To muddle things further, I have been taught by living in a civilized society that it is entirely reasonable for me to drink the water for free as long as I don’t steal the bucket. That is, once I own a book, i can resell it or give it away. If I don’t own the book I can read it for free by borrowing it from a friend or from the library, or even just by having it read to me. Once again, I’m taught that the value is in the bucket.

Now, the bucket makers aren’t necessarily happy with this arrangement, but they’re kind of obliged to deal with it. Part of that is social pressure – this freedom is part of the culture of books, and fighting it makes you the bad guy – but another part of it is more cynical. See, every other non-consumable good in society is tied to these rules as well – you can gift and loan tools, jewelry, cars or anything else you can think of. To buck this trend, the bucket makers would have to say “Well, wait a minute, we’re different than these other goods. We have this great water which has value of a different kind” and that’s a problem, because so far the whole model is based on putting value on the buckets, not the water, so they don’t want to upset that cart.

This has worked well for a very long time, and people really love their buckets, but now some crazy guy has gone and invented plumbing. Suddenly I can get my water from the source, and that really screwss things up. The ways in which it messes things up are a whole other conversation, but here’s the bit that interests me.

What happens if, when I want to make a gift of a book, I don’t need to buy a new bucket?

See, I will never feel bad about libraries or gifting read books, at least under the current model, but I also feel it probably hurts creators more than anyone else. But the idea of “gifting” an electronic file really means “giving a duplicate” unless you want to do something particularly cumbersome with it. I can imagine a world where, in the absence of buckets, the cost of that is small enough to pay casually, and goes directly to the creator.

Sure, this upends a lot of assumption. If money goes to the creator directly, he then becomes the person who has to hire all the people who make a book possible rather than them hiring him. That’s a drastic change, so much so that it may seem impossible. But in my gut, I’m wondering if it’s the only possible outcome.

PS – So it’s clear, this is not a “Death to Publishers!” position, merely a “The roles of everyone involved in the book chain are potentially subject to drastic change over the next decade or three”

(This was originally a comment in a discussion of piracy on Chuck Wendig’s blog, but I wanted to pull it out and make it it’s own thing)

I mean, I still buy books. In fact, looking at Amazon I’ve bought 14 books in the past 30 days, not counting ones I’ve gotten for free. Of those, 3 of them were physical books, and the rest were all e-books. I am well and truly converted over to the ebook manner of reading, and there’s no turning back. The real proof of it? Jim Butcher’s Changes came out in this window too. I’m not counting it because I’d pre-ordered, but it’s nicely illustrative.

See, it was one of the books that got caught up in Amazon’s squabble with the publisher, and the kindle version got yanked off shelves (so to speak) shortly before release. Now, Amazon made it right — they sold me the hardcover for the price I’d paid for the ebook, $9.99 — and I’m grateful for that, but here I am a month later, with this book form a series I love by an author I dig which I’ve heard is fantastic, and I haven’t touched it. Why?

Because it is just too much of a pain for me to bother with carrying it around. I always have my kindle. It’s part of my regular kit. And I’ve got four different books that I’m reading at once going on it. It lets me read in strange places at random time. In contrast, for the hardcover I need an uninterrupted block of time at home, something I just don’t have with a rambunctious 15 month-old in the house.

All of which is to say, I am very much the ebook audience these days, and its with that in mind that I want to highlight the three books of the past month that AREN’T electronic, because I think they illustrate something important. See, I still love books, but the kindle has changed how I think about them. There are books I buy because I want the actual book, but there needs to be some reason beyond reading it. If it’s just the content I want, the Kindle does a better job.

Setting aside gifts and books with sentimental value, I think these three books do a good job of illustrating what attributes call for a real book.

The first is Sanjay Patel’s Ramayana: The Divine Loophole. Patel’s a graphics guy from Pixar and the book is, to put it frankly, absolutely beautiful. I saw it on the shelf in Borders and every page was a wonder to behold. It’s possible this book would do well on something with a really nice screen (like an ipad) but for something this lovely, the ability to flip pages and be struck by the images is entirely worth it.

