Tag Archives: Kindle

by | July 1, 2015 · 6:35 AM

Mixed Media

I am a completion-ist at heart. If I’m collecting something, watching something, reading something, I want it all.

I don’t mean every obscure fan-fiction Star Trek story, or every piece of Babylon 5 paraphernalia available. But if I’m reading a series, I want every book in that series.

And here lies the quandary, do I mix my media?

I tend to split things this way: physical books (especially comic books) are for my really prized series. The best of the best. The rest is digital. But it’s the digital I actually have  time to read, so some of my “best of the best” series are actually all digital (Chew for example).

bleach-logo

Then there’s the stuff in the middle. I like to read Bleach (a manga). I own volumes 1-34 physically, but know that I do not have the shelf space to buy any more (the series is up in the 70’s now). Digital volumes of the series are actually half the price of the physical, and take up no more space than their electrons. And they’re way more likely to be read. But I’ll never make enough money from selling 1-34 to buy their digital equivalents (maybe a good number but not all), so selling my existing stock doesn’t make much sense. But I’m much more likely to actually read these books if I buy them digitally, and I buy a whole row of a shelf’s worth of space in the process.

So for the moment I have mixed media (1-34 physically and I just bought Volume 35 digitally). At least it’s a clean split.

But sometimes price can get the better of you.

If you’ve been reading a series on the Kindle, then suddenly find the next book as a paperback for 1/5th the price, do you go for it? Or do you buy the Kindle book anyway so you can have the whole series in one form?

Kindle Matchbook is a nice theoretical solution to this problem, except that you have to buy the books from Amazon, and not everything participates in that program (in fact most things don’t, Bleach doesn’t). What’d be nice is to be able to buy cheap digital copies of everything we own physically, regardless of how we got it, but that’s an impractical business model.

I don’t like buying things twice any more than the rest of us, but the urge to be able to take things with me is strong.

Maybe this is why libraries are awesome. You can read things without the burden of figuring out how to own them.

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by | June 5, 2014 · 6:35 AM

I Swear on the Gorilla Glass

Suzi LeVine, the new U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, became the first US official to be sworn in on a Kindle, specifically a Kindle displaying a copy of the constitution (from the photo on the Washington Post blog it looks like the eReader was displaying the 19th amendment [women’s suffrage]).

Let’s acknowledge that this might feel a little weird. Weirder still might be the group of firefighters sworn in on an iPad Bible. But is being sworn in on a digital copy of a book really any different than the physical one?

That depends on what you think the purpose of the artifact is, and what the motives were for using a digital equivalent.

My argument would be that swearing on the constitution or the Bible is intended to bring those documents to mind. Basically, putting your hand on the Bible is supposed to make you think about actually being in the presence of God, and that your words are being spoken in front of him as well as anyone in the room. When you swear on the constitution you are pledging your loyalty to our country and its guiding principles, and if you’re an ambassador you are pledging to be our representative, to speak for us.

So does a physical book do a better job of invoking this state of mind than a digital book?

I don’t buy it. Sure a book has heft, weight, substance, but I think it’s easy to either be sincere or to go through the motions no matter what you’re putting your hand on.

Now I’m not making the argument that a physical book and an eBook are the same thing. I’m merely stating that the differences do not have a significant impact on the symbol, or at least they don’t have to. For me, a digital Bible is eminently more practical, useful and effective in my life than the dozen physical Bibles I own. The digital Bible is always with me, and even though I don’t read it as often as I like, I read it a lot more than any of the physical Bibles (even my nice little hardbound red one I bought specifically to carry with me everywhere).

The experience of God is not tied to a specific medium, and the impact of our country is not tied to a bound or scrolled or engraved constitution.

Now a Kindle might signify laziness on the part of someone doing the ceremony. They couldn’t be troubled to find a nice copy of the constitution so they found one online in a second. And I bet in some cases this is true, but again care is more a function of the heart of the person taking the oath than the actual circumstances. And in this case she took the time to swear on a significant amendment (and the time to adjust the font ridiculously large and show it in landscape view).

For some people. the digital version will never be quite the same, and for them the physical is a good thing. But for others, the digital has the same if not more significance.

What do you guys think? Is this the beginning of the erosion of our natural principles, or is it just the natural progression of technology?

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by | April 28, 2014 · 6:35 AM

Pow! Bam! Zort! Amazon gobbles up Comixology!

Actually my favorite one of these was in Fables Volume 6. Boy Blue slices a guy in half with a vorpal sword and the sound effect is “snicker-snack!”

ComiXology-Logo-Dark-Grey-500x92

Publisher’s Weekly raised some questions customers will have about Amazon’s recent acquisition of comics app Comixology. Though I think discussions of in app purchases (Comixology removed them to avoid paying 30% to Apple), content restrictions and listings are important, there are a couple of other issues that I think need addressing by both sides.

