Bubble Bathing, or Historical Déjà vu All Over Again

I've been reading Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds on my Kindle, and just finished the British version of the market follies: the South Sea Bubble. Reading the book in the US as the sub-prime mortgage disaster unfolds rings a lot of bells. For one thing I note how, though the British government responded to the crisis, it did so through using the Bank of England. In America we have somehow developed the concept of the Federal Government as bank, which is, of course, completely unhealthy. Of more concern, though is the blame game. As always, the largest target gets the most arrows. The banks and other institutions who offered these bad loans are now under heavy fire. There are calls to 'save the poor home owners'. It makes me think of the plaintive cry that arises whenever there is a public panic in The Simpsons: 'Isn't someone going to think of the children?!'

Well these aren't children, they're adults who entered into a contract knowing full well that they couldn't afford it. No one seems to have pointed out or determined just how many of these folks who took out sub-prime loans were actually floating several home purchases as part of one of the real estate schemes (scams) that (until recently) were so widely advertised on infomercials as a sure road to riches. I'm sure many of these future millionaires got caught at a very inconvenient moment, trying to flip an expensive property just at that point the whole inflated market came to earth.

It seems that the help to be offered to the 'victims' of the sub-prime crisis is to be very limited, at least if the Administration's plan wins out. Perhaps as few as 5% of the effected loans will get active relief from the Feds. But a much larger proportion of the loans will be modified by government intervention, leaving the loan companies with an unprofitable instrument. It's good that the emotionally driven 'what about the children!?' relief called for by the Social Democrats is not winning out so far, but as always, I suspect that when all is said and done the results will be same as in every other bubble: Those who were both clever and immoral will flee the scene with their money. Those who were stupid will be bailed out, at least in part. Those that had no idea they were at risk, i.e. the entire tax-paying constituency of the US, will end up stuck with a huge bill and possibly a recession to boot.

Like the man said, Déjà vu all over again.

Kindle Hacks

There is an outstanding set of hacks, easter eggs and sundry useful items here. You can play Minesweeper, for instance (Alt-Shift-M). Ever want to skip through a book quickly? Alt-Page forward/back. Also, I found accidentally that if you click on the dotted line that shows your progress in a book that gives you a menu that allows you to move around quickly in the book and go from bookmark to bookmark.

I tried the Googlemaps hack (the author couldn't since he's overseas. If you are in Googlemaps and press Alt-1 all you get is defaulted to San Fran. Oh well, a glance at the future anyway, since the same cell phone network that provides GPS services to Sprint phones can just as easily serve it out to the Kindle.

Joy of the Season to All!

The Kindlemonk

How Bad Things Are Alike

I was reading The Halo Effect tonight, an excellent (so far anyway) book on business and how people perceive it. There was a quote from George Orwell's 1945 essay on nationalism, and that in turn made something click for me. Orwell was discussing some of the similarities among nationalists (after a definition that to my mind really suggest idealists more than nationalists). I remembered an old medical rule that applies. One way you can tell that a child has a genetic syndrome (Down's, for instance) is that the child bears more of a resemblance to other children with the syndrome than to siblings and other relatives. Just so with extreme thinking and the societies it produces. Stalin's Russia bore a strong resemblance to Hitler's Germany, a stronger resemblance than to other Eastern European countries of the time.

There are several such rules and axioms of medicine I use quite often. My favorite is from diagnostics: If you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. I've often used that one to stop myself from going down some convoluted and exotic path of investigation of a computer problem when in fact the solution was pretty much: Is it plugged in? Well, no. Well, plug it in!

In a Kindle moment, it was really neat to be able to read the Orwell quote, then pop it in search and find the essay in another spot on the Kindle, read the essay, and then come back to the Halo Effect.

Christmas Kindle

A very quiet Christmas day spent at home, most of it split between reading, some of it even reading the quaint 'paper' books that still line my walls. Spent some time reading a book by Jonathan Spence (Return to Dragon Mountain, Memories of a Late Ming Man). I've just started on it. It has all appearances of being a sad work, being as it is biography of someone (the scholar Zhang Dai), who survives the downfall of the Ming Dynasty, losing their place in society and all their property in the process. Perhaps it will be one of those 'testimonies to human resilience' so favored by the optimistic writers of our day. I'm pulling for a more melancholy slice of reality. Not all was lost, for instance Zhang Dai kept his manuscript of a history of the Ming Dynasty with him. But it wasn't actually printed till about 10 years ago, so his fate seems to be taking a long time to ripen.

