This coffee shop still life comes to you from Coffee & Company at 53 Pricess Street in Kingston, Ontario. Impressively, it has no web site. Which is not to say it’s unwired; most of us are bent over screens of one size or another. “The password is bagel,” the barrista answered when I asked if there was Wifi. He spoke to the side, as if SMERSH agents might overhear us. “All lowercase?” I asked, lowering my voice as well. He nodded. So I’m back on the net after a frustrating 24 hours at the periphery, ever since we breezed past the border at Port Huron/Sarnia yesterday. Nothing to declare. No WiFi at the Comfort Inn last night in Oshawa, and spotty results at the one today in Kingston, where we checked in early at noon and napped.

The Profession by Steven Pressfield dropped from the Whispernet to my Kindle today. I have paper proofs and now the much-preferred Kindle version. Darlene left her colorful sunglasses case and Claire (unseen in photo) behind while she checks out the shops on Pricess Street. That triangle shape is the case/stand for my iPad.

Travel is disorienting, especially on a trip like this one that won’t have time to develop much of a routine. When we used to travel in a small motorhome, a Rialta, we’d pick out an RV campground sometime in the early afternoon and arrive before dark, so there was plenty of time to hook up the water, electrical, and other connections. No hauling of suitcases and gear up the stairs of a Comfort Inn. No packing and unpacking. On this trip, we try to stay a day ahead of ourselves for hotel reservations. Since tonight will be our second stay at a Comfort Inn, we’re due to get our next night free, thanks to a special promotion I spotted on the breakfast table in Joliet, Illinois. So disorienting, yes. But that’s what travel’s good for – to shake things up and see what remains. For me, perhaps sadly, it always comes back to the net. Gotta get back online. First thing I do in a new hotel room is fire up the devices. I get jumpy when I’m offline. So sue me.

Late Afternoon at Ocean Park, Maine

We were reading our Kindles at the beach when an autumn breeze came up. So I fetched additional layers of clothing up at the cottage and returned with a bag of almonds and a root beer. Our friend Holly, a quilter and a Mainer undaunted by cold water, rode waves and swam for a good 20 minutes without a wetsuit. Claire dug in the sand furiously. “For what?” I wondered. I called Bayley’s Lobster Pound in Pine Point on my iPhone to order three one-and-a-half-pounders and cole slaw, ready for pickup just before they close at 6 p.m.

In 19 days we will fly to Johannesburg via London for a stay in South Africa and Botswana. It will be early summer there. Pretty amazing.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I believe in biking. I rode hard each morning this week, usually at 5:30 in the morning, when the streets and roads were mainly clear of vehicles, except for the street cleaner in Old Orchard. I found the East Coast Greenway, which follows an abandoned railroad track through the woods and across a marsh. Sweat is good. Riding the waves with just my body is good. Having the cottage full of young teens is good. Having a lull before the next wave of family arrives is good.

Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540)

I’m reading Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel, a tasty, layered tale set in the reign of Henry VIII. The protagonist is a real person, Thomas Cromwell, portrayed as a sly survivor who is maybe wise, too. I’m reading the novel on several e-readers, to compare them, but I returned the Kindle version because for some reason it didn’t have a table of contents. The nook so far beats the Kobo, because the latter is slow to load the book and has no way to look up words or search. Same with the Sony Reader Pocket Edition, which comes in last, because the screen is too small. You get about the same number of words at a time as on an iPhone book app, but you can’t really put the Sony Reader in your pocket unless you’re Captain Kangaroo. After a couple of gee-whiz days of marveling at the gorgeous e Ink Pearl screen of the new Kindle DX Graphite, I’m not using it much, because it’s too big for my taste. I’ll probably return it within the 30 days that Amazon amazingly provides for free evaluation of the Kindle, and they even pay for shipping it back, no questions asked. I want to see the high-contrast Pearl screen on a new Kindle six-inch, which I bet will be out before I turn 60, on August 30.

