You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Technology' category.
Even before I reached my teenage years I had a camera I used a lot. As I got older I moved onto a SLR and my interest in photography grew. Then, around the age of fifteen, I got bored. It wasn’t the urge to use a camera that went away it was that I stopped looking at the pictures. The albums I’d compiled (which I still have) started to gather dust, and those images I’d gone back to time after time never saw the light of day.
Flickr
This lack of interest continued for many years and then cameras started appearing on phones. All of a sudden I could take a picture wherever I was. Admittedly the lenses were poor, the flashes were shocking and therefore the quality was terrible, but none the less I could take pictures at any time. What I still didn’t have any urge to do was print them off, stick them in albums and show them to friends when they came around.
It was at about this point that I discovered Flickr. Most of my friends didn’t use the internet, but I rather liked the idea of being able to show others what I’d snapped. After thinking about it for a while I finally created an account and within a very short while I’d upgraded to a paid account. Since then I’ve continued to add images as and when I get around to it, but now I’m presented with another dilemma: should I keep a local copy?
With all my other media I make at least one back-up, and in most cases it’s three or four, yet with my photo’s they are on Flickr and nowhere else. I can’t imagine that the service is going to close down, but there could be a server crash and then all those images will be gone. I don’t look at them, so I probably shouldn’t care, but they are still a part of my life so I’m beginning to change my mind.
All I’ve got to do now is find a piece of software that pulls all the copies off Flickr and saves them on a local machine.
Being a lover of technology I tend to hunt down opportunities to play with new stuff and I recently got the opportunity to have a look at a Voice over IP (VoIP) install. It’s not a new technology, but something I’d never got near before, so I was eager to find out if all the fun things I’d read about were actually true. And I wasn’t disappointed.
Integration with Outlook was particularly cool, although it would be useful (and may well be possible) to have further options so that booking yourself out in your calendar picks the correct voice mail profile rather than just defaulting to the standard out of office one. (i.e. When I book a week’s holiday the phone switches to my ‘on leave’ voice message.)
Voice mail notification via email is also useful as is an organisation wide directory that can be accessed through the phone’s keypad (no more trying to remember all those extensions). Back end number mapping and the switchboard software also worked very well.
One thing I thought an obvious feature to have left out was further Outlook plug-ins. It would be very useful to open an email from someone and have a button on the screen that allowed me to ring them rather than replying (my phone does this for emails and texts). It could, of course, be available and I just didn’t see it, but given the calendar links it would seem like a basic feature to add.
Overall the system lived up to my expectations and certainly had the same cool feeling I get when someone rings me on Skype and finds I’m actually using my mobile rather than being sat at a computer. Long may technology continue to invade my life.
I had a conversation via text, email and Twitter to arrange meeting a friend for drinks while on a train. Neither of us made a conscious effort to use all these mediums, it just worked out that way. Being a total geek, afterwards I couldn’t help but smile about how cool it was that not only could I do all that from my phone, but it was all so easy.
Nokia E71 Smart Phone
Since finally succumbing to a smart phone I’ve noticed this type of integration more and more. It’s the same as being on a computer connected to the internet, but it’s highlighted because I don’t tend to be sat at a desk. What I want now is for the applications I use to merge even more; or more to the point, the protocols each one uses to be accessed from a single point.
A good example is Gravity [link]. I use this for Twitter but it also supports link shortening, Facebook and if I select a URL in it I get the option of copying to a SMS, email or just opening the web page. This makes recommending things to friends so much easier. I see something I like, and if a particular person isn’t on Twitter I can simply send it via a text message.
The task I tend to do the most is send people messages. Most friends use SMS, but not all bother with email (some are very very old), so when I get an email I think they might like I have to cut and paste it between various screens. What would make my life easier is if I could compose a message and when selecting the recipients pick a phone number, email address, Twitter or Facebook address to send it to. Then I could press send and the software would work out the rest.
Hopefully, as smart phones become more prolific, this will happen. Apple or Verizon will probably block it, but there are bound to be hacks and work arounds.
Nothing is free, or so people tell you, and even with music give-aways this appears to be true; at least in this instance.
The Pixies have made their EP available free via download; which is excellent news. I’ve not listened to them for a very long time so upon hearing this news I rushed over to their web site to get the zip file containing the tracks.
You have to give up an email address to access the download and it was here that I spotted the line:
‘By clicking Confirm and Download, you agree to the terms of this promotion and agree to receive future email updates from Pixies.’
The first part I expected; the terms probably mean about as much as the average end user licence agreement. The bit about getting more emails from the band was less good.
