Category Archives: books

NaNoWriMo 2011: Winner!

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Well, after 28 days of solid writing, thinking, more writing, less thinking and then more writing, I was able to submit my novel to the NaNoWriMo servers, and just as Scrivener had told me, I was clocked in just under 51,000 words, so I’m a winner!

The Last Week

As you can see from the last week stats below, taken from the NaNoWriMo site I was [finally] getting ahead of the game on word count and really it was because the story was just flowing out and everything seemed to be falling into place. I added a few more secondary characters which I think added a bit more texture to some of parts of the story and helped the plot line, but still, the issue was getting to the end of the story, and so I had to simplify some of the subplots, and one arc which I’d decided in week two I was going to have to miss out never made it back in.

Writing Stats

Writing Stats

I’ve been really pleased actually with the writing rate and that I was having to decide what to take out, rather than trying to come up with new things to put in to fill space, though paradoxically, new things were creeping in just because they seemed to fit what was going on.

So what did it end up being about? Set in an alternate steam technology based version of Japan’s opening up to more external influence and trade in the mid nineteenth century, there is a stand-off between the three regions left from the recent civil war, and it tells the story of how various groups are attempting to gain technology and power in order to take on the others.

The narrative is driven by three main protagonists trying to find out who or what is is pushing events forwards following the murder of a trader outside Yokohama, but draws on rogue British delegates, Royal Societies, a splintered Japanese samurai class and just normal Japanese people trying to decide what they want now that there seems to be so many new opportunities.

One interesting thing which happened which I wasn’t expecting or intending, is that the story, characters and scenario actually lend themselves to a second story which would largely need to take place in Britain (though not in London like many steampunk novels) and Hong Kong instead of Japan.

On Winning

I have to say I felt a real sense of accomplishment upon seeing that I’d topped 50,000 words, after what had become a habit, and almost a compulsion over the last four weeks, going from feeling like it was a grind, through to a feeling of obligation, and then in the second half of the month of actually being keen to sit down and get on with writing. As you can see from some of the posts, word count does become a obsession at the beginning, I suppose because you’re left with the impression that you’re behind schedule, and then that disappears when 2,000 words a day just flow out. I’ll admit that since ‘winning’ I’ve had that sense of ‘what now’?

Working Method

Broadly speaking, the vast majority of my writing was done in one of two scenarios – either on my MacMini, at the desk on a full size keyboard, or on my aging MacBook at the dinner table, and it all seemed to work well. I definitely recommend Scrivener - even though I’ve used it for a few years for short stories and such, I really found why it’s such a good writing tool this last month, making it simple and quick to jump between writing, character info, story research all within the one app and quickly able to find things, without interrupting the flow.

That concept of flow was essential – as I learned early on, to stop to check and correct grammar and sometimes even spelling is a massive mistake and to just keep going as NaNoWriMo is about getting a novel first draft done, not the finished article.

Somehow I thought I’d have developed a ‘soundtrack’ during the writing, but it never really happened; as I look through the list of recently played tracks in iTunes it’s a selection of certain songs, and I think by hour I probably wrote mostly without music. The tracks I did listen to though were quite interesting – some were tracks I hadn’t listened to in years – and seemed to fit certain chapters of the book – I listened to Jean Michel Jarre’s “Revolutions” [1988] which fit some of the steam punk parts, and also the soundtrack to the classic “Akira” by Geinoh Yamashirogumi which has a mix of more traditional elements and modern styles.

One rather sad thing is that I still don’t have a title with my NaNoWriMo dashboard recording it as “Japan Steampunk Novel”.

So What’s Next?

My plan right now for the novel is to let it sit for a few weeks, and then start a second draft. Yes, I’m going to see this one through to some kind of ‘finished’ version, something I struggled with on my only previous attempt at a full length novel. I’m keen to add in a couple of story arcs in which never made it into this initial draft – the main one being the arms dealers supplying one of the main factions which was to be set in my home town in the UK (Grimsby) which in the timeframe of the story was ramping up as a major port. This makes one subplot (the factions within the British Government and Royal Societies) a bit clearer and shows that the main story is just another part of a larger political policy being executed.

As for NaNoWriMo, will I be doing it again next year? I honestly don’t know. It required a lot of time and and patience from the family, and November is quite a busy time of the year for us with other events, so I really don’t know, though certainly the next time I do NaNoWriMo, I wont be as worried about word count.