The dog is dozing, and the wife is still reading. Is there anything I’ve neglected to tell you about this moment? No doubt, but this will have to do for now.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad



I’m on a Southwest flight, half way from Boston to Denver. In my “Life Is Good” cloth bag, I’m toting a Kindle 6-inch and the iPad on which I’m drafting this post in the Pages app.  I told Bryan Person last month that if I had to choose between the iPad and the Kindle for a long flight, I’d take the iPad. That’s still probably true, but the Kindle has been coming back up in my world lately, to the point where I would probably now reply, “Why do I have to choose?”

If I had checked my Kindle along with my laptops in the suitcase, I would have missed a great read that occupied me for the first hour of the flight. At a Logan Airport newsstand, I saw that James Fallows has the cover story in the current issue of The Atlantic, titled “How to Save the News.” I pulled out the Kindle and bought the issue wirelessly for $1.49. It’s a fascinating piece, in which Fallows explores Google’s quiet but significant initiatives to help print news publications break through to the Promised Land of renewed ad strength for digital content. I read the article slowly enough to think about it as I was taking it in.  I find that my Kindle is the perfect way to follow a complex article, because I see fewer words at a time than is the case with print on paper.  The Kindle made getting the article (and paying The Atlantic something for Jim’s good work) almost as easy as simply thinking about doing so.

As for the iPad, it’s the perfect magical tool for a tray table in coach. My Apple iPad case lifts the top of the screen to a comfortable angle for typing and grips the tray, so there is no sliding around. In addition to writing this post, I’ve done some MindNode brainstorming for a Western States Arts Federation tech presentation I will give in St. Louis in September, and I read some from my Financial Times iPad app, which has a smart and simple way to download the latest content for off-line reading.  I haven’t had time to play Plants vs. Zombies or listen to the any podcasts.

So I agree with Mike Elgan, who says there are good reasons for using an iPad and a Kindle. BTW, if you haven’t seen it yet, click here for Mike’s brilliant comparison chart for an iPad, a Kindle — and a Rock. It was great to talk with him for Kindle Chronicles #97 last week.

There are about 10 laptop computers on this flight, one Kindle, one iPad (mine) and lots of print books and magazines.

Life is good, and the news is worth saving.

[Delayed upload, after getting home in Denver.]

Yesterday I launched a project to provide free Kindles for U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan.  I chose Kandahar because of the letter K, but also because it’s the general region where Army Sgt. Andre B. Corbin will serve when he deploys later this month.  He will be toting a new 6-inch Global Wireless Kindle and accessories, all donated by M-Edge Accessories in a sponsorship for which I gained quick and enthusiastic support from Patrick Mish, CEO of M-Edge.  You can listen to the interviews I did with Sgt. Corbin and Patrick Mish in Episode 84 of The Kindle Chronicles.

It was during those interviews that the idea of Kindles for Kandahar arrived, and I’ll be working with Andre and Patrick to develop the project. Andre this morning left the following message on my Reading Edge Facebook page:

“As the Kindles become available, I will provide to you a name and address of one of the Kandahar soldiers who will find great pleasure in receiving a Kindle. I will donate the money required to cover the postage.”

I appreciate that donation, Andre!  I realized yesterday, when the first contribution arrived, that PayPal is charging a small transaction fee, so I will donate that money back to K4K, so that we can assure donors that every dollar contributed will go toward a Kindle for the troops.  I haven’t had a chance to talk with Patrick Mish yet about M-Edge’s involvement in this next phase, but I’m hoping he will consider contributing a protective cover and an E-luminator 2 light for each of the Kindles we ship to Kandahar.

Andre has another idea we’ll pursue, which is to figure out a way to donate Amazon gift certificates for purchasing content on the K4K units.  I loved his signoff on the Facebook entry today:

“Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”

I hope you’ll consider becoming one of the first contributors to Kindles for Kandahar. To do so, simply click here or on the logo above or the PayPal button.  If you have your own PayPal account, you will be able to use it for the contribution.  If not, there will be credit card buttons available. I don’t have nonprofit status set up for this yet, so for the moment your contribution will not be tax-deductible.

This project is a terrific use case for eReader technology.  I realized that when Andre described how small the bag is that he will carry for his personal effects when he deploys.  Instead of taking one or two print books, he will be able to bring more than a thousand titles on his 10-ounce Kindle.  His reading list for the year he will be stationed at a remote base in Tarin Kowt includes recreational fare, as well as elucidating tomes such as In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation (Kindle, hardcover) by David Loyn and Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Kindle, paperback) by Steve Coll.

