emily's journal

Livejournal entry makes fun of book titles.

2009-04-15T17:11:49Z

The Brooklyn Public Library may be developing a nice collection of ebook titles, but the findability leaves something to be desired. There's no way to filter ebooks from audiobooks, so you can't browse by genre without weeding through all the audiobooks. Instead, I usually look at "all ebooks" ordered by date added.

In that mode, I get to scroll past all the recently added romance novels. Some of them have the kind of title you'd imagine, like "An Improper Aristocrat," but tons more have titles that are like newspaper headlines for the plot. Is this a hilarious new fad among Harlequin writers? Here are some of my favorites; I'm too lazy to make links.

Pleasured by the English Spy
Promoted: Secretary to Bride!
She Thinks Her Ex Is Sexy
The Spanish Billionaire's Pregnant Wife
Blackmailed Into a Fake Engagement
Bought for the Sicilian Billionaire's Bed
The C.O.O. Must Marry

As usual, it looks like the library is up to date with recent social trends.

Ebooks, part I: Ebook as object.

2008-12-29T19:22:25Z

So, after occasionally expressing skepticism about ebooks, I've finally got one: the Sony 505 (not the 700, on which the touchscreen reportedly renders the screen hard to read, defeating the purpose, and not the Kindle, since I'm already schlepping around two QWERTY keyboards, thanks).

I have finally arrived at a situation where an ebook makes sense: I really am running out of storage space and I carry a laptop three days a week which means I can't carry a book larger/heavier than a small paperback. This doesn't qualify as the killer app I was looking for nearly five years ago, but it's enough for a "why not try it?"

Looking at this thing first as an object, I'd say that it's a success. I've had it for about a week and have read about 1500 screens worth of text. The screen is very, very easy to look at and doesn't provoke any of the eyestrain I sometimes get even from an LCD screen. It does look amazingly matte and paperlike. Every book can be viewed at three levels of magnification; the ones that are published as real ebooks automatically repaginate themselves as you increase or decrease the text size. (With miscellaneous PDFs at a larger text size, you read a single page, 342 for example, as two screens both numbered 342.)

I didn't realize how useful the button placement is until I started carting the thing around. There is one pair of page forward/page back buttons on the right edge, where your fingers would be if you were holding the ebook with both hands. Then there is a second rocker switch for paging forward and back that is located just where your thumb would be if you were holding it in one hand. The result is that it's very easy to operate with only one hand, such as while standing on a crowded and turbulent subway. Also, the book doesn't flop closed, which means that you could prop it up and read it while eating (a particular foible of mine). It might even be possible to read while knitting.

Finally, it has a comfortable and visually pleasing navy blue leather cover. Don't underestimate the way that the leather, which is soft and warms in your hand, improves the feel of the device. This addition was a real stroke of genius on the part of the designers; to the extent that it feels like a real book, it feels like a very nice real book. The cover appears to contain tiny magnets which cause it to snap gently shut in a satisfying way. And while the ebook doesn't gratify a fetishistic desire to collect and display books, it turns out that a single object that allows different books to manifest themselves has a bit of its own magic.

Obviously, I have a lot more to say about it in terms of book availability, pricing, etc. Next post.

Chapter MCXC: In which I actually name a favorite book.

2008-12-03T16:13:25Z

If you asked me to name my favorite books, I'd have to agonize over it for a while, and then I'd name some titles that you've probably read, like Pride & Prejudice or Pale Fire. But I'd also definitely name Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck: a passionate book about towns, streets, and the places where you want to live. This book changed the way I look at the world around me and gave me a new vocabulary to describe where I want to live my life. It's also great fun to read.

Illustration 1
Originally uploaded by bradamant

The authors contrast traditional city planning with the suburban sprawl that took root during the twentieth century. Sprawl arose largely as the result of zoning laws that dictate road widths and geometry, the distribution of housing and other land uses, and even the architecture of the buildings themselves, and so that's the level the authors approach. They show how a traditional town constitutes a human habitat worthy of protection, and a suburb is a place that traps people an unsustainable lifestyle that, when they are offered real alternatives, they don't even want.

The authors don't fall into the mistake of assuming that people who live in suburbs are banal, instead, they show the social consequences of bad design. As the "victims of sprawl" they identify "cul-de-sac kids" who are "unable to practice at being adults"; soccer moms who work full-time and then must serve as chauffeurs for their kids; bored teenagers; the stranded elderly, who "are neither infirm nor senile [but] healthy and able citizens who simply can no longer operate two tons of heavy machinery"; weary commuters; bankrupt municipalities that must not only pay for roads, roads, and more roads, but sewers to connect all those far-flung houses and police to patrol those neighborhoods; and "the immobile poor" who, without cars, cannot get to the jobs they need to escape the failed social experiment of high-rise projects. It should be easy for most of us to recognize current, past, and future selves among these categories and realize the significance of what this book is trying to tell us. Having once been the chauffee, I have no aspiration to become the chauffeur.

There are two qualities of this book that make it a joy to read. First, the authors do a marvelous job of showing, in both words and pictures, how small design decisions have significant unintended consequences. (See the first illustration.) Second, the writing in this book is passionate and sometimes withering, as in the second illustration, which is accompanied by the comment: "The building pictured here is not, as it may appear, a refugee relocation center or a storage depot, although it could be considered a storage depot of sorts: it's the place where we store our children while earning the money to pay for their cars."

Illustration 2
Originally uploaded by bradamant

Although I'd lived abroad for a year beforehand, it took encountering this book and its razor-sharp analysis of how design affects how a place feels to make me notice just how insane and destructive our country's adherence to and idealization of suburban design really is. Note that this book is not an encomium to giant cities like New York; the authors reserve their highest praise for neighborhoods and for small cities like Charleston. Nor do they have a misty-eyed view of the traditional town: their discussion is about how long it takes you to get to work and where you put your trash to be collected, not about Norman Rockwell. And their new urbanist design program isn't just aimed at making life more pleasant for the upper-middle class, because one of their main goals is to integrate lower wage-earners into middle-class neighborhoods, just as they want to integrate light retail and offices into residential places and vice-versa. They don't want to bring this about by busing-style top-down orders; rather they want to achieve it by eliminating the zoning laws that, for example, often prohibit placing apartment buildings near detached homes. In short, the authors see the neighborhood and the town as natural, enduring units of healthy human self-organization, and suggest that we get rid of laws and prejudices that make them infeasible.

If you ever wonder why I insist on living in an expensive city or why I've never owned a car, or why I'd move back to a certain street in my hometown but not another one, read this book! Really, you should read it anyway: it offers a fresh perspective on the world you live in--whether you want to or not.

Suburban Nation: 5 smileys
Recommended for: Americans

Decisions.

2008-07-09T17:22:46Z

I am currently on page 116 out of 635 of the third printing of "version 3.0" of The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. So far, the book is about globalization and technology.

In the last few pages, Friedman quotes someone as having realized that Apache was "'produced for free by a bunch of geeks just working online in some kind of open-source chat room.'" Then Friedman writes, "Yes, the geeks in the mail room are deciding what software they will be using--and what you will be using too." A few pages later, "to learn more about [open-source software], I went exploring among the geeky guys and girls in the mailroom." Sure, here's a picture I found, I think this shows Linus Torvalds:

Then, a few pages later, Friedman interrupts a quote from Kevin Kelly at Wired to define BitTorrent as "a Web site that allows users to upload their own online music libraries and download other people's at the same time."

View Poll: Seriously.

Worth a try, I guess...

2005-04-25T22:28:32Z