That said, it has been a lot of fun, and I would definitely encourage people to give it a try next year – or any month really – and just crank out 50,000 words.

NaNoWriMo 2011 Winner

NaNoWriMo 2011 Winner

NaNoWriMo: Week 2

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So we’re now 14 days in to National Novel Writing Month! According to the schedule of writing rates, I should be up to 23,333 words, but as expected, I’m a little behind, currently weighing in at 22,554 words, which I don’t think is too bad, given that my daily work rate has increased.  One thing that I’m learning quickly about this, as that previous sentence suggests, is that word count begins to become something of an obsession. Really.

That said, I’ve gotten a bit better this past week in how I approach the act of sitting down and writing, staying more focused, and getting more writing done per sitting, which is vital for me, as like many, I’m squeezing this in behind family and work requirements.

I try to set out a block of at least one hour to focus on the writing, and it seems to be working, and sometimes it spills over to 90mins or even two hours, but I know when I’m done as I start writing sections that move nothing forwards, and that’s the time to stop.

When I am writing, I only write in full screen mode with Scrivener, with the only other app open being Firefox, for those ad hoc fact checks. I also make sure I start with a drink, a cup of tea or coffee, so there are no reasons to get up during that hour. I’ve also tidied my desk up, or when I’m writing on my old MacBook on the dining table, I try to clear everything off it – minimise distractions of any kind!

Perhaps one question I have been asked this month has been ‘do you think you can fill 50,000 words?’. Right now, I’m not worried about that. As far as content goes, I think this story would need 80-100,000 words to tell it, so for this month, and against the clock, I’m more interested in getting the bare plotline down.

Two things I was expecting after two weeks though were i) a soundtrack to have made itself known, and ii) to have a title!

Indeed, I still don’t have a name for the work, and for some reason I haven’t been listening to anything consistently enough to call it a writing sound track. Maybe we’ll get to that next week.

NaNoWriMo 2011: Week 1

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So I’ve been working on my novel for NaNoWriMo for a week now. It’s been hard work. A problem for me is that this time of year involves a lot of family commitments, and I now know I’ll be away on business at the end of the month, so I’m a bit concerned about running out of time.

I’m already behind the curve. As of last night I’ve written 8,313 words, when on a straight progression curve, I should be up to 11,666 words.

That all said, let’s not look at the negative – let’s look at the upsides, or which there are many.

What I’ve written I’m actually OK with, and I’m heeding what I thought might have been some good advice and which it is indeed turning out to be:

“If you want to hit the word count, don’t edit as you go”

Indeed, this is to get the first draft of a novel out, not a final edit ready for publication.  So far then I’ve laid out the characters I need so far; I’m also happy to have had an opening chapter with a decent body count. What I’m wrestling with right now is the technology vs. intrigue as it’s a sort of steampunk set in mid 19th century Japan. I think I need to move the story on to the next milestone, which is a meeting of some of the main protagonists on neutral ground (a Japanese version of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851), so we can see how they contrast, and then by this time next week many of the characters will go their separate ways to find out new things, before coming back again amidst the chaos as it moves to a finale I havent even thought of yet!

I feel like I’ve got a decent workflow going, writing between 10.30pm to around 12.30am when I can – often this week I’ve only managed an hour between those times, but they’ve been good hours as I’m more of a night person. I tend to stop when I realise I’m treading water and not moving things forwards. Considering I’ve written in a week what I would normally call a short story, I’m pretty pleased.

As expected, all work is being done on my Mac in Scrivener, which is great for dropping in new character tidbits as needs and keeping going. I saw this morning the Windows version is out too! If I can ‘win’ NaNoWriMo I might take advantage of the 50%  discount on that! I’m saving into Dropbox and then re-reading what I wrote on the train in the morning and making notes as Scrivener saves into several .rtf files.

OK, why pour words out here when I could be adding to the novel!

Also, still no title decided.

NaNoWriMo Preparation

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So per my previous post on the subject, I’ve decided to have a crack at NaNoWriMo this year – writing a 50,000 word novel during November.

