Archive for the 'Paper & Ink' Category

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First Minutes With the Apple iPad

April 3, 2010

It’s still syncing.

While I prepare myself for the inevitable post-purchase depression and “why can’t I do that, Mr. Jobs” revelations, here are some unboxing pictures and a video from my Posterous page.

At some point I’ll list the pros and cons. But I’m done with the posting and tweeting today. I doubt there’s much new that I could say about it.

Technology isn’t my beat, so I’ll leave the iPad news and reviews to my colleagues at Bits. (Here’s an earlier post about how I made the purchase decision.)

For me, the iPad is first and foremost a book and media reader. Read the rest of this entry »

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Considering the iPad as a Kindle Replacement

February 1, 2010

Image Copyright 2010 Apple Inc.You’ve seen the new toy. You’ve seen the experts debate: Will the Apple iPad “save” newspapers, journalism, book publishing? Will it kill the Amazon Kindle? Is this the death of the laptop, and the PC as we know it? Has Apple just signaled the death of the ultraportable MacBook Air? Will it replace smartphones like the iPhone or Nexus One? Has Apple just pwned another media marketplace — sorry Amazon, Google, Microsoft? Goodbye, netbooks? Farewell, computers?

Blah, blah, blah. Nobody knows the future, so such pronouncements are justifiably viewed as so much hype.
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N.Y.U. Poetry Reading in East Village

November 15, 2009

Time for some more plugs. My wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, will be joining New York University professors and students at the Liberal Studies Program’s Fall Faculty/Student Reading from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 3, at the Telephone Bar and Grill, 149 Second Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets) in the East Village.

Also, Jane’s “After Voices” poetry chapbook — published last month by Burning River of Cleveland — is now available at the McNally Jackson Book Store in SoHo, one of the few remaining interesting indie bookstores left in Manhattan.

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Poetry and Silence: ‘After Voices’

October 25, 2009

IMG_0185Updated, Nov. 15. Time for a plug. I’m pleased to announce that “After Voices,” a poetry chapbook by my wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, was released last week by Burning River of Cleveland. Jane has been laboring over these poems for a couple of years. Some people have asked, what is a chapbook? One definition: a short booklet containing poems, ballads or stories. Jane’s chapbook includes 12 poems and an essay arranged around the theme of her father’s deafness. (He is already disputing some of the facts. Fun times!)

Jane plans to read some of the poems at a New York University faculty-student reading in the East Village in December.

A hard copy of the chapbook can be ordered online for $6 a copy from Burning River. A PDF version can be downloaded for free (it includes a bonus poem not in the print edition). It will eventually be available as a digital book in epub format from Project Gutenberg. You can also buy a copy at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in SoHo, and the McNally-Jackson Bookstore, also in SoHo.
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Exit the Kindle, in a Splash of E-Ink

August 9, 2009

IMG_0051Well, this is one cost of early technology adoption. I bought an original Kindle in April 2008, and it has served me well, so I can’t complain too much.

Recently, I noticed a sort of smudge developing in the upper left corner of the screen, even when the machine was turned off. There were also slight streaks of white lines going vertically down the screen, with a washed-out appearance at the top. I could still read books, but it was sort of annoying. I decided to see if Amazon tech support could offer any advice.

I wasn’t looking for a replacement, although I wouldn’t have minded a sort of cash-for-clunkers trade-in discount on a Kindle 2 or a DX. Mainly I was hoping this was an easy problem that they had learned how to fix. If they couldn’t, I would live with it.
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The Next 100 Years Could Be Better Than This

April 5, 2009

bestselling_large1I just finished reading “The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century,” by George Friedman, and I hope he is wrong about nearly everything.

His thesis is that we humans don’t have much choice in our international politics, that we are guided by geopolitical considerations, and that armed conflict is inevitable. The book is an odd mix of plausible scenarios and wacky Star Wars fantasies.

Perhaps that is not surprising, coming from a fellow who is the chief intelligence officer and founder of Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor), a private intelligence agency whose clients include foreign government agencies and Fortune 500 companies (and plain old citizens willing to pay $199 a year for newsletters).

There is a some fresh thinking in the book, but ultimately it suffers from a failure of imagination.
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A Nerd Planet, Gobsmacked by the Reticulum

January 7, 2009

I’m happy to report that I finally finished the 900+ page “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson, just four months (!) after starting it. I have to admit that I took breaks to read a few other things.

I previously posted about the difficult, otherworldly vocabulary that Stephenson made up for this book. (For example, the “Reticulum” is similar to what we call the Web or the Internet, though you have to figure that out based on the description of a narrator who is basically a cloistered monk who never uses technology. “Jeejahs” are smart phones or mobile devices of some sort. Videos are “speelies” recorded with “speelycaptors.” Those are some of the neologisms that feel apt. Not all of them do.)