Having thought about this for a few days I’m still in two minds as to how good it is. First off I don’t like being forced into signing up for something. If I enjoy the band and want to hear their news I’ll let them know. I could even follow them on Twitter or add their blog to my reading list (I do this for some artists). Certainly if they had suggested I give them my mobile phone number I’d have walked away very quickly. Email matters less. I use plenty of filters and there are numerous people and organisations who send me messages that just get automatically marked as read and deleted without me ever knowing about it.
Having said that, the unsubscribe option was in small, greyed out print, at the bottom of the email, which is a bit rude.
The other half of my mind has pointed out that I am getting a few tracks for free and the pain of being on a mailing list is a small price to pay. Also, I can hardly blame the group. They have a living to make, work to promote and this is an ideal way of doing it. It’s certainly less underhanded than a lot of promotion companies who have decided to keep sending me information after I’ve purchased theatre or gig tickets from them once or twice.
If you do want the free tracks (I’m not sure how long they are available for) you can find details here. The unsubscribe option is at the bottom of the email and will look like this:
Cory Doctorow’s (@doctorow) experiment might work, but not for long.
I won’t reiterate everything Cory Doctorow has said (you can read the full details here), but the upshot, if I understand it correctly, is that he is giving away his new book in as many formats as possible, while at the same time it is being published in a normal paperback version. He will then make all of the revenue available for people to scrutinise. The aim is to see if the free approach, one he has always espoused and stuck to, hurts his physical sales.
Kindle
I like the principle behind what Cory is doing, and I’m pretty sure it’ll work out okay for him, but I’m also convinced that if the experiment were run again in ten years time the result would be drastically different.
My reasoning behind this is simple: there are far more people (who want to read his book) that don’t know how to access the free variants, than there are who do. That is to say, that although a lot of the world is now plugged into the internet, many of those people have neither ability nor inclination to download an eBook or audio version.
For example my group of close friends range from their late twenties to their early forties (about twenty people). All of them have at least one computer and many have internet connected mobile phones and iPods of some kind. Only one has an eBook reader. Two listen to audio books. Some have tried reading online, but that has only been on the odd occasion and certainly hasn’t continued.
My point is that the majority of people are in this position. They neither have the knowledge nor the inclination to use one of the new forms of book distribution and so the likelihood is, if they want to read a novel they will go out and buy it.
Jump ten years into the future and I suspect you will see a very different world; one where eReaders and audio books are far more mainstream. If you want to do a fair comparison now, put printed books on sale next to free versions, then see which ones fly off the shelves. In the meantime it’s good practice to make your work free online as long as you have a priced paper version as well.
(I could have misunderstood the idea behind Cory Doctorow’s experiment, in which case ignore the references. My thoughts about how free eBooks alter remain as stated.)
More thoughts on combating the theft of books and eBooks.
(This is the second part of my thoughts on the matter. The first section can be found here.)
While it still frustrated me that the publishing industry is not learning from
Kindle
what the music companies have gone through (changing the way they make money etc.), there is one obvious and very easy thing authors, agents and the rest, can do to avoid piracy: make downloading legitimate eBooks easy and simple.
It is my view that a large proportion of the human race will take things for free if they can. With a big following a donation system will earn you some money, but it’s not going to be anywhere near the same level of income that can come from getting everyone to pay a small fee. And the simple fact is that most people don’t mind paying a low price for something they want.
The key is to ensure that getting the product, and paying for it, has to be quick and easy. More to the point, it has to be easier than getting the same thing for free.
Torrents suffer from a number of problems: the software isn’t fool proof (a seventy year old can just about understand iTunes, but uTorrent is something that is beyond their reach); the quality of the download is variable; the format it comes in isn’t always going to work with the software you own; getting exactly what you want is not that easy when the file name is all over the place.
The answer for the book industry, I would suggest, is not to get caught up in DRM. This only makes it difficult for people to do what they want and pushes them towards the illegal material. What they need to do is make stories easy to get, easy to pass around and easy to pay for. Crucially they need to make it easier than getting hold of the illegal stuff.
Combating the pirating of books and eBooks.
Part One
There has been, and I sure will continue to be, plenty of discussions about the illegal book market now made available by torrents. I’ve posted comments on a number of them and it therefore seemed only right that I finally put my opinions down in my own space.
Before I start, I’ll give you some background so you can understand how I’ve come to my conclusions. (I’ve also split this into two parts as I’m sure I’m not the only one who dislikes reading long blogs.)
