.

It takes something small like a spell checker to make the change. It takes small steps. One word at a time. In fact, it’s probably happening already without us really noticing it.

This comic strip is definitely one of my favorites and it continues to improve. The Halloween stuff has been particularly funny and todays Sunday strip prompted me to put out a little link love. I think the characters probably get funnier as you get to know them. This and Dilbert are the only strips I read on a daily basis.

I’m tempted to copy the strip strip here, before it leaves the archives but for a comic strip that would probably extend beyond the scope of fair use.

Pearls Before Swine can be read for free every day here.

This is an excellent (and personally highly relevant) post by Ian Ybarra about parents and their kids’ dreams. It wisely takes the point-of-view of the parents and explains why they often don’t support projects that could be incredible for the child, instead encouraging them to take a more traditional career path.

I suffer this very problem because I can barely contemplate working a traditional office job. If it’s temporary then fine, but the idea of taking on a permanent position sends pulses of dark death cascading down my body.

It’s well worth your time to read Ian Ybarra’s full post, but below are my personal responses.

Parents don’t get much of the reward, but absorb a lot of the risk

While I get oddles of reward for researching and writing, none of that reward is evident to my parents. I’m really bad at explaining what I’m researching and getting them excited about it. I expect them to just read what I write, but why should they if they don’t have an interest? I didn’t expect them to read all my essays at school or reports in college. It’s up to me to sell my ideas to them just like anyone else.

Even when I was at university, my weekly phone calls were often less than enlightening. My mum is very good at telling stories of how her week has gone, but I lack this ability.

When I can afford to join a public speaking group this should improve, but I should also keep in mind the problem whenever I converse with them and push myself to talk more and share my ideas. In fact, not just with my parents, but with everyone.

This is a great quotation by Ybarra:

I have a friend who quit his high school teaching job in Kansas to move to Nashville to play music. He sends a documentary video of his new life to his parents about once a month. And they get so excited that I hear about it the next day from my mom who heard from my dad who works with Scott’s dad.

It makes a lot of sense. If I can tell the story well, they can live my dream with me. It’s all about sharing that dream.

Losing Face - Failure isn’t just a problem of taking care of your child. Its also dealing with questions of “what is junior doing these days?”

I find answering this question difficult myself, so it must be really difficult for my parents. What makes it particularly difficult is the fact that at the moment I’m making very little money from ventures. This makes the work I do seem like a hobby rather than real work. Again, this would be easier if I was able to sell what I’m doing to my parents, but it would still be difficult. They need something like ‘he’s a writer’, or ‘professional speaker’, or ‘psychological researcher’. But I don’t have a title and I probably never will.

This is Ian’s suggestion:

You have to be to your parents what Karl Rove is to Dub-ya. Feed them the lines, tell them what to say, explain why it’s good, show them how to sell it. [...] I, for one, don’t have an official title in my day job and I have several other projects that are important to me. But for now I just tell my parents to say Ian’s a writer. and mention one notable thing I’ve worked on. If you’re not employed in the traditional sense, then that needs to change to She’s working on ______.

So what is the line I should give. I think something like ‘Alan is researching and writing about learning and brain fitness’.

That isn’t my favorite way of explain what I’m doing, but it is probably the best way for other people to understand it. I’d like to change writing to teaching at some point, but that will wait until I’m at least practicing public speaking.

Not Wanting to See Your Child Hurt. Kill the dream early, so they won’t get hurt later on when they don’t get it.

Get your parents to realize that you will hurt a million times more if you don’t go after your dream than if you just don’t quite reach it.

I know this already, but the more I explain it to my parents the better.

I think my mum understands it. She told me recently that when my dad was made redundant there was the possibility of using the redundancy money to start a gardening business. It was risky but my mum was excited by the idea.

About a week later my dad landed himself a managing director’s job. The redundancy had turned into a nice promotion and my mum was frequently congratulated on becoming a managing director’s wife.

But Mum wasn’t all that excited. In fact she was a little disappointed. She was looking forward to taking that risk.

I think Dad ultimately enjoyed the work, but I do not think he was passionate about it on a day to day basis. It was stressful, took a lot of work and involved a lot of traveling — which is fine if you really care for the reason behind the stress, but I don’t think Dad was.

When I was doing work experience is the offices of a factory when I was back in college, I was talking to one of the workers about careers. I asked, a bit rudely probably, whether her job is what she dreamed of doing when she was growing up. She dodged the question, but explained how when you’re a kid you have big dreams and want to do all these amazing things, but you reach a point when money becomes important. I can understand where she is coming from, but as I listened to her tell her colleague about the fancy new mirror she had just bought, I vowed that I would never let my dreams die like that.

