Event Horizon

The Hunger Games & The Fragility of Civilization

The "Hunger Games" movie has dominated the box office for the last few weekends and it will be interesting to see if the trend holds this weekend. It's a great movie and a great book. What do The Hunger Games mean to me? It makes me think of the fragility of civilization. We tend to think that the world we live in is a given, that things are simply meant to be this way.  We forget that civilization is man-made. We forget that over the course of history most people have not lived in freedom or prosperity. We who are lucky enough to live in societies where individual freedom and liberty are valued, where there is access to education, health care, and an economic system that promises advancement should realize that these societies exist only because someone cared enough to create them and defend them. Even today, there are countries where the entire purpose of the government and all the institutions of society exist not for the benefit of the people, but to keep one person in power. Syria and North Korea spring to mind, but there are other examples. Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy joins Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 in reminding us that civilization is both constructed and fragile and if it is to endure we must be willing to do our part to preserve and advance it and hand it off to the next generation.

Amazon Milestone Heralds Dawn of E-Book Era

Amazon announced this week that they have passed an important milestone in sales of their Kindle e-reader. As The New York Times reports:

Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books. In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition [...] The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.

I've been a Kindle owner for about six months now and I'm not at all surprised at this news. I've found the Kindle to be very easy to use. Thanks to the wireless delivery system, purchasing books is a breeze (after all, if there's one thing Amazon does well, it's sell books) and the e-ink is easy on the eyes and holds up well in almost all light conditions, even direct sunlight. The selection of available e-books in the Kindle store is vast and is supplemented by a large library of free public domain books, so there's always another book to read. I really like how easy it is to change font size and change the orientation to landscape for when I want to read sideways. Now, I have to admit the most glaring shortcoming of the Kindle is that it's a dedicated e-reader, it's not a web browsing, e-mail checking, twittering tablet of the sort made by Apple. It doesn't even do color. And even though there may come a time in the very near future when the Kindle I own will look as antiquated as a black-and-white TV, I'm quite happy with it being very good at the one thing it does because it does it well.

Have I no critical comments? Well, yes, I do. Amazon has released some Apps for the Kindle that allow you to read your books on your PC or your mobile device and these are great apps. They probably contributed to Amazon's e-book sales figures because the amazing thing is, you don't need to own a Kindle to use the Kindle App. All you really need is an Amazon account and a PC or a mobile device and you can download and setup your Kindle App and you can begin reading e-books. You can even read Kindle e-books on an iPad because, yes, there's an app for that. It's genius! However, there is one major drawback that, if you are not aware of, may leave you feeling a bit shortchanged.

I downloaded the Kindle App for the PC for a very specific reason. I tend to read novels before going to bed, usually escapist fare as a distraction from the cares of the day, and I've been neglecting the newspapers and magazines that I'd subscribed to on the Kindle. Let's face it, the news is so depressing these days, who wants to read news right before going to sleep? So, I thought I'd download the Kindle for PC App and read the news on my computer during the day. Good plan right? Well, once I downloaded the app and opened up my archived library I found my e-books there, but none of the magazines or newspapers that I expected to find. I fired off an e-mail to Amazon to ask for help in fixing this problem and to their credit they replied quickly. Sadly, their reply said that only e-books are available by App. So, it's not an error or a glitch, it's a feature. Great. This really undermines the utility of the app for me and I doubt I'll use it much. I can't imagine why they would hobble their own app by not syncing the full library of purchased items, it seems like a bad move, but I'm sure they have their reasons. Still, I can't imagine why publishers accept their e-subscriptions being shut out of a such a worthwhile platform. If I have an interest in reading the e-version of a newspaper or a magazine and I'm willing to pay for it, they should not discourage my interest, that's just bad business, especially in this time of diminished ad revenue for the major print publications.

So, given that, would I still recommend the Kindle e-reader? Yes, absolutely! I've found it easy to use and convenient to take with me when I travel. It's a remarkable device that has contributed greatly to my reading pleasure.

Photo Credit: Amazon.com

Memorial Day

In Memoriam

Read Any Good Books Lately?

