BACKSTRIP

My demo of open standards is better than your demo of open standards

Make no mistake, Google and Apple are now having a proper, stand-up fight. But at least they’re fighting sensibly.

Easiest (free) ways to read ebooks on your iPad

In five steps:

1. Get yourself a free Dropbox account

2. Upload your ePub files to Dropbox

3. Download the latest version of Stanza for the iPad

4. Browse to your Dropbox folder in Safari, select the ePub file, then hit the Stanza icon

5. Go to Stanza and your ebook file should be there.

This is the easiest (free) way to get ebooks onto a suitable iPad ereader if you a) already own ebooks and b) prefer ePub files. If you’re into Kindle, then you’re probably better off just using the Kindle app; if iBooks are your thing (you sadist), then just use Apple’s own app.

Here are some other ways:

• Get yourself a Dropbox account and the Dropbox app. Anything in your Dropbox folder will appear in the app, and PDF, TXT and RTF files should be readable within Dropbox. You can also select a Dropbox file and hit the ‘Open in…’ button at the very top right of the screen to pump the ebook into Stanza or other compatible apps. Or…

• Get the Goodreads app, which is a better reader than Dropbox. You can use it to access your Dropbox files, as well as websites, FTP, Google Docs, IMAP servers, even WebDAV servers. Okay, so this isn’t free, but at US$0.99c, it’s near as dammit. Or…

• Advanced: Use Calibre on your desktop (Linux, Windows or Mac versions are available) to convert your ebooks into whatever format you need, then go to Preferences and start up the Content Server. Grab your iPad, load Stanza, then hit the Shared button at the top. There should be a link to the server running on your desktop, otherwise just add the IP address manually (usually 192.168.0.1:8080).

• Double advanced: Sync your Calibre library location to your Dropbox folder (via the desktop), so you can have all your bases covered.

Suggestions? Clarifications? Let me know.

The command-line is a (useful) lie

Here’s a big, meaty post by Emily Short on the role of parsers in interactive fiction.

But at the end of the day … the trick isn’t to make the parser understand whatever a novice might type, and that the average novice user would actually be happier with a smaller vocabulary that has been spelled out in full.

It’s a matter of making the game better at communicating to the player what kinds of things are valid actions in the first place — indicating the affordances of the system, in other words.

That will also help with the other problem that novices often report: a kind of paralysis of choice. If you can do anything at the command prompt, where do you start?

Yeah. That command prompt is a problem.

I agree, sort of. This is a carefully framed argument that discusses the role of the parser in terms of the novice, but I wonder if that’s beside the point.

Take, for example, the ‘problem’ of the paralysis of choice. I think IF works because of the paralysis of choice, but only in players who know their choices aren’t unlimited, i.e., they’re experienced enough to know that there’s actually a fairly small vocabulary and range of actions available. To experienced players, the parser becomes a canvas of hopeful experimentation, but for the novice, the parser represents hopeless trial and error.

To bring novices up to speed, some IF incorporates cues to help them understand which actions are available and, subsequently, how to translate their actions into the parser’s vocabulary and grammar. If you’re unsure how to use a parser, then graphics, maps, Choose Your Own Adventure-style ‘jumps’, underlined ‘actionable’ nouns and contextual menus are enormously helpful, and it’s easy to just take the next step and dispense with the parser all together, which is typically where these discussions end up (and if you’re not careful, they lose the IF altogether and end up as a graphical point-and-click, and we all know how that story ends…)

But to ditch, or even diminish, the parser creates a fundamentally different game — a game where the player plucks his or her actions from the scene in front of them, rather than issuing commands in their natural language (however illusory that might be). It’s not a worse game, it just has a narrower command space, as Short puts it.