So I’ll buy a book if it’s beautiful.

The next is Headfirst Rails. It’s an instructional book about the Ruby on Rails programming language. The Headfirst series are unique and well regarded because they present the information the reader needs in really engaging and innovative ways. Comparing their books to a random computer textbook is like night and day. They use layout and presentation as a technology, using the book form to its fullest. It is probably readable in electronic form, but it’s so well designed as a book, that would actually seem less efficient.

So I’ll buy a book if it takes advantage of being a book.

The last book was the late Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat Strikes Back. This is a great book and I *really* wanted it, but it wasn’t available as an ebook, and given the circumstances of its production (Snyder died before it went to print) I didn’t feel confident it would be available in any kind of timely manner. So I bought the physical book, and despite it being fantastic, I’ve barely dented it for the same reasons I haven’t read Changes.

So I’ll buy a book if I have no other choice.

I would suggest against publisher’s leaning too heavily on #3 — in most cases there’s a different book I could buy, and I almost certainly will. However, #1 and #2 are hopefully a little bit more informative, and they both have something in common. Both celebrate the book as an object rather than a mere container.

Now, none of this addresses the very real frustrations I have with ebooks — the inability to gift or lend them is a paralyzingly bad element that I tolerate only because they’re still in their infancy — and I understand fully why any of those other problems might keep someone from embracing the ebook. But once you do, it’s hard to go back, and it also makes you appreciate the books that really deserve appreciation all the more.

When I moved on to high school, I set it aside. Rather than being part of the curriculum, shop was is own distant wing of the school, visible only occasionally from Gym or Driver’s ed. It wasn’t shop, it was “Vocational Education” and the kids who went there didn’t overlap much with my world. I was a power-nerd, on track with various honors classes, good tests and mediocre grades. My view of the universe assumed there were various tracks of academic success, and over time I bought into the general idea that somewhere below the lowest academic track was Vo-tech (Vocational/technical education), and I had the general sense that that was where kids ended up rather than dropping out of school. These were “the dumb kids”, troublemakers and smokers, the ones without real futures, unlike me and my honors class compatriots.

Yes, I was a dumb, arrogant, know-nothing snot-nosed brat. I know this. I’m also in the future.

This idea got smacked out of my head one night when I was at an awards ceremony. I’d gotten an NHS nomination (beating out my fellow power nerds, who had only gotten the equivalent of honorable mention) though the award was pretty much just for show since my grades were middling at best. I hung around for the whole ceremony to be polite, even when it came time to hand out the vo-tech awards.

I did not recognize the woman giving out the awards – she might not have even been a teacher at the school, but given my disconnect from vo-tech, who knows – but I remember her twangy accent as she made a point of fully pronouncing “National Vocational Technical Honor Society” every time it came up, never shortening or abbreviating it. I don’t remember much of the specifics of what she said, but it caught me up short all the same. See, for most of the folks at this ceremony, this was a little sideshow, a chance for the not-so-smart kids to be seen on the stage before we could go back to recognizing the best and brightest.

It was clear this woman knew that, and it was clear it made her angry as hell. And not angry because it’s what she did, angry because she was damn proud of these kids up on the stage and what they had done, and it meant less than nothing to most of the people watching. She didn’t rant or anything. She just made a short statement about how these kids deserve respect, and she made sure that no part of the ceremony was rushed or abbreviated. But that pride and anger shone through as clear as day, and it kind of knocked me on my ass.

There are few times in my life when I have so clearly seen what an utter dumbass I’d been. That night pretty well upended my whole perspective on vocational education. I stopped seeing it as a safety net for losers and started recognizing it as something valuable, a path that someone who knows what they’re doing can and should set their feet upon, and know they’re going to get somewhere. Hell, compared to the vague plans that come form a four year degree, it was positively enviable.

I mention all this because it gives a little context for how intensely disappointed I was with the book Shop Class as Soulcraft. I had read the reviews and heard the interviews and I was intensely excited about it. The premise was that there was value in real work, in learning to do and make things with your hands, and that that had been lost and needed to be regained by our society. This resonated really strongly with me, and I had hoped for a book that addressed it.