So, have you read any good books lately? According to a new survey, most people read four books last year, and one in four didn't read any books at all. Here's the interesting part from the report (Guardian Unlimited - One in Four Read No Books Last Year):

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices. The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year - half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

Sadly, I'm in that group that read fewer than four books in a year. I used to read a lot more, I'd typically read three books at a time, one non-fiction (usually a biography), one fiction (usually sci-fi), and one motivational self-improvement type book, and alternating them, depending on what I was in the mood for and usually would finish one book a week. That was before grad school, which totally demolished my recreational reading routine, and I never recovered. Now, I may read a couple of pages of a novel before going to bed and that's if I'm in the mood for it and it's not too late, but when you only read five or six pages a night, well, it takes a while to finish a book. I do enjoy reading, I think a well written novel will stay with you longer than a movie will, and introduce you to characters you may remember for the rest of you life. I just don't have the time that I used to and I have to admit that the internet (and yes, blogging) and all the other entertainment distractions we have now do tend to take away from time spent reading. Still, this news has me feeling a bit guilty about my reading habits. I think I'll go read a book now.

Lost World

The great writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a book called The Lost World (long before Michael Crichton) in which a professor and his team discover a pristine jungle plateau where unknown species and dinosaurs lived. Well, that has actually happened, minus the dinosaurs. This CNN report ('Lost world' found in jungle) details the discovery in the jungles of New Guinea. This is great news for National Geographic (and documentary filmmakers), ecotourists, and biotech firms. Discovery awaits.

Clark's Vision

Space visionary Arthur C. Clark is back in the news (BBC News - Arthur C Clarke still looking forward) and still taking us over the speculative horizon. His books made a profound impact on my early imagination and I'm glad to see him still pushing the boundaries of our possible future.

Murder, She Wrote

Today is the anniversary of the death of famed mystery writer Agatha Christie, she died in 1976. She is one of my favorite mystery writers, I love curling up with a good mystery novel and trying to figure out "who dunnit." For more information on Agatha Christie, see the official website here.

Toasting Tolkien

The humans over at the Tolkien Society remind us that January 3rd was J.R.R. Tolkien's 113th birthday. According to its website, the group is planned a global toast in his honor: "On January 3rd Tolkien fans around the world were invited to raise a glass and toast the birthday of this much loved author at 21:00 (9 pm) your local time." So, here is a belated toast to 'The Professor Tolkien, creator of worlds, wizards, and those wonderful creatures called hobbits.

Google the Library

Google has signed a deal with leading libraries to scan their books and add them to the Google web index (TechWeb - Google Undertakes Huge Library-Search Project). This is exciting news for bibliophiles, info-junkies, and world civilization. It is one of those transformative events, the kind historians will note as a Really Important Development. They are starting with books that are already in the public domain, just as the Project Gutenberg e-text archive has done, but clearly the next step is to scan copyrighted works. This won't mean the end of libraries, but it will put a library the size of the planet in the hands of anyone with a computer. This will change the flow of everyday life for students, scholars, writers, journalists and maybe even desperate housewives.

Reading Declines

I've always been an avid reader, I have a wide variety of interests (history, politics, science fiction, biography) and actually enjoy reading, so I noticed a recent report that says reading has declined in the U.S. over the last few years. According to this Guardian article Report Shows Big Drop in Reading in U.S.:

The reading of books is on the decline in America, despite Harry Potter and the best efforts of Oprah Winfrey. A report released Thursday by the National Endowment for the Arts says the number of non-reading adults increased by more than 17 million between 1992 and 2002.

The report blames television, movies and the Internet for the decline in reading. I have to admit that I've also been reading less than I did in the past. It had been my habit to read a book or so a week. I would usually read a fiction and non-fiction book at the same time, just for variety. However, my reading for pleasure pretty much ended in grad school and I have not resumed my past habits after grad school. If any of you happen to notice the reading link on the sidebar, I'm ashamed to note that the fiction book has been the same for many months now. I'm reading the Otherland sci-fi trilogy, and I'm on the second book, and it's taking a long time to finish, mostly because I read only a few pages a day, if that. It's not that the book is not interesting, it's just that I don't have the time for it. In my case, the blame lies with the Internet, with reading news online, with blogging, and otherwise spending the time online that in the past I would have spent reading. I feel an odd sort of guilt about this, and a desire to renew my old reading habits. So, what about you, have your reading habits changed? Read any good books lately? Please use the comment link right below to chime in about this new national crisis, the decline in reading.