Another book I’d recommend is Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (Kindle, hardcover) by Seth Godin.  It’s about making yourself indispensable by overcoming lizard-brain resistance to your true mission.  I happened to have read it in preparation for an interview with Seth just before talking with Andre, and it helped me overcome reasons to procrastinate the launch of Kindles for Kandahar.  Andre and his fellow soldiers are taking the art of being indispensable to the 11th power.

Aboard the Henry Longfellow in the Charles River Basin, Boston

I have decided to take a five-month break from politics.

To some extent, I have Steve Jobs to thank for this decision.  Apple’s handing down of its new tablet on Wednesday has turned the eBook space white hot.  The iPad will have a new iBooks app, a direct attack on the Kindle’s dominance of eBooks.  I’m not saying the Future of Reading is more important than the future of civil political discourse in America, but for the next six months I’m going to focus on the former and let the latter lurch along without me. My weekly Kindle Chronicles podcast just passed the 2,000 mark in Feedburner subscribers, and my new companion podcast, The Reading Edge, offers a great way for me to further explore the eBook Revolution. This is shaping up to be a truly amazing year for anyone as passionate about literature and technology as I am.

Apple's new iPad

I don’t have a precise definition of political sobriety, but I have taken actual steps to reduce my intake of political news and commentary.  I turned off my Google Reader feed and created a brand-new one that, so far, contains nothing but eBook blogs and news. No more Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish or Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook, no more deep political reads in The New Yorker or political podcasts. (One reason I am including these links is that I may need them to find my way back to political immersion on the Fourth of July.)

There is no way to avoid political news completely.  I have resolved to continue watching the President’s weekly address, and to finish Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, an experiment in reading a nook and remaining open to a cultural phenomenon that is as opaque to me as professional sports.  I have a hunch that an open mind is my only hope for an old age that works.  It’s the daily drip of savvy, deconstructive political reporting and toxic partisan bickering from which I take this sabbatical.

On Independence Day we will be in Maine again.  I hope I will return to the fray refreshed by being away for a while, and that The Kindle Chronicles and The Reading Edge will benefit from 153 days of renewed attention and work.

The Road to Harvard Square

1.

Cory Doctorow and Stephen King have hijacked my Kindle with great fiction reads.

My pre-ordered copy of King’s Under the Dome arrived, as promised, on Christmas Eve. It’s scary how well he tells a story.  I suspect that I will soon be drawn into a dead run toward the end of the story, even as the initial beckonings are small and odd.  A dome gets dropped over the sock-shaped Maine town of Chester Mills.  This ridiculous premise already seems plausible, because of gruesome bits like an unlucky woodchuck chopped in half on Dome Day.  Spoiler alert: If you don’t want to know how the story ends, don’t click on this Wikipedia item.

Doctorow’s Makers, downloaded for free from his site in .mobi edition, has taken longer to draw me into the story, even though story itself is a central artifice of the novel. It’s set in a troubling future, and you’ll never think of Disneyworld the same again.

2.

I like Chrome, the new browser from Google now available for Macintosh.  It’s slightly different from Firefox and Safari, but I can’t tell you how or testify to any of its advantages, except that you type search terms or URL addresses in the same place, called the “Omnibox.”  I like the pretty icon, which looks like a camera lens.  It’s peeking at me from the dock on my MacBook Air, saying, “click on me.”

3.

I’ve had it with the nook. The gee-whiz phase lasted about two weeks, peaking one night at the Barnes & Noble store in Chestnut Hill when I got a free oatmeal cookie by showing the puzzled barrista a coupon that had appeared on my nook once it found the B&N store network.  The same coupon appeared when I entered the palatial B&N store across from the Burlington Mall, so I got another cookie.  You could make your way across the country with your nook, apparently, grazing on free cookies at every store.  Except that the Burlington barrista did not check the coupon number, which was the same at each store.  If she had entered it in the cash register, perhaps there would have been a message: “Seize this impostor! He has already obtained his free cookie at the Chestnut Hill store.  He is a suspected Kindle provocateur.”