NaNoWriMo 2011I’ve been doing a bit of research into the basic premise of my story (you can prepare, but you can’t write anything of the novel itself outside of November). Essentially it’s a steampunk based story set in an alternate mid 19th century Japan, where the real life Meiji restoration has happened a slightly different way, allowing for rival states within the Japanese archipelago. I’ve also decided to include real historical figures in there, in adapted versions of their real roles.

It’s been interesting to read into this period of history again, which was a time of real direction change for Japan, and spent some time reading more about such things as the Ezo Republic (Japan’s only republican entity in it’s history), and some of the women warriors of Japan, many of whom aren’t well known outside of their areas nowadays, such as Nakano Takeko from Aizu who will feature as head of the independent city state of Aizu.

As far as the writing itself goes, I suspect most will be done on my Mac Mini and my old MacBook from 2006 in Scrivener, with the file saved into Dropbox, so I can switch between the two machines. I also have two weeks now to re-read “The Elements of Style“.

The next update will probably be just as we kick off, so good luck to fellow NaNoWriMo-ers!

NaNoWriMo 2011

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As a bit of a hobby for the last few years I’ve written a few short stories – I even almost finished a full length story (60,000+ words and counting). It’s just mental exercise, a stab at creativity, writing something down.  In 2006 I first read about the National Novel Writing Month initiative, where people are invited to write a novel of 50,000 words within the month of November – not to a polished conclusion, but really to get at least that first draft in, and thought that some year I should give it a try.

You can have outlines and such prepared beforehand, but the novel must be something new and original, started on November 1st, and ‘finished’ by November 30th, midnight local time. It’s not deathly serious as you can tell from the site; you become a ‘winner’ simply by uploading your text to their servers in the last week of November to see if you’re over than magical 50,000 word count – it’s largely honour based to get people to actually get something into their PC.

Anyway, after 5 years of watching NaNoWriMo come and go, I decided to give it a go this year, so blog posts to this site might slow or stop next month as the small amount of my personal keyboard time flows into writing some epic work of fiction. How bad can it be? I don’t have anything else on apart from studying for my Japanese test in December, family and work commitments!

All I know so far is that I’ll mostly be writing it on my Mac in Scrivener, and that it’ll most likely be set in some kind of steampunk world, a genre I’ve always kind of liked. More updates on this in a couple of weeks.

Bookshelf: The Four Hour Work Week

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It’s been a while since I added anything here on the Bookshelf, though rest assured, I’m always reading something! In fact, I’ve just finished reading Tim Ferriss’s book “The Four Hour Work Week” (4HWW) (he just released another ‘The Four Hour Body”).

The book aims to be a guide to ‘lifestyle design’ and has gained an almost cult following around the world. Much of the premise revolves around the 80/20 rule which Ferriss adheres to, more commonly known as Pareto’s Principle which Ferriss does acknowledge further on in the book. Basically – you can get 80% of things done / achieved (good enough), with 20% of the effort, and the question is whether than last 20% is really worth it. He shows how you can create a business (initially on the side) which is self sustaining, and from which you can increasingly step away from thanks to outsourcing and subcontractors. If you had a 9-5 job, then the key is remote working agreements, and then you can travel and do what you want to do with your life whilst building that product and outsourcing the rest. This is how it’s a four hour work week.

The resulting book, is one third potentially useful and interesting, one third useful if you’re Tim Ferriss or like him, and one third is almost silly, but it’s all entertaining and really is best described as ‘career porn’. That’s what this book is – a product which can generate money without much work from Ferriss now, so he can, and does, outsource routine matters and is living what he says – and in the book he tells you how to do that.

When you look at reviews for the book, those people who slammed it are generally against the ethos – that somehow this is cheating: he ‘won’ a martial arts tournament by dehydrating himself for the weigh in, then boosting back again adding kilos of weight against his opponents and then pretty much just bear hugging them and forcing them out of the ring to win (there’s a few clips on YouTube of this). Ferriss makes the point that he exploited a loophole in the tournament’ rules, and didn’t break them. It’s very much up to the reader, but that a book elicits that kind of response is interesting in itself.

The truth is Ferriss is very smart, and puts his money ostensibly where his mouth is – perhaps the tournament push-outs weren’t in the spirit of the event, but he did turn up and get in the ring, and that takes a bit of skill and guts as it is.