Ultimately, I don’t think parsers are the problem here. I think the problem relates to player experience. But rather than remove the parser, or artificially embed aids, cues and other affordances into the interface, I suggest we concentrate on building IF worlds that are consistent, tighter and predictable. Even the best IF still consists of world models that are a mile wide, but an inch deep: they are generally inconsistent and lack operational depth, which is complicated by a broad and loose vocabulary. Let’s invert that process and make the text indicate the affordances — why should IF require anything else? — and then build the world accordingly.

Vale, Cimmerian

The Cimmerian, home of probably the best articles about Robert E Howard and Co, is closing down.

But of late, Deuce and I haven’t been able to be that involved — I’m ashamed to say I’ve been so busy I haven’t even been able to read many of the current posts at TC. And so every time Deuce and I see a mistake in a blog post we should have corrected before publication, or a critical take that it was our job as manager/editor to help expand or deepen, we’ve felt like we’re letting the TC name down. If I had it to do over, I would have closed the blog down back in 2008, but I don’t have that time-travel luxury. So now, in May of 2010, with less and less time for it, Deuce and I both decided that we should bite the bullet now, better late than never.

Read the full post, while it’s still there. Hopefully the site will be archived at Leo Grin’s personal site, but you can also try your luck at the Internet Archive. It would be a damn shame for this content to disappear completely.

The future of feed reading

It’s been a while since I used iGoogle. Initially, I liked the way it took my feeds into a single, multi-column display — separated into discrete blocks depending on their source, and then contextualised by tabs — and I was particularly impressed with its customisation options, which let me drag and drop elements, add applications and pull in my email. It wasn’t great, but it had a workmanlike vibe to it.

But after a while, my iGoogle page began to languish. It was certainly getting better in every way — faster, more applications — but I rarely had a good reason to visit it. The romance just kind of died, but not for any real reason I could articulate at the time. It’s like how I just decided to stop watching Lost a couple of years ago — superficially, it’s a show I should love, but it was conceptually wrong for me.

On reflection, though, it’s clear why I left iGoogle. First, I’m a voracious consumer of information and I need something far more powerful and reading-friendly (yet also browser-based) than iGoogle, and Google Reader is hands down the best tool for the job. Second, and more importantly, I only wanted to subscribe to feeds and give them a minimal structure, rather than think about how all those elements were presented. iGoogle forced me to think about the presentation by having me indicate precisely where an element should go — and consequently, where everything else should sit in relation to it — for every item.

Essentially, you could say it was a high maintenance relationship — it required more work than I cared to put in — but it’s worth thinking about what that actually means for ‘feed reading’ in general, and where things might be headed.

What feed reading is

From the reader’s point of view, the process of reading (or interacting with) feeds can be broken down into three steps:

1. Selecting a feed (“I want to read more of this”)

2. Structuring the content (“I will tag this feed as X/put it in folder Y/prioritise it as Z/share with person A”)

3. Presenting the content (“And here’s how I want to view this content”)

The problem is, I’m only interested in 1 and 2. I am interested in 3, but, as mentioned, not all the damn time. Furthermore, the structure should influence the presentation, and to the extent that the presentation can be done automatically, then that’s how I’d prefer it.

Not everyone is the same. Some like end-to-end control and will constantly curate the structure and presentation. Others couldn’t care less — they’ve probably never heard of a ‘feed’ and they’re happy to outsource that job to an editorial authority, such as a mainstream newspaper, community aggregation service or even just a printed magazine.

So, coming back to me. Google Reader is far and away the best at 1 and 2, but it doesn’t do 3. Although I’m not overly fussed about it, I’d like to have the option to present that content effectively and situationally, but that also leverages off Google Reader.

And this is where Feedly comes in.

Structure to presentation

I stumbled on Feedly by way of a Chrome browser extension and it’s fair to say I was blown away by it. Not by its design or layout, or by its magazineness (using terms like ‘cover’ for the front page doesn’t do anything for me) but by how it took all the work I’d already done in Google Reader and arranged it according to basic design principles.