Also spent a little time with my Chinese books, which are all paper for now except the small, bare-bones Yi Jing I have on the Kindle. I hope a hack comes out soon to read Chinese on the Kindle. It will open it up to another billion and a half people and allow me to struggle and fumble through various Chinese texts in e-ink as well as the regular kind.

I finished the Dickens short story I've been reading, Mugby Junction. A most unusual work, that. It seems like two pieces oddly thrown together, perhaps the thoughts of Dickens as he waited at a major rail junction of the time, Rugby, which inspired the physical background of the story. The thought of getting off at a place where nearly everyone merely changes trains is in itself a somewhat surreal subject. With the introduction of a main character who lies on her side throughout the piece (an invalid since infancy), the surreal element grows stronger, especially when the reader is trying to work out the physics of her 'horizontal' face being at the window to interact with the author and yet the person herself cannot rise from the sofa on which she lives. At first I thought it was a rather dark story, along the lines of a Kafka piece, but it turns into one of those typical bright turnarounds, a la Christmas Carol, as the narrator is changed by his interactions with the present and an unexpected encounter with his past.

Overall a good and a memorable story, but I'm still trying to sort out if I can say that I really liked it.

One of the books I've had on paper for decades is the history of self-deception and mass hysteria called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. I found a three volume version of it for the Kindle and downloaded it. Today I read the section on the Mississippi stock and banking folly of early 18th century France. The whole affair was a study in greed, folly and tyranny. Having read about this irrational interlude, the French Revolution a few decades later really comes as no surprise. It 'warmed the place up' for it, really.

Constant Churn in the Kindle Booklist

I've always read many books at once, sometimes dropping off for months at a time, often never finishing. The Kindle both helps and hinders such a process. I'm making a concerted effort to move books I've paid for to the top of the list often, but there are so many of the free books I've downloaded! Many of them, like Boethius, are books I've been 'getting around to' for decades. The real surprise find for me was Mugby Junction by Dickens. I'm still in the midst of it, but already amazed that of all the wide range of Dickens' work I was somehow drawn to download the one short story of his that feels like it fits firmly in the Kafka/Borges literary continuum. I may finish it tonight, or behave myself and read some of the more scholarly books I've paid for in the last couple of weeks like Geza Vermes Jesus in His Jewish Context.

One gap I feel very keenly is the absence of public domain translations of The Castle and Amerika by Kafka. Much as I like his works, I'm not going to learn another language just to read them (though I once had ambitions of learning Italian, and found a translation of Il Castello available). Chinese is enough to keep me occupied, especially with the daily and unrelenting addiction of reading books and newspapers in English on the Kindle.

I've subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, which I find much more engaging as a Kindle edition than it is in print, oddly enough, and download the Sunday New York Times (for 75 cents), mainly for the magazine and the book review. Another novelty from the Kindle, since I've been a very spotty newspaper reader for the last ten years or so, depending almost entirely on the Web for news.

Making a Kindle Book

Well, I finally was able to create a Chinese book I can read on my Kindle, but it's big (5 MB), and when I tried to use Amazon's DTP service to make it available on the Kindle website I hit a glitch. The process of 'converting' the .PRC file turned all the graphics into little postage stamps, at least in preview mode.

I may experiment with setting up the book as an HTML file and then loading that to the conversion system, but for now I've just put a comment on the Amazon DTP forum to see why it is a Mobipocket format PRC file needs any conversion at all. Another nice benefit of 'conversion'? It tosses your cover image.

I'll let everyone know when (if) I get it published, though the target demographic is about 10 people world wide. The book is a scanned version of the Yi Jing (I Ching), and in fact it's only the core portion of the text the Zhou Yi, along with some graphics from an old Qing commentary. So to enjoy this text you have to:

1. Read Chinese
2. Read traditional characters
3. Be interested in the Zhou Yi
4. Have a Kindle

Make that one person, not ten. And I have a copy. Sigh.

Roll Your Own Ebooks

I still make very primitive use of it (I haven't worked with tables of content, even), but the Mobipocket eBook creator is a splendid and free product.