Instead, I get a book by and about a Doctor of Philosophy who gave up a think tank job to repair motorcycles, and has now written a book for the sole purpose of justifying that decision, and possibly airing a few of his favorite bits of politics. It’s utterly disappointing, and I wrote a review to that effect, but I wanted to get down the rest of my frustration, if only for myself.

That sense of fairness haunted me well into adulthood without my giving it much thought. I would see people do something that seemed very clearly bad in my eyes, and have other people shrug it off. That was ok, people have different tolerances, but what got me was that they would do it again, or do something comparably bad, and the excited little kid in my brain would want to hump up on top of something and point and say “SEE! SEE! That’s TWICE as bad! Aren’t you appalled?”

But the thing is, people weren’t. The people who were bothered the first time were bothered again, and the people who weren’t bothered the first time just shrugged it off. That just seemed wrong and, perhaps more importantly, unfair. This niggled at the edge of my mind for a long time without ever really crystallizing — it just didn’t come up enough to really merit more than annoyance.

Then the internet came along, and I was deluged by examples of this on a daily basis[1]. This proved the basis for many important moral lessons, but it also laid out the additive fallacy in the starkest of terms. Go to blogs and forums where people are complete jerks and you will quickly discover that they always have a body of people willing to defend them, no matter how obviously rude, insulting or destructive their behavior. Sometimes there’s a clear explanation, like a fierce free speech advocate or just a bigger jerk, but usually it seemed to just be a function of community. Paradoxically it seemed the more often the person was a jerk, the more tolerant their community was of it.

Occasionally, the bad actor might strain tolerance, usually if he’s really machine-gunning the hate, but most often the only way things could change would be if the bad actor took things to the next level, to make his behavior drastically worse, such as by starting to include racist comments in what had heretofore been merely misogynistic remarks. But otherwise? No problem.

It really hurt my heart to acknowledge that if bad behavior is additive, then it suffers from drastic diminishing returns — repeat actions only move the needle up fractionally, and only for as long as memory lasts. If people are willing to be tolerant of the first bad action, then they will probably be tolerant of each subsequent bad action. In fact, these supporters will become so inured to it that when someone else raises it as an issue, the supporter will sincerely wonder why this person is overreacting so strongly.

This is, to be frank, a kind of crappy moral conclusion to reach. At best it suggests a zero tolerance policy of assholes, and while that seems satisfying on paper, it overlooks the simple fact that everyone has the occasional bad day. And, if I’m completely honest with myself, I have to acknowledged that there are a few assholes that I also tolerate in this fashion.

It’s good to be aware of that. Yeah yeah, pop philosophy, blah blah blah. Not very satisfying, but the alternative is that little part of me that still really and truly wants things to be fair, and I;m pretty sure I don’t want to let him out of the box.

1 — In retrospect, I would probably have seen it sooner if I listened to more talk radio.

What’s jarring is that his thesis — that cloud computing is so exciting because people think they can make money off it — is pretty fair. I would go so far as to suggest that it’s not even particularly controversial, outside of a few techno-idealists. It’s just that the reasoning and examples that follow are far less about that point and far more about…honestly, I’m not sure. Maybe the man keeping us down or something.

For my two bits, cloud computing is far from any kind of new idea (even if the terminology is newly hip). There has always been a conflict between the idea of doing everything locally with one mighty computer and doing things remotely where there are advantages like redundancy, accessibility and cost. The idea of the “thin client” — a cheap computer that plugged into a more powerful computer to do everything — was a re-emergence of the classic dumb terminal, and it was the next big thing for a while, until computers got cheap enough that it seemed wasteful.

Today, computers have gotten cheaper still, to the point where the average user may well have access to several computers. This is important because it means that for normal human activities, like writing or playing music or playing games, it matters a lot what is on which computer. There are solutions for this — home networks, USB drives and such — but they all have their own limitations. For a user, being able to get to their content from any machine without hassles is the ultimate convenience. There are some ubiquitous examples of this, like gmail and flickr, but it’s possible dropbox is the best better example. I have a free 2 gig account with them, and anything I’m writing gets saved to the local dropbox directory, and gets synced to all the other machines I’ve signed up. If I’m on someone else’s machine, I can access my stuff via the web.