Others have weighed in about the lexicon, and the book’s need for editing, especially in the early chapters (here’s an example from Slashdot, the bulletin board for geeks). And there’s the question of the title, which looks like a typo and calls to mind Ayn Rand’s completely unrelated polemical novel “Anthem,” which Stephenson says he has never read (see video below).
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The Great Nerd Book Remains Unwritten

December 14, 2008

nugent Supposedly, nerds are now cool. People compete to show their nerd cred. They are joining Facebook, taking nerd tests on the Web, and discussing the definitions of geek and nerd on their blogs. They watch TV shows like “Battlestar Galactica,” “Heroes” and “The Big Bang Theory.” They read adult comics and mammoth science fiction novels. Even Barack Obama is said to be a nerd. It was not always this way, a topic that Benjamin Nugent explores in “American Nerd: The Story of My People,” published earlier this year.

I ordered the book after listening to Nugent give an interview on The Sound of Young America podcast about what he called his childhood experiences as a self-loathing nerd. It was poignant (and familiar) to hear him describe dumping his nerdy Dungeons & Dragons friends in high school so he could pass for normal. Unfortunately, the book did not quite live up to that interview, either intellectually or emotionally. (But it was a pleasant diversion from reading more of “Anathem,” the giant Neal Stephenson SF novel on my to-do list.)

Let’s start with the definition of a nerd.
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‘Old’ Media, ‘New’ Media, on Twitter

December 11, 2008

I jumped into an esoteric debate Wednesday evening: What is the most effective way mainstream media can use social media like Twitter? Should they never post RSS feeds automatically? Must every tweet be crafted by human hands?

Notice that I don’t say “old media,” because I happen to think that term is bull. Plenty of supposedly “old media” outlets have been on the Web since the earliest days and produce innovative multimedia content that is as good as or better than anything found elsewhere in the “new media.” But that doesn’t make for a good story. (Yes, plenty of old media practitioners still have their heads in the sand. And I don’t claim to have figured it all out — my point is, nobody has figured it out. The Web is 20 minutes old. Nobody knows anything.)

Anyway, the first thing I re-learned was how hard it is to have an extended discussion on Twitter. My Tweets are in one place, under my updates. The other person’s replies are somewhere else, and I can’t even link to them easily on Twitter. I have to use this search tool. Messages are limited to 140 characters. We’re surrounded by a cloud of unrelated tweets by others, in varying degrees of engagement, who also might get annoyed if you’re posting every 30 seconds.
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Wandering at the Indie Book Fair

December 6, 2008

img_7720One notable aspect of the 21st Annual Indie & Small Press Book Fair this weekend is the location, the members-only library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, at 20 West 44th Street in Manhattan, which is also home to the New York Center for Independent Publishing.

The free book fair (donations accepted, in exchange for homemade baked goods on each floor), which lasts through Sunday, is a great excuse to wander up and down the floors and halls of this fascinating building on one of the more interesting blocks of Midtown. The Algonquin Hotel, another literary landmark, is across the street. (Times have certainly changed: The hotel now lends Amazon Kindles to its guests.)
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‘Correction,’ N+1 No. 7, Ink and Paper, 200 Pages

November 30, 2008

img_04741 The Post Office has become the department of print spam, an agency that delivers trash for us to recycle. I pay most of my bills online, and do most of my reading digitally (computer, iPhone or Kindle); I subscribe to fewer and fewer print magazines and have no use for catalogs. So it’s great when the mail includes something I want to read. Last week, that was the 200-page issue No. 7 of N+1, entitled “Correction.”

A few years ago, Tony Scott wrote an essay about the earnest young New York writers who started N+1. On a whim, I bought a lifetime subscription. (They still sell them for $200.) It seemed like a good deal, even for a journal with an uncertain publication schedule, now described as twice a year. The cover price is $11.95 per issue, so I have yet to break even. (The founders went on to write first novels — both enjoyable but slight — or become literary fixtures, and they have tangled with the gossip blogs now and then).

N+1 feels right in print. Despite the promise of “Web only” content once or twice a week, I rarely visit its Web site, which is odd behavior for me, given that most of my news is filtered through blogs or social media like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and Delicious. (There is some good stuff there, like this article about being a student of David Foster Wallace).
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Jeff Jarvis Asks, What Would Google Do?

November 20, 2008

img_0440I recently skimmed a galley proof of “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis. The book, available from HarperCollins in January, is structured as a series of rules or aphorisms about how Google does business, with some anecdotes from Jarvis about things he has observed in his groundbreaking work as a blogger and media consultant.

The book reads like an expanded version of a PowerPoint presentation on the conventional wisdom of Web 2.0. Transparency. Learning from your customers. Simplicity in design. Always being in beta. The importance of links and search engine optimization. The information wants to be free business model. The let-it-all-hang-out-in-public lifestyle of Twitter and Facebook and blogs. (Jarvis gave an overview of his thesis in the Guardian on Monday.)
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