I broke that vow without even realising it. And it’s tempting to let them die again. It really would be easier it the short term. But I think letting a dream die is like letting your soul die. I’m not prepared for that depression.

Financial Concerns

This is the big one for me because my finances are not strong at the moment. I’m taking a very difficult career path, and money is even my prime concern. This is probably what is eating my parents the most, and to be fair it is my own concern as well. I have plans for improving this, but it’s going to be difficult to get it going.

When I do it’s going to be important to share everything with my parents so that they feel like they are part of the project.

The big message, however, is communication. I have to communicate more.

Ian Ybarra’s post can be read here.

The original prompts for Ybarra’s post come from Jason Sheen.

Past attempts to produce a good portable eBook reader have been disappointing at best. Flawed in design and format support (What! You want to be able to read PDFs?!) they have deservedly flopped. Finally, we may have a sensible offering.

From the reviews I’ve read (here, and here) this is not a perfect product, but it sounds like the Sony Reader is a reader that is finally good enough to use. A product that will actually be comfortable to hold, won’t hurt your eyes and won’t restrict what you can can download onto it. Even if it doesn’t take off like the iPod did, it should offer some market traction.

To be honest, the pictures doesn’t sell it for me, but the point of an eBook reader is that it has a different type of screen — one that is almost like paper.

The Sony® Reader’s display uses e Ink® - a significant improvement over CRT and LCD technology. Instead of rows of glowing cells, e Ink® microcapsules actually appear as either black or white depending on a positive or negative charge determined by the content. The result is a reading experience that’s similar to paper - high contrast, high resolution, viewable in direct sunlight and at a nearly 180-degree angle, and requiring no power to maintain the image. In other words, it’s a screen that, like you, is well read.

(from the official site)

That’s the kind of thing you have to see for yourself, so I think this will sell via word-of-mouth more than general advertising.

A couple of posts down I wrote about the dream of having a secret room behind a bookcase. I also said by time I have the opportunity to do so, all my books will probably be electronic. Looks like we’re drawing closer to that situation. I won’t be too sad to see my books disappear, however. The main benefit of having real books on a shelf is that people can look through and see your collection and what you are interested in. The possibilities of socialising book collections on the Internet are huge.

One negative point I see if it becomes a good RSS reader like Mike Cane’ says, is that it will reduce interactivity. If we can’t use the machine to leave comments we obviously won’t leave comments. This would be a shame in many cases.

Oh, and we need to find new work for paperboys.

Actually one thing that may sound negative, but I don’t think ultimately will be, is the possibility of a loss of jobs in publishing and related work. The age of automation is picking up pace and taking jobs, but these are generally jobs that people are not all that passionate about. It also means prices will fall for more products — sometimes to nothing. One possible outcome is that people will choose to work fewer hours so they can work on their passions instead. Free open source software is the first sign that people are willing to work for free when they can. I believe we will see a lot more of that.

This is one of those products that will change the world. Which actually isn’t a very bold claim if you look at computers, cars, Walkmans, vacuum cleaners, televisions, modems, mobile phones, the electric guitar… They all play a surprisingly large part in shaping how we live. If Sony has got it right, this will be their next Walkman.

I came across an interesting post (via Cartoon Brew) that compares rip-offs of Preston Blair drawings to the originals. The copies change a few details to fit the specific project’s needs — in this case to make it Halloweenesque. It’s these changes that ruin the copies.
Being very much an amateur myself, I wasn’t quick to note why they were bad (though to be fair I was probably distracted by the hideous colouring; something I did notice straight away). When you compare them side-by-side with the originals, it’s pretty easy to say which are the more sucessful images, but it takes a little while to spot exactly what makes the copies so bad.

This my favourite example because it shows how something small can make an image seem wrong; even if the reason isn’t obvious straight away:

There’s a big give-away here — the line that run’s through Blair’s picture depicting the line of action. Now look at the eyes. In Blair’s version the eyes follow the line of action and make sense when compared to the position of the body; the cat looks like he’s looking at something with his whole body. But in the copy his body position is in contrast to what his eyes are doing. This could make sense in the context of a story (e.g. he’s seen a mouse, then someone tells him off and he responds by moving his eyes), but without context it just makes it seem a bit odd.

From looking at remakes of good movies I think one of the biggest problems with copying is that you always miss some of the subtle elements that make it great. And at the same time you don’t put enough of your own decisions into it. But if you take a bad movie and make a good version, or you reimagine* the original concept and make something completely different then you can be successful. Sometimes.