None of this is particularly hardcore. I don’t talk about Amazon or Rackspace and the cloud services they offer here, I’m just talking about things that my mom might use. And that, I think, might be where my opinion ends up differing from Doctorow. He is right about the sheer amount of computer power that can be cheaply bought by the average user, but even he acknowledges that it’s simply more computer than most people need. This simple truth has sold a lot of netbooks and a lot of cheap Dells, and it’s ultimately the flaw in any argument that a cloud service is not as fast or powerful as your computer. Users (excepting a very nerdy segment) don’t measure computing in absolute terms — they need enough power to perform certain tasks, and most of what’s past that point is likely to be lost on them. If remote computing can clear that threshold (and evidence says it can) then it can do the job.

Now, he’s right to be wary of predatory pricing schemas and bad business practices, but I don’t think that’s news, and if nothing else the robustness of the cloud market seems to have successfully driven the entry price to “free” for the average user. And that’s the rub — I think Doctorow’s sense of the average user is a bit more rarefied than mine. If he thinks Amazon’s service is for the average guy, then heck, maybe he’s right. We may already all be too smart to need anything but sftp, our personal linux box and a few scripts. I certainly know people for whom that is true, but their time tends to be worth enough to merit just paying for the service.

But I apparently know many fewer of them than Mister Doctorow.

On the desktop, and this is unfortunate for them, the only way to make a truly discriminating choice is to purchase a competitor’s product.

That is to say, going with Microsoft is not a choice for most shoppers, it is the absence of a choice.  Or, as they put it in the comic: “Isn’t every store a Microsoft Store?“‘

It is hard not to look at this effort by Microsoft as a slightly petulant swing at the success of the Apple Store.   The ultimate proof will be in what kind of store it turns out to be. The fear is that it will be a computer shop where the bulk of customer choice is between which version of Vista or Windows 7 will provide them the “best experience”.  Like a tiny Best Buy, without the overpriced DVDs.

Even with things which work really well, like the X-Box (which boasts a fantastic online experience and store), how do you translate that into a worthwhile shopping experience?

I’m not optimistic about this effort. I intellectually hold out hope that the guys at Microsoft are smart enough to keep this from being every bad thing one might expect , but I don’t feel it. All the ways to make this smart and workable are too small for Microsoft as a whole.  Maybe the store folks will be given enough leeway to prove me wrong. Maybe.

But all this got me wondering if there was a way to make a Microsoft store any good, and I realized there was.

The paradox that Microsoft will need to overcome is that they have too few choices among their products, and too many choices among all the things that surround them (hardware and software). For a store to be successful, they don’t need to concentrate on creating more choices among their products, they need to find a way to give me fewer choices among other products.  That means they need to either look at hardware or software.  Hardware’s kind of a dead end — competing with Dell is eating their own lunch, and cooperating with them is just redundant.  Software, however, is rich with potential.

If you use Macs, you will sometimes hear Windows users talk about the sheer breadth of software available for the PC, and how that’s a point against Macs.  Mac users laugh this one off because they know the secret — less software means that what there is tends to be better. There are two big  reasons for this. First, most Mac Software has a degree of passion behind it: programmers only develop for the mac because they want to, and that sets a natural bar.   Second, and perhaps more importantly, there are fewer options, so finding the good ones is easier.

Microsoft fans may be experiencing a knee jerk now at the assertion that Mac software is better than Windows, and that is clearly Very Wrong Indeed, so let me explain the contrast.  There is a lot more software available for Windows than there is for the Mac, and that has a profound impact on the quality of the user experience. Assume the quality of product is exactly the same, and the distribution of quality is roughly equal, finding a really good piece of software -  the kind you get excited about, something like Scrivener or Omnigraffle -  is like finding a needle in a haystack. The trick is that the Mac haystack is much, much smaller.   More is not necessarily better in this case — even if the Mac software is generally better, there will still be more good windows software just out of pure volume, but you can go nuts trying to find it.