It was also cool to download two library books to the nook from the Denver Public Library, but there’s no way I’m going to finish them before they expire, and I doubt I’ll be able to renew them.

So after straying from my Kindle, I’m back home with fuller appreciation of its amazing tool set for reading.  For example, there is no way on the nook to search for a character’s name and see all the references to it, including the first, when the character enters the story.  With the Kindle, I can do this with ease, and then use the magic “Back” button to jump back into the story, with a clear sense of who this person is.  The nook’s dictionary is a joke. It’s painfully slow and awkward to maneuver the cursor to a word, and the definitions are truncated and lame.

I still don’t hope the nook fails.  Driving up to the Burlington B&N book palace, I had a strong sense of how many people work there, and how sad it will be if places like that cease to exist, never mind classy independent bookstores like the Tattered Cover in Denver and the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. They guy at the nook kiosk in Burlington really knew his stuff.  How odd, though, to have an eBook sales desk in the midst of all those paper volumes.  Do the other sales people hate the nook guy? Do they look on him as their only hope to survive the coming revolution?  It’s a great story unfolding, and I’m glad I invested in a nook so I can follow it firsthand.  But for the pure joy of reading, I’m back to dancing with the eBook that brought me.

4.

I realized the other day that I am in my sixties.  I’ve been 59 years old since August, and that comforting “fifty” in my age had disguised the fact that I am well into my 60th year, the first year of a new decade.   The realization hit me not with sadness and dread, but with the hope of impending wisdom, if I play my cards right.

5.

Ross Douthat in a recent New York Times op-ed piece has totally nailed what makes Obama tick, in my humble opinion.  As a hard-core moderate, I am thrilled to read an insight like this:

“Both right and left have had trouble processing Obama’s institutionalism. Conservatives have exaggerated his liberal instincts into radicalism, ignoring the fact that a president who takes advice from Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates probably isn’t a closet Marxist-Leninist. The left has been frustrated, again and again, by the gulf between Obama’s professed principles and the compromises that he’s willing to accept, and some liberals have become convinced that he isn’t one of them at all.”

I have to say that this is the Obama I thought I was working for since early in the primaries. At this point in his presidency, it takes a lot of hope and faith to expect him to leave a legacy of peace and prosperity in these impossible times.  But when it comes to Barack Obama, I have become used to long odds paying off handsomely.  My wife and I first saw him in person during the 2004 election campaign, shortly after his keynote speech to the Democratic Convention on July 27, 2004.   With a huge lead in his own Illinois U.S. Senate race, Obama had come to Denver to support Ken Salazar’s much tougher Senate bid.  He looked tall, thin and slight as he entered the small gymnasium.  But as soon as he began to speak, I could imagine him as president.  It’s with a similar awareness of long odds that I now can imagine him as a truly successful president.  Time will tell.

6.

It’s not always easy to find a fact on the Internet.  I spent two hours trying to learn the date of Obama’s 2004 appearance in Denver.  The only trace I found was a blog entry stating that Colorado State Treasurer Cary Kennedy has a photo on her wall of Obama at a 2004 rally with Salazar and some congressional candidates.”  I’ve emailed her in hopes there is a date on the back of the photo.

7.

“It’s Complicated” with Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, and Alec Baldwin was much more satisfying a movie than I had expected.  My wife and her sister and I saw it last night in Harvard Square.  We also enjoyed a very different movie, “The Young Victoria” the night before at the Kendall Square Theatre.  On the way out, I rang Cha Cha up on my iPhone to ask what relation the current queen is to Victoria, and by the time we’d reached the car I had a text message informing me that Queen Victoria was Queen Elizabeth II’s great-great-grandmother.

8.

My sister totally surprised me with a Christmas gadget gift that I had not even known enough to lust for.  It’s a tiny Veho Micro DV camcorder that I strapped to my head for some of the big family dinner here on Christmas day.  I can’t wait to try it while rowing on the Charles next spring.  You can also clip it to a shirt pocket.  The resulting videos are headache-inducing because the view jumps around so much.  But it’s definitely a cool addition to my tech arsenal.

9.

It’s been fantastic to spend most of the past six months here in Cambridge.  Next week we return to Denver till the spring.  No matter where the suitcase lands, it’s nice to hang out “here.”

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