You can import PDFs (something that lots of people squawk about in the Amazon reviews for the Kindle), Doc files, Text files, etc.

Once you import the text, set the title and author you want shown on the metadata tab. You can also import a cover image. Make sure you go to the bottom of the screen and 'Update' your metadata before leaving the page or the title won't stick.

Then just build your book and you will find a folder in My Documents/My Publications containing the various components of your book, including a .PRC file you can load onto your Kindle.

Simple and straightforward.

The application has TONS of features I don't use, allowing you to enter copyright info, price, TOC, etc.

My current task is to import an old Japanese printing I have of the Yi Jing (an ancient Chinese book). The type is so large that it should be readable in the Kindle, even though graphic files are both bulky and low resolution. One of the great shortcomings of the Kindle is its lack of language support. There is no Chinese display, not even Russian, in short, the Kindle, like America, is monolingual. Sigh.

Merry Christmas to All and to All a Good Saturday Morning!

Loading Free Books from Feedbooks et al.

An announcement on The Teleread Blog talks about a great download document at Feedbooks. Feedbooks have a massive library of public domains works. By downloading this document to your Kindle you can grab them directly over Whispernet.

A few words on downloads.

I've used the Amazon recommended method of emailing to your Kindle, and it's good as far as it goes, but you pay for the email (unless you use the free address, which a lot of people don't know about myemail@free.kindle.com.

That can be a bit spotty at times, free or paid, and I opened up a trouble ticket with Amazon for one set of books I was trying to send.

It's much better if you use a memory card. I've used USB transfer to the Kindle, and it's slow, especially for moving music to the Kindle. The optimum solution is to buy an SD card (found a good price on a 4GB card) and a USB card reader. The caveats are: make sure your Kindle is completely shut down before removing the card and don't get an SD card larger than 8 GB at this point. I've read other bloggers who have successfully loaded an 8 GB card, but no larger.

Using this method, transferring music, podcasts, etc. is snappy.

Next time from the Kindlemonk: Rolling your own books

Welcome to the Kindlemonk Blog

I've always been a heavy reader, first English, then Russian, lately Chinese. But with the advent of the Amazon Kindle I've gone back to reading a lot of English for the first time in twenty years. I am constantly wandering around with this little plastic tablet in hand, reading newspapers, reading books, reading blogs. I have become, in short, a Kindlemonk.

The implementation of the Kindle, it's exterior look and interface design, are hideous. I don't deny that. It looks like a Kenmore refrigerator, circa 1972, miniaturized. The ergonomics aren't bad, but there are interface moments that make you wonder if the designer really put any thought into it at all. Every time you go to the home page you can view your books in the order in which they were last read - latest on top. The scroll bar, naturally, is set on menu...completely at the bottom of the page.

90,000 books is hogwash, of course. There are perhaps 90,000 items, but many of them are garbage articles put up by flakey authors who see this as their moment to make it big. If you look for books by Jorge Luis Borges, there are none. This in itself shows the shallowness of the books available. They can add more books, and do seep a few new items in every week, but Amazon is being cautious in investing in the most labor intensive part of the Kindle, digitizing books and marketing them.

This and many other clunky moments do not take away from that fact that I have dreamed of having something like the Kindle all my life. I like to know that whereever I am I have a library with me. I love the ability to do light Web browsing when needed (though it depletes the battery mercilessly).

I've sent a batch of ideas in to the Kindle feedback team, on marketing, software, hardware, etc. I'll post some here as I go along. The first and foremost thing I see as a tremendous area of growth for Kindle is audio books and music. People tend to use audiobooks in cars more than elsewhere, so this is actually not a major item for Kindle. But a lot of people do like to listen to music while reading, and there is the potential of a whole new medium here. Imagine if you could read a Patrick O'Brian novel (none available on Kindle yet, of course), and when you are reading about Aubrey and Maturin playing a classical piece that very piece is playing in your ears. As you read a sea battle described, you hear the sounds of it, mixed with martial music, etc. Or perhaps you are reading a favorite novelist while listening to her favorite music, as licensed with the book. The possibilities are endless, and profitable.

If you haven't discovered it yet, this is an enormous library of free ebooks you can download to your computer and move on to a memory card for transfer to Kindle (you DO have a memory card in your Kindle, don't you?): http://manybooks.net/