The other factor of quality is that the most exciting Mac software comes from smaller companies. The position of Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office are pretty well cemented in the universe, and the really interesting stuff comes from people who aren’t trying for a piece of that pie, and instead are looking to fill some other niche. These are the companies who make the most exciting stuff, but they are the hardest to differentiate from the noise around them in the PC world.

This is where a Microsoft store could really shine. Rather than offering me the same software I can find at Best Buy,  Micro Center, Frys, Staples or Amazon, why not offer me the best software out there?  Why not offer the kind of software that is so good and useful that windows users can be smug rather than apologetic? For those companies and individuals putting out electronic product, use some of that Microsoft muscle to help them put physical media on the shelves. Be picky as hell, limit shelf space to only those programs that create enthusiasm, and suddenly there’s something to buy.

That’s a store I’d shop at.

(And for the naysayers — that software really is out there. The fact that you haven’t seen it is mostly just an illustration of the underlying problem. )

Unfortunately, the first generation pen is a monster. Not to say it doesn’t work, but the thing is huge. It’s like writing with a big, fat marker, and all the technology in the world can’t make it appealing for me to write with. I’ve been quietly hoping for their success so that they can eventually produce a second generation pen that’s a little more manageable.

Thankfully, all signs point to things going well. Target carries them, which is great. Plus, one of the first paper products they released were moleskine knockoffs, which shows a great understanding of their target audience.

I was at Target the other day and discovered that they’ve clinched it. They seemed to have entered into a partnership with paperblanks, the makers of the distinctive notebooks with the magnetic closures. They don’t even have them up on the website yet, but they were stacked neatly under the pens. It’s a small thing to be excited about, but it’s the sort of convergence I’m really happy to see.

I am still wrestling with my opinion of The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It by Joshua Cooper Ramo. It is both a very good and a very annoying book.

To explain that contradiction, I’m going to talk a little bit about Clausewitz and Jomini. They’re a pair of 19^th century military writers, and some of the most influential military thinkers of all time. I do them a great disservice in simplifying their work here, but they are iconic of a division in military thinking which is mirrored in most other sorts of thinking. Clausewitz argued that the way to win a war was through overwhelming force, applied unrelentingly at your enemy’s weakest point. In contrast. Jomini argued for winning a war by fighting smarter – strike at your enemies’ supply lines, fight only when you can win, pick your battles and in doing so you can overcome a vastly superior force.

This actually got played out very interestingly in the US civil war, which was fought in a pretty Jominian fashion form the outset, which went badly for the north because Robert E. Lee and his generals were much, much better at it than the union generals. Grant’s victory came in large part because of a shift to Clausewitzian tactics, and a willingness to grind out the fight with the south to its brutal conclusion.

This conflict, between force and calculation, has been with us for most of history. George Eliot called it the dirk versus the cudgel, and I’ll use those terms now if only because I’m tired of trying to spell Clausewitz. It shows up in fascinating places in military history (look up Thomas Jefferson’s idea of a navy sometime), as recently as with the modern American fascination with air power. Like the perpetual cycle of offense vs. defense, the dirk and the cudgel rise and fall in relationship to one another, but this pattern is a bit more interesting because of its predictability.

Put simply – intellectuals and engineers love the dirk. They love its elegance and its emphasis on knowledge, understanding and intellect. They are constantly certain that the cudgel is just going to up and go the way of the dinosaur any time now because the dirk is just so much more elegant. And they are always surprised when someone shows up and takes a cudgel to the side of their head (or, more properly, the heads of the guys they’ve sent to fight for them).

On a lot of levels, Age of the Unthinkable is a predictable tract on the death of the cudgel, written in a manner better suited to an ambitious grad student than a veteran of the world stage. It is so enamored with flexibility and resilience that it either dismisses or merely pays lip service to strength and determination, and that is what keeps it from being great. By the end there is a nod to the idea that we need both to thrive, but it is so absent from the rest of the book as to cut it off at the knees.