The book is full of links and product recommendations – most links in there smell like product placement, and yes the whole thing smells like an infomercial, but at least it’s a readable ‘reality distortion field’ informercial if nothing else, and again, you’re simply holding a sample of what he’s talking about – it’s about sales – there’s a reason Ferriss won a “Greatest Self Promoter” award and why his Wikipedia page is relatively bare for someone so high profile online – it’s all about sales – the tips in the book can be found elsewhere – he’s wrapped it up, added an angle and sold it. It’s about sales, sales sales, and expertly done.

You might wonder whether I actually liked the book, and ultimately I did, but not because I believe so much in the message of the book – it isn’t for me – but viewed as a sample product, and as an example of what Ferriss is selling it’s very good, and there’s are some good tips and reminders in there, many of which you can apply to many aspects of your life and work.

For a different angle on this type of idea though, I would recommend Gary Veynerchuck’s “Crush It“, 37 Signal’s “Rework“ or David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”.

Quakebook, a review.

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Out of all the tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates and everything in between, which flew around in the initial couple of weeks following the beginning of the quakes in Japan on March 11th. 2011, something coalesced together – partly intended as a record of note of the event and those affected by it, whether locally or internationally, and partly intended as form of fund-raising effort for those survivors of the tsunami, with the side-effect of raising awareness of what actually happened.

That thing was the #quakebook - “2:46 : Aftershocks : Stories from the Japan Earthquake” brought together by a cadre of essentially Japan based bloggers and Twitter fanatics, led by the most certainly not attention seeking @ourmaninabiko. I say that because even though it’s simple enough to find out who he is, he’s made a keen point with reporters and others not to be named in the media, and largely it seems like they’ve complied.

The book is currently only available as an e-book, for 9.99USD from most versions of Amazon, so I’ve just read mine in a single sitting, taking just a couple of hours.

This has been of interest to me, not just as a form of donation whilst receiving something, but because I myself was in much the same situation as many of the people whose accounts are in there, having been on the 20th floor of an office building in central Tokyo when the quakes began. What @ourmaninabiko and his team has done is capture a cross section of experiences from inside the country and from the outside, looking in. I suspect what I found most interesting were those entries which were not like my experience.

To start off, one of the passages which struck me was that by Andy Heather writing from Kyoto:

“But what hurts is the idea that the earthquakes were like seeing a loved one getting beaten and being unable to stop it.”

One of the topics, certainly in the foreign community, was those who left Japan in the week or two following the M9 quake the – ‘flyjin’ – and one of those was @sandrajapandra / Sandra Barron, who I began to follow on twitter the day after the quake for news and opinion, and who surprised me by announcing she was moving to LA, with obviously mixed emotions. Her account in ‘Aftershocks (’Leaving’) was the first time I realised why she’d left. It’s an interesting and personal debate. (Addendum – I should note she did return to Japan a few weeks later.)

If there’s one thing everyone should know who maybe (fortunately) has not been in that situation where you’re on the fringe of a massive disaster, and with options, is that everyone should do what they feel is right for them. There’s no value in duress or forcing people into a position – things are tense enough as it is.

The book isn’t all Twitter users and bloggers, some of the writers are noted professionals, and it’s worth mentioning their contributions. Truthfully, with Yoko Ono, whilst I appreciate her support, I found her contribution overly self promotional, with little to add.

Jake Adelstein however, a well known true crime writer and reporter in Japan, juxtaposed a case he was reporting on of a (completely not quake related) double suicide in the face of personal debt, against the disaster in Tohoku and the sacrifices people are making there to keep the country safe. For the two debtors, no one in their apartments knew them, no one at work knew them. No one missed them or even claimed their ashes. In Tohoku whole communities sheltering each other in turn. The effect is almost hypnotic, and echoed something I’d wondered about just after the quake – how this would effect Japan’s infamously high suicide rate.That entry, ‘Muenbotoke’ is worth the price of admission.

William Gibson, the cyberpunk freak who probably turned me most on to Tokyo as a brand, contributes something totally Gibson – what is your memory of Tokyo and Japan? A man sitting naked, totally still, on the edge of a table in an open window, as seen by Gibson from a taxi speeding past on a raised expressway. It’s not notably quake related, but perhaps captures the something ‘other’ of Japan.

In all then, it’s a well rounded and a well meaning collection, pulling together many facets of the disaster in one place. In some ways something like this may be worth updating over the years as people look back on the effect the event has had on Japan, and will continue to have.