If you’ve not used Google Reader, it might sound like Feedly just takes a bunch of feeds and rearranges them on another webpage. That’s true, but it uses the structure and behavioural data (e.g., sharing and starring) gleaned from Google Reader as the engine, which in turn drives how Feedly presents the information. If you don’t like the page layout, you can swap between different styles of magazinelike grids, newspaper columns, summaries, and so on. Plus, it’ll also reconfigure its presentation based on the device you’re using.

In other words, it’s not asking me to do more work, or overriding the work I enjoy doing (i.e. steps 1 and 2). Rather, it’s only interested in step 3, which means it complements my reading style and habits. It may not be the first to do so (it’s been around for a while), but this is clearly the start of something much bigger. And with the iPad and web-friendly tablets on the way, I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this stuff soon.

So who’s going to buy an iPad?

Research group YouGov has released some interesting stats [PDF] relating to iPad awareness and interest:

When shown a picture of the product and asked if they had heard about it 70% of British respondents said they had, compared to 64% in USA, 63% in Germany, 60% in Denmark and 53% in the Middle East.

Middle East respondents were most likely to buy the iPad, with 58% of respondents stating they would definitely or probably buy the iPad [NB: the survey also shows a high proportion of Middle Easterners grossly overestimated its features and would only be willing to pay a third of the RRP], compared to 17% in Germany,13% in the USA and only 7% in Denmark and the UK.

Make of that what you will. I don’t have a point of reference, so I’m not sure if this is high or low. I’m actually more interested in how many people have heard of it — 64% of Americans may sound reasonable, but that sounds a bit low for an online-only survey.

(via The Bookseller.)

What could the Macmillazon affair mean for authors?

Now that Amazon has started putting buy links back on Macmillan books, there’s no shortage of opinions on what it might mean for the future of publishing, retail, distribution, and so on.

But here’s a question that I don’t think is being asked: how will the the relationship between publishers and authors change, and more importantly, how can authors exploit the situation?

Here’s Andrew Zack on the subject:

But can we take this one step further? Could publishers just become “agents” of authors, where the author gets a bigger piece of net?

…

So, could Macmillan’s face-off with Amazon benefit us all? Perhaps. But it could also come back to bite Macmillan in a tender place. Because if it makes sense for Macmillan to change the way books are sold and priced, why shouldn’t authors try to change the way they are selling books to publishers?

(I’m not sure on the some of the maths in the article, though.)

Some vague stats on e-reader usage

NPD has released some interesting, though infuriatingly vague, tidbits on usage patterns for e-reader owners. Buried inside this press release (which seems to hang off the sloppily-worded “95 percent of e-readers owners are happy with their devices”) is something enormously interesting:

[It] seems that e-Reader owners aren’t married to their e-Readers to do their reading. About three-in-ten owners say they use at least one another device for reading e-books, such as a PC or a smartphone.

This suggests that format- and device-shifting will be important to at least a third of the potential market, which means things like DRM and device lock-ins would likely cause some dissatisfaction.

Of course, we could probably get more insight into this if the study had looked at attitudes toward DRM, but that doesn’t appear to be the case (I asked but haven’t received a reply, and the full report is behind a paywall), because If it had looked at these issues, the statement probably wouldn’t have ended with this strange quote:

“As the recent introduction of Apple’s iPad demonstrates, applications now on smartphones benefit from larger screens, and industry leaders are recognizing the importance of supporting multiple platforms by supporting multiple clients and open standards.”

I’m not sure what this means — it’s either naive about these issues, or is intentionally ignoring it. Kindle books, for example, can only be read on Kindles (or approved devices), iPad books will presumably have similar DRM and licences. Open standards? ePub is an open standard, but that doesn’t mean it’s DRM-free.

Now’s the time for some good, solid research into e-reading, and although I haven’t seen the full report, NPD’s statement of ‘highlights’ doesn’t bode well.

(If anyone with access to the report can tell me whether the study looks at DRM or EULAs, please let me know.)