In other words, no matter how great your talent, copying or tracing is always going to produce something inferior if you are copying something great. The remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is probably the most obvious filmic example. I saw the remake first and the credits were just funny. Then I watched the original and they were haunting. I guess there were probably oddities in the music, but the obvious difference was the use of the colour green in the remake. Without doing a side-by-side comparison I’m not sure what caused the different reactions, but my guess is it’s not mainly the green colour, but something to do with the interaction between sound and image. I think if I were doing it, I would have mismatched the image to the music to some degree to make it a little uncomfortable to watch.

Having said that, copying is one of the best possible methods for learning from the masters; it’s just not a good idea to turn the copy into a full production.

Take a look at the original post (here) for more examples and some great comments. Try to ignore the colouring and shading (it’s difficult) as it’s too obviously grotesque — and not in a halloween type of way.

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*No, not like Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. I can’t even comment on that because I haven’t seen it.

One day I will have one of these:

Preferably mine will have a full library behind it, but we shall see. By time I have the chance to actually build this all books will probably be electronic and I’ll have to build a virtual version. Still the dream lives on.

This project looks good from the picture above, but it’s a bit obvious that it’s a secret door on some of the photos; especially this one. And the content is a bit disappointing.

It’s very cool though, especially the catch which is an old Sherlock Holmes book. Again, a bit obvious, but it’s the right choice. I think it would be fun to watch people try to figure out this puzzle (especially if they don’t know about it). Imagine a house that you know has lots of secrets waiting to be uncovered. What fun! (Although it may encourage visitors to seek out your real secrets!)

I remember visiting some relatives (not sure who they are now) who lived in a really old house. The layout didn’t make practical sense because you had to go through bedrooms or up and down sets of stairs to get to certain places, but it was exciting. I went exploring and found a random door. I was expecting it to be a cupboard, but when I opened it I found another set of stairs leading up to an attic that they didn’t use. You’ll never know how excited I was exploring that house.

Anyway, check out the details here.

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Oh, I’ve just come across this article which suggest they are becoming a bit too common. I’m not sure I want to be common.

On the otherhand, the snooker table coming out the floor (video section animation #2) just makes sense. I like the idea of something being practical and cool. Space saving is a very practical idea.

Dun, dun, dunnnnnnnn

I’ve always sat on the fence when it comes to subjects like the Iraq War because, frankly, I’m a little ignorant of the facts. Not more ignorant than most people I doubt, but I take longer to reach a conclusion. Somebody telling me, ‘it’s all about the oil’ doesn’t really sell the idea. When it’s backed up with a FACT it doesn’t help because a fact is useless unless you can put it in context and check its accuracy.

But I finally decided I should become a little better informed. This is a major issue afterall, and it’s not really sensible to be ignorant of politics.
My route in was Terrorstorm — a documentary by Alex Jones declaring that the London Bombings of 7th July were ‘an inside job’ just like 9/11. This is obviously the extreme view (and he gets more extreme) but it’s amazing how easy it to get sucked into his argument when you are igorant of what he is talking about. I decided to let go and for the two hour documentary I suspended my disbelief and swallowed every FACT (he prints them reguarly in capitals across the screen) he shoved down my throat.

By the end of the documentary I was furious, scared and ready to fight against the evil conspirators…

…just as soon as I checked out the counter argument.

The first page of search results were just people propagating the video, but on the second page I found some forums that tore his documentary apart. How did they do this? Well they took the majority of his facts and proved (often with citation, but admittedly not always) that his facts lacked accuracy. Not all his facts were torn apart, but enough to seriously discredit him as a reliable source of information.

But to be sure I had to check the counter argument. That didn’t really exist for Terrostorm but I found the more common 9/11 conspiracy theories. What became immediately obvious was that those that believe it was ‘an inside job’ generally had less reasoned forms of argument; they jumped to conclusions based on a profound mistrust of the government and little else.

However, the majority actually had a more reasoned argument, were very well informed and took more of a middle-road conclusion. Everyone knows that governments twist the truth and hide too many details. Not only does this produce a profound mistrust, but that mistrust is usually well founded. The chances of all terror attacks being funded by the Illuminati in order to set up the World Bank that will rule the world is possible, but very unlikely. The chances that the government made several cock-ups and is trying to hide them is so likely that I’d ‘eat my shorts’ if it didn’t prove true.

There are so many political problems that we know are true and we really should be focusing our attention on them. I don’t like government cover-ups nor spin and I believe we should be focusing on ways to counteract it properly. If we do that, it will reveal any true conspiracies along with it. As it is conspiracies do more harm that good by distracting from real issues that never really get resolved. Whatever your stance on Iraq, falsifying intelligence reports is wrong. Even if it proves the correct decision, the means still do not justify the end. Such a lie shows such a great disrespect for British citizens that there is no way we should ever have voted such a person back in. So why did we?