If there’s a question on the work, it’s that there seems to be few accounts from Japanese in the tsunami hit areas, or from the Fukushima exclusion zone, but given the time frame it was put together, it would’ve been difficult to include these, and still get it out for the world to read I would think. Perhaps in a retrospective in a year or so these will be included.

A paper, and Japanese language version of the book is also in the works.

Overall then, even if you ignore the charitable nature of the work, it’s worth the money and the read to get a feel for what these events do to the people, beyond what the rather dumb and crass mass media has failed to achieve. The brief nature of many accounts actually increases the impact, there’s no time for dwelling, just the basic emotional facts behind an event which took over 20,000 people away in just a few hours, and left a nation digging it’s heels in for years to come.

Bookshelf: The Diamond Age

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Or, to give it it’s full name “The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”.

The full title actually encompasses the story a little better.

I seem to be reading Neal Stephenson books in a wrong order – not that they’re in any way connected in the narrative though.  First I read the seminal ‘Cryptonomicon’ (1999) , then ‘Snow Crash’ (1992),  and now ‘The Diamond Age‘ (1995).

Stylistically then it’s a jump; Cryptonomicon was very smooth, albeit with a slightly flawed last few chapters (though by then, the story you cared about was largely wound up). Snow Crash likely has the best first chapter ever in a sci-fi novel, but then goes off on several tangents before spluttering out. It’s great whilst it works though, and sports the best named main character – ‘Hiro Protagonist’. However, chronologically, you can see Stephenson’s style develop nicely over time.

The Diamond Age’ then, has a bit of both – a strong, yet slightly irrelevant first chapter albeit in the universe, but a much stronger ending, albeit somehow vague. It’s set in a future where there’s a lot of nanotech amongst an almost retro steam-punk society of phyles – the future nations – geographically spread sub-city states, with one of the main ones being the New Atlantis clave, also known as ‘Viccies’ due to their adoption of Victorian dress and behaviour. Basically then, instead of single, contiguous physical countries, all these nations have huge embassies all over the world and almost no central hub.

The plot revolves around an ensemble of characters;  Nell, a small girl whose brother at the outset steals her the titular Illustrated Primer which is itself a illicit copy made by a New Atlantean engineer, the original of which was commissioned by a senior Equity Lord for his daughter.

The book is fully interactive, or ‘ractive’ and over the years Nell learns from it both academically and in many other ways, as it leads her on her own real world journey via the stories it tells, to join the New Atlantean phyle. Conversely, the book’s creator, engineer John Hackworth, a respected man in the Viccie phyle is cast out when his illegal copy is discovered, only to go undercover to understand the reasoning behind events involving Doctor X. the man who performed the copy, his own plans, and the events involving the drummers.

The whole thing works quite well, and draws in the hopes of technologies such as nanotech, and how a sponsored age of plenty could evolve, how whole islands can be programmed and created, down to the failing of artificial intelligence, and the reliance in the ractors of humans by preference for interaction. There’s a subtle undercurrent of the role of family in the novel, but also how children can be raised by technology, or how different people from differing layers of society can have access to similar tech, and evolve differently. Case in point is that Nell is mainly interacting with a single female ractor who becomes a mother figure, with her father in the background. The mouse army are poorer, but saved from certain death, through the Primer identify as a force in the book’s virtual world, and later in the real world, drawing strength from each other. Essentially everyone reacts differently to the Primer and it illustrates the choices make in life.

The book then is well worth the time; there are some diversions – the drummers seem a little illogical at times, but seem to be set up as the anti-Victorian phyle to illustrate Hackworth’s fall as he would have initially seen it, and in his search for the the alchemist, which almost becomes a pure plot device to drive the story. That aside, the historical references, the sheer detail Stephenson goes into really makes the world perhaps more so than SnowCrash. Worth a read.

 

eBook Recommendations – November 2010

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Although I’m loving my Kindle, I’ve been collecting sources for e-books for a while, from reading some on my old Palm III and even my old Windows 95 PC and Mac Powerbook 190cs. I thought then, since e-texts are now more accessible, to recommend a few every now and then, which I’ve found to be worth the time. I’m trying to pull them from different genres, but also sources, so people can look around the sites to see if there’s anything else which interests them.