For those who aren’t aware, Comixology is an app that works on a variety of different devices, from PCs to tablets, that allows you to buy digital issues and collections of comic books. It is also one of the more DRM (Digital Rights Management) heavy formats going so far as to split its image data into two separate encrypted files that are merged together by their proprietary viewer. Comixology is also very aggressive in patching or taking down solutions that users have created to attempt to break this DRM. Even for backup and recovery purposes, the AZW (Amazon Whispersync) or AZW3 formats are better since they at least contain the entire comic book in a single file.

Back when the second Star Trek movie was coming out, Comixology had a sale on a number of their Star Trek IDW titles (stuff that can be a little expensive to collect physically even for a purist). I bought a number of titles that I could view on my Polaroid, computer or Kindle.

And then I remembered Amazon’s golden rule, we will never be undersold by anyone.

Now inevitably, every time I get a sale notification from Comixology, I can expect the exact same one from Amazon. And consequently I’ve stopped buying from Comixology altogether unless they have something I can’t get anywhere else.

And that’s the only thing I think Amazon’s gaining by the acquisition, content. But if we’re talking format, I’d take Amazon’s ebook format hands down as I can at least get a little closer to owning my own content (though really on all of these you’re just leasing the rights to them). What I’d really love is for Comixology to convert all of my existing titles over to Kindle versions when the two companies merge. That way everything’s part of one big happy library. That’s the way the Audible acquisition went. Anything bought from Audible shows up in my cloud list same as any regular book. Now it’s in audibles audio format, but the difference there is that Amazon doesn’t really have its own audio format for books (for the most part).

Now Amazon’s not without its flaws on comic books. Manga can be downloaded to the Kindle Touch but not a first generation Fire. Saga can only be downloaded to Kindle HDs and above, the Kindle App or the Kindle Cloud reader (though the only thing standing in the way seems to be higher resolution though that doesn’t quite track since my Android has worse resolution than the Fire). *

Comixology does have some unique comic formats that might only work on the app, such as more interactive or guided view comics, but most standard conventional material will look nice in either format. And the app and library management are actually a lot clunkier than Kindle so I’d just as well hope that they merge everything together.

The merger should be good from a content standpoint if nothing else, but I’m hoping they go a few steps further to create a truly beneficial offering.

*Actually Image Comics (Saga, Sex Criminals, etc.) offers their comics as true ebook downloads (PDF, CBR, CBZ, epub) so it might be better just to buy directly from them for those comics since they are DRM free.

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by | February 10, 2014 · 6:35 AM

Amazon Manga Madness!!!

Long time readers of the blog may remember I like to read manga, but being an Amazon Kindle user my options were limited and they had none of my favorite series (including Bleach and most Viz media).

Apparently that has changed.

After a couple of layers of Amazon “you may like” or “customers who bought this item also bought”, I discovered Rurouni Kenshin – Restoration, a two volume retelling / tie-in with the live action movie (also discussed on this blog). Each volume is priced at $5.79 and are welcome editions to my Kindle (I’ll evaluate the story and the movie in a future post once the live action arrives on my doorstep).

It turns out Amazon has a lot of good titles: Naruto, Bleach, Attack on Titan, Rurouni Kenshin and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Single volumes all seem to be priced at around the $5.79 price though the Evangelion title’s offer three-in-ones priced at $9.39. Absent though is Fullmetal Alchemist, Trigun, Love Hina and numerous others that I would have loved to see.

As I have long suspected it would, manga looks great on the Touch. Barnes and Noble, who used to be the only game in town, did not offer manga on their eReaders, only supporting it on their tablet models. There are some quirks, however:

  • Manga is compatible with my Touch but not my first generation Fire. This seems odd since the Fire has a better resolution and supports a variety of other comics. It works on my crappy generic Android, however. To my understanding the Touch and the Fire are the same hardware generation so I find it a little odd that the Touch works and Fire does not.
  • The manga pages are ordered backwards, or more to the point they are placed back to front as a real printed volume would be. I think it’s a little weird to have to hit the previous button to get the next page, and the effect is not as natural as it is with the actual book.

The price point’s not bad, though I wish they offered more of the long running series in the same format as the Evangelion books (the equivalent of buying each volume for $3.13 instead of $5.79). Kenshin is a 28 volume series, and Bleach and Naruto have 50+ volumes. Manga has never been the cheapest hobby to sustain, and Amazon is cheaper than most print runs, but it’s still expensive to have a complete collection.

Overall I’m happy, particularly for trying new series like Attack on Titan that I haven’t read. One of these days I’ll have to review a real book so you don’t think all I read is comic books 🙂

What other manga titles do you like?

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