Worse, it falls right into the worst sort of traps. Have you seen Rising Sun? Recently? It was a kind of fun action flick when it came out, but nowadays it’s running theme of JAPANESE SUPERMEN WILL RULE US ALL is almost comical to behold. Ramo seems to feel the same way about the Chinese, and he does things like quote Sun Tzu in ways that might have been novel and interesting 20 years ago, but are just tired now.

And that’s sort of the rub. 20 years ago, this would have been a brilliant book. Earth-shakingly brilliant. But now, it’s full of insights that are going to be trite to anyone who has read any decent non fiction (or good science fiction) in the past decade or so.

BUT

The thing that keeps me from dismissing this book entirely is that they are good and legitimate insights, even if some of the analysis (and writing) around them is flawed, and it’s possible that there are people they would be new for. So if you’re a reader who is actually baffled by the rate of change in the world, and if you don’t understand why planning and response might make for a more robust defense than barriers or why an organizations ability to learn is important, then this book is a great primer for such things. It’s probably a great read for high school freshmen, for example.

On a purely practical level, the first chapter can be skipped, as can most of the second. If you’re annoyed by gimmicky writing, expect to get annoyed early and often – he overuses narrative tricks like the reveal pretty much every chapter.  For all my cycnicsm about this, if you aren’t a regular reader of non-fiction or science fiction, this may be an interesting read.  If you are then this will likely provide a few interesting anecdotes, but little in the way of revelation.

Kindle vs. Moleskine

On the right is one of my Moleskines. As this picture shows, in it’s case the kindle is only slightly wider and slightly shorted.  Given that the Moleskine is something I’m already very comfortable toting around, that makes the Kindle very easy to work into approach to carrying things. Specifically, i won’t need to find some new way to carry this new gadget — I’ll just keep it with my notebooks.  For more of a comparison, let me add my HP netbook and my ipod to the shot:

Clockwise from top left: HP Mini-Note 1000, Ipod Touch, Moleskine, Kindle in its case

For someone who is trying to get everything down to one bag, kindle plus netbook already looks like a promising combination.

It’s now been a few weeks with an HP Mini 1000, and I remain pretty happy with it. Practically speaking, there’s only one thing it does that I couldn’t do with a smartphone, but that one thing is pretty important – writing.  I bought the HP because it has the best keyboard of any of the netbooks – the Asus EEE 900 is almost as good, but trying them side by side definitely came down in favor of the HP.

The netbook is definitely liberating – I’ve already ditched my usual bag for a much smaller one, and it’s really, really nice to move towards a lighter load. A large bag tends to attract more stuff and get heavy pretty quick.  Restricting to a smaller bag heads that off at the pass.  Similarly, it’s a lot easier to grab in one hand and take up to the kitchen or bust out when I have an idea.  If my laptop weren’t so large (17”) the contrast would perhaps not be so pronounced, but as is the difference is night and day.

It’s not without quirks. With a 3 cell battery, I’m looking at 3–4 hours of battery life, which is kind of short. HP is theoretically releasing a 6 cell battery next year, and I’ll likely grab one, but it’s a shame to need it.  In fairness though, I knew what I was getting into picking this up before January.  Less predictable was the power adaptor, which is not well fitted to the charging port. A stiff breeze will disconnect it, and that makes it very frustrating to work while plugged in.

These are minor concerns at best though, akin to my gripes with windows XP.  For all that they may bug me a little, the device works just fine, and my ability to write anytime, anyplace without lugging around a huge block of computer has taken a turn for the better. For anyone else who really wants something small and portable but still friendly for writing, I would definitely encourage looking at a netbook. That said, if you’re not looking to do any writing more involved than the occasional brief email or IM then I must admit you’d probably be better off with an Ipod Touch„ Nokia n800/810 or a comparable device (unless, that is, if there’s some windows specific functionality you demand).  Similarly, you can get a more powerful laptop for the price of a netbook, so make sure you really want to pay for something smaller and lighter before you shell out. 

For me, this is just the sweet spot I needed, and when I close it up, I get a little rush of nerdy pleasure since it feels like I always imagined a cyberdeck to.  Crazy, I know, but if you’re not going to be excited about the device, then get something cheaper.