Of course, everyone should go and check out the awesome resource which is gutenberg.org for their unrivaled collection of public domain and otherwise legally available downloads. If you want to go back and read true classics, that’s the place.

Also, these aren’t reviews, just general recommendations. Maybe I’ll get to write quick reviews in a few months.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

This is hard Sci-Fi novel available for free online, or for purchase, and a former Hugo Award nominee which is impressive in it’s own right. It deals with a near future first alien contact scenario, and like 2001 and other encounter tales, looks to see how much such an experience will tell us about ourselves as well as the aliens.[download]

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

This was Cory Doctorow’s real breakout work, of a fantastical future with no money – only whuffie – no death and the world of the Bitchun Society, woven into which is a murder mystery. It’s a well written tale, and has always been a free download which Doctorow is a big proponent of. It’s also a good introduction to some of Doctorow’s other works, some of which have received several awards, as well as the respect of other contemporary writers. [downloads]

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

This is a true story as such, or rather a documentary in print of some of the hacker exploits of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, not just about the hackers, but also the police and government forces charged with tracking these -often kids, down. It’s fascinating to read after the fact, about the obsession of these kids, the complete lack of coverage under law, and the poor funding and support keen law enforcement agents received. I actually liked this enough to buy a print copy too having read it digitally, in about 1998. I’m also a fan of Bruce Sterling’s other works, especially ‘Global Head’, a collection of short stories, and his journalistic work. [download]

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

A literary classic from 1899,  set in Africa against a background of Imperialism and racism in a dangerous time and place. It follows the story of Marlow, an ivory trading riverboat captain as he seeks to return another trader back to civilization from upriver. The book is probably better known as being the loose basis for the film ‘Apocalypse Now’ and is contentious by today’s standards for racial and religious viewpoints, which is perhaps why it’s still so widely read, reflecting the standards of another not-too-distant time. [download]

Thoughts on my Kindle

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I like to read. I’m not saying I’m some kind of über prolific reader, but I do get through one or two books a month, although I like essays, short stories, novellas and such as well. So what I wanted then, was an e-reader to buy books to, which would allow me to drop things in to it from gutenberg.org and other public domain locations, then also white papers and other lengthy pieces of text from the net.

I’ve been eyeing the Kindle for a couple of years, but between the form factor and mainly the price, I hadn’t gone for it, but with the 3rd generation model having a wi-fi only model available, and the then high on the yen vs. dollar exchange rate, I thought it might be time to bite, so I ordered, it shipped, and now I’ve been using it for almost a couple of months.

Out of the box, the device is well packaged, and it simply powers on and works. It’s a good first experience.

I’ll be honest though, it’d didn’t work straight away with the WPA2 wireless in my house based out of an old Apple Airport Express access point. It really didn’t seem to want to try, so I looked at the Kindle Forums, and though people were helpful, the tech level there is as you might expect for a general customer device perhaps – it’s addressed some issues, but some of the reasoning is a little off target – there’s a lot of misunderstanding amongst posters, and attempted clarification by helpers on what WEP is and isn’t, what the SSID is and isn’t, what the password is and isn’t and what are your wireless access point details, and what are your ISP router details. At least they’re polite.

I also tried calling Kindle support, and to be fair, their response was what they promised – I entered my number, and a few minutes later, they called me back. I have to say though, I put in a Japan number, but the response was in English and I don’t think the person had any Japanese language skills, so I don’t know what kind of support a Japanese only speaker would get. (Also, the Kindle itself came set to English with no Japanese instructions, though the cover does have Japanese instructions.)

Anyway, I did get it working, and I’ve put the troubleshooting part of that at the bottom, so we can talk a bit more about the device itself now.

Overall, it’s excellent. The readability is very good – it’s not black and white, but a pulp grey and black, and honestly, with a few pages, I forgot I was using an electronic device. I actually caught myself trying to look at the top of the Kindle to see how far through the book I was. It really is as immersive as a book as far as I’m concerned. The Kindle does helpfully tell you what percentage you have read at the bottom of the screen in place of page numbers which obviously aren’t valid as you might alter the font size and so on, and there all the note and bookmark options you’ll need.

