Category: 
As tech savvy gadget reviewers all know the Kindle sucks. In simple terms it is a cheap plastic piece of junk. It has a barely readable gray and chartreuse screen, which disappears in sunlight, and is useless for night time reading as well. If I were rating it, the Kindle would get a 1 for broken and fail. I saw Kevin Pereira break a Kindle while talking about it, just by holding it. His thumb went right through it like a pair of nylons. The general consensus is that if you want to read ebooks, get an iPod or a netbook. Either will do much more than the Kindle. And do it much better.
Someone pointed me to the New Yorker, a magazine that I have never read before either in print or online. It’s off the geek radar, an icon of the past. It began in the 1920s, as a weekly. Now down to only 47 issues per year instead of 52, the old rag is apparently known for its commentaries on pop culture, rigorous fact checking and copyediting. In his article Annals of Reading author Nicholson Baker shows us geeks how to write a review. The guy must be getting paid by the word. He certainly did his homework. It’s the type of an article that could take the writer a week or more to write, instead of a few hours, and frankly it’s impressive. You don’t know which side he is on until seven pages later. Now that’ a page turner. What I said in five words “cheap plastic piece of junk.” He takes a couple thousand to say.
However, how many of us do that much homework on the products we look at and test? Most importantly how many readers are willing to wade through thousands of words to get to the point? For a guy whose articles and books are about the emerging changes in the way we get information, he breaks the cardinal website rule, “Get your point across in the first paragraph, preferably in the first three sentences.”
It’s good to know that someone took the time and the expense, (I wonder who paid for all these books he cites, some of them he mentions sell for about a grand.) to tell the world that you don’t get what you are paying for on a Kindle. “You get the words, yes, and sometimes pictures, after a fashion. Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don’t work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range—e.g., the phrase “She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms” is to be found at location range 1596-1605 in Mari Carr’s erotic romance novel “Tequila Truth.”” Again, GW ten words, Baker a couple hundred.
The best points he makes are by giving examples. He tells us that the instruction manuals for a nuke plant, and for cancer surgery are so messed up on a Kindle that they could cause a meltdown or malpractice. Of course not in so many words. But in so many more words.
“…illustrations are there in the Kindle version, but they’re exceedingly hard to make out, even if you zoom in on them using the five-way clicker switch, or “control nipple,” as one Kindler called it. An award-winning medical textbook titled “Imaging in Oncology” (second edition) is for sale in the Kindle Store for $287.96. Tables are garbled. The color coding—yellow for malignancy, blue for healthy tissue—has been lost. Arrows pointing to shadowy tumors become invisible in the gray. Indeed, the tumors themselves disappear.”
“One more expensive example. The Kindle edition of “Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems,” an e-book for people who design nuclear power plants, sells for more than eight thousand dollars. Figure 2 is an elaborate chart of a reaction scheme, with many call-outs and chemical equations. It’s totally illegible.”
Anyway you phrase it the Kindle sucks. But whose way of telling you about it is better? The New Yorker style has been around for ever and has lasted the test of time. The new mode of communication slings facts out with out garnishment. It’s ironic that a guy who writes books about books, wrote an article about a non-book which is overly bookish. Kudos to Baker. We should all take a page from his through article. Although isn’t his dull plodding style the very reason why paper media has been going the way of the dinosaur?
Recently:
- Geek On
- Tap Tap Radiation on iPad
- Alpha Protocol PS3 Review
- iPad Total Family Solution
- WordPress Sucks on iPad
- iPad Happiness
- Blur for PS3 Review
- Geek Woman Interview on Whohub
- Aion: Assault on Balaurea – Pets are Coming!
- Guild Wars 2 ‘Manifesto’ Video