Pirated software has been around for longer than the web, but when the internet first appeared torrents were the place people went to get it, everyone used IRC or Usenet. (Interestingly these methods of distribution are still available, they are just less well known of. Okay, so neither is as fast as a torrent, but you can still get almost everything you want and there is less monitoring done on those networks.)
Kindle
When I was younger I got my music in many forms and a lot of them weren’t legal. I’ve taped stuff off the radio, done cassette to cassette copying, borrowed CDs from friends and copied them onto MiniDisc or computer, and even had a go at downloading. In more recent years, however, I’ve returned to buying CDs. By doing this I know exactly what I’m getting and I can do exactly what I want with it.
Until recently I couldn’t do the same thing with tracks I’d purchased from iTunes or other stores. Now, finally, music companies have realised that restricting things isn’t going to win anyone over. Sadly they’ve only learnt this because others have forced it on them.
How does this tie into the book publishing industry? At the moment getting an eBook is neither cheap nor easy when compared to getting a paperback. The Kindle has helped and other eBook readers are starting to catch up, but there are no standards, no one format that is available from every online store.
If I buy something from Amazon the eBook is locked down with DRM. I can’t take it off my Kindle and pass it to a friend who has a Sony reader. Compare this to what I do with a paperback (in fact, not only what I do, but what many people do). I buy the book, read it and if I like it I pass it to one of my friends. They read it and likely then go out and buy other novels by the same author.
My instinct with any book, or music track, isn’t to instantly pirate it in some way. All I want to do is share what I’ve enjoyed with other people. As others have said before, restrictions put on the digital format of media presumes from the get-go that I am going to do something naughty with it. While I don’t find that offensive I do find it annoying and it pushes me closer to using something that is already illegal, but that I can do more with.
(Part two on Friday 23 October 2009)
It’s all very well getting a 500Gb USB drive for $80 (£50), but what if you don’t need that much storage space? More to the point what if you want to spend a lot less cash.
Dead Hard Drive
Given the prices of half and one terabyte drives, for a small amount of money you should be able to get lower capacity drives. Sadly now they rarely come in anything less than 250Gb and when they do they are only a few price points cheaper than the 500Gb ones. For example, I found 120Gb drives selling for $50 and £35.
If you step down to USB sticks you find they are not only very expensive in comparison but they are difficult to find over 32Gb.
Hopefully with the advent of SSDs the sticks and memory cards will catch up, but in the meantime, cheap, low capacity, external USB drives are hard to come by.
After mentioning eBooks being corrected as readers spot errors (here), something else occurred to me: service packs are issued for software, they add value to what you’ve already paid for (in theory); sometimes they are free and sometimes you pay a small amount for them. So, is there anything wrong with authors doing the same thing for their readers?
Books
If you’ve purchased an eBook how nice would it be to get a free piece of flash fiction (less than 1,000 words) by the author about the same characters (or a side plot)? If it was a longer story would you be happy to pay a small price for it?
Knowing how much readers enjoy stories set in the same world I can’t imagine this would fail to gain interest. The workload isn’t even that onerous for the author. A piece of flash fiction takes about three hours to write. That’s from start to the finished article. Three hours, every now and then isn’t that much work and the value it adds to the reader is immense.
Now all we need is an easy way for the author to send updates out to the Kindle without having to fight their way through Amazon.
Books
I’m not talking about author platforms or eBooks (well, I kind of am going to mention the latter). What I’m interested in is the speed at which versions of a book come out.
I those dark years when all we had were books printed on paper and the electron powered format was just a twinkle in the eye of the creator, popular books would get reissued every few years. When these new versions were brought out editors would sometimes update sections, making corrections the author, or even readers, had suggested. Now that books can be downloaded, changed on web sites, or even repealed by the publisher, does the version you read today have to be the same as the one I read yesterday?
I heard Jasper Fforde tell a wonderful story about this. During a talk a reader questioned a particular reference in one of Jasper’s books. The reader pointed out that the author had got something wrong. Thinking on his feet, Jasper asked which version of the book the man was referring to. The one I got from the shop, came the reply.
“Ah,” said Jasper. “In that case you’ve got the old version. The new one is available on my web site and that error has been corrected.”
At the time there was no new version, but as soon as he could get to a computer Jasper posted one. Problem solved.
The two questions that spring from this are: is it legitimate for an author to update his book on an ongoing basis, and should he then be able to charge for it?
If your answer to the first part is yes, would you then like to have the publisher update the copy you have already paid for and downloaded (I’m thinking about Amazon’s little 1984 issue)? Maybe you should be given the option to accept or decline the update and offered a list of amendments. And if that is the case would you always read through them, or after a few years of getting used to updates popping up would you just press the ‘okay’ button each time?