The UI is still a bit odd though. You can make folders, lets say ‘Thrillers’ and place certain novels and stories into it. Great. Except they still show in the main listing as well, which for me means it’s already getting quite cluttered, and I’d like to have all my sci-fi together, my comedy together and reference works together. I’m half thinking I’m missing something on this.

I commute to work on a busy train, and even in it’s leather cover I had no problem holding the Kindle for an hour at a time into work, though they’re not that common in Tokyo, so it did get a few second glances.

Some other notes on the physical device: the battery does last as long as it says – at least four weeks with wi-fi off, and a built in memory capacity of ~ 3GB which I think will be enough for now.

Getting works on to the device and into that memory is interesting. When you enable the device on Amazon.com, you get an e-mail address to which you can e-mail acceptable formats and when you connect via wi-fi, it’ll connect to that address and download the works you’ve sent. This is also the way you get the stories you can buy on Amazon itself, delivered wirelessly via the ‘WhisperNet’. You can also connect the device to your PC/Mac and it shows as a mass storage device on the desktop so you can copy files on to it directly. This is all fine, but for many, knowing what’ll work and what wont is a bit hit n miss, and I might not want to use this clunky desktop approach.

One app I’ve been using to get around this is Calibre, which converts files between formats like ePub (which the Kindle doesn’t support but which is popular), text and so on to the .mobi format Amazon does support. It’ll also e-mail the file to your Kindle account for download. Why doesn’t Amazon offer this functionality in it’s Kindle for Mac/PC app?

Buying an e-book from Amazon is pure simplicity. I bought ‘Daemon‘ by Daniel Suarez and once purchased it really was just pushed down to my device and I could read it within seconds. Excellent. One disappointing note is that many Kindle books are a bit overpriced in my humble opinion – most are paperback price, some are hardback price (like ‘Freedom TM’, the sequel to Daemon, at the time of writing).

Really? For a file which saves Amazon and the publisher all the physical media and shipping? If you look at the tags on many books, people have tagged them as expensive Kindle versions. This is a real shame at this stage of adoption.

Basically then, it’s an iPod for reading, which is what these things were always meant to be; certainly it’s web browser works, but I don’t see much point for it. Some people on the forums slammed it because for some reason they thought they were getting a 140USD iPad. It’s not an iPad. It’s a book reader, and for that it’s excellent. You can also listen to audio books if you like too, which is no surprise since the leader in that market is the Amazon owned Audible.

Overall, I’m really pleased with this purchase, and the Amazon case I got for it. It gets taken a lot of places, and I’ve already read a lot on it, and I can see it being excellent for trips. Again, if you want something to read books on, get a Kindle. If you have more cash and want a media device and maybe read something, then get an iPad I suppose, though I emphasise, reading for long periods I’m told by friends is not as good an experience. I see this Kindle as being something I’ll actually use more than I expected, and that’s always the sign of a good purchase.

The technical bit

Just to cover my out of the box lack of wi-fi activation. So it couldn’t see my SSID, and when I manually entered the details it said it just couldn’t connect. Allegedly being at least somewhat tech savvy, I decided to give it a try from first principles, but I wanted to see where official support channels would get the average user, that is, if my parents had this issue. Firstly, the forums; as I said they are good people, perhaps not overly technical, but definitely keen, but no real answers unfortunately. I called Amazon’s Kindle support line.

The person went through their script and was very polite, but their bottom line suggestion was to go to McDonalds, to a totally open wi-fi hotspot, register/activate the device and then it might work on my home network. There is a McDonalds down the road, but honestly, I wasn’t drunk (my usual requirement to duck under the golden arches) and since I have full control of my wireless system, and consider myself somewhat technical,  I decided to give it a crack. So, I dropped everything to make my system a hotspot and set my Apple Airport Express to factory default – it worked fine. I don’t recommend having anything else on your wi-fi if you do that – it’s not very safe.

I then started ‘rebuilding’ the security – put WPA2 on, made a few other minor changes like the channel, and every was fine. I didn’t get it, then I changed one last setting back to how it had been before: “Connection Sharing” – factory default is to ‘Share a Public IP Address’ whereas I had it set to “Off – Bridge Mode” and sure enough changing that kills my Kindle’s ability to connect to the wireless, no matter what anything else is set to. I honestly have no idea why, and since the box is ~six years old and discontinued I doubt it’s a big thing in the market. I do wonder if anyone can replicate this though.