matthewgruman.com

Stand Up Comedy from Amir on Vimeo.

Argine_HD from jujube on Vimeo.

This is absolutely stunning. I STRONGLY suggest you watch it at Vimeo in HD.

?? from Trey on Vimeo.

This is ridiculously funny.

This is a VERY funny shirt.

- Via Deadpan Designs.

The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Shorts Stories: A Collection of the Comic Strips of The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicolas Gurewitch is everything I’d hoped it would be and more. It’s designed to look like a children’s book!

emma on the piano from soxiam on Vimeo.

Smoothing out the pages… SO cute.

eBook Readers

I’ve spent the past couple of years trying my hardest to defend eBook Readers (the gadgets, not the people. I don’t actually know any eBook readers). “Oh they’ll work it out soon!” I’ve been saying. “Have you seen the new flexible screens? There’s NO WAY they’re not implementing that into the next-gen Readers!” I was POSITIVE they’d finally nail down that one thing that has made eBooks such an utter failure, and finally books would enter the 21st century.

Sony

The Sony Reader was the first one to excite me. Sony makes sexy products that usually work pretty well. They’re big enough to get rid of all the proprietary bullshit from the last round of eBook Readers. They HAD to think of a good design.

They did end up with a nice design, but it really looked like a PDA. They also let it read pretty much everything. But, it still didn’t work; probably due to price of both eBooks and the Reader.

Kindle

I heard about Amazon’s Kindle just a few days ago. If ANYONE understands how books work in the digital age, it HAS to be Amazon. No one else survived the dot com boom that well, and they really have zero competition online. I got excited again. I saw the “leaked pictures” and thought “there is NO WAY that’s the final product! Man, I can’t wait until it’s launched!”, and then this:

I’d say that I’m underwhelmed, but I’m actually very overwhelmingly disappointed. I watched their product page video, and there is nothing that convinces me that $400 is a worthwhile expense. The iPhone was so successful because there was nothing to compare it to. People trying to compare it to a phone sounded like idiots, as did those comparing it to an iPod. The Kindle though? I want to say “Good Luck”, but don’t believe in lost causes.

eBooks

There IS exciting news with all of this, though. Amazon has nearly 90, 000 eBooks, with Best Sellers priced at $9.99 or less. That was a HUGE issue with the first run of eBooks. There were a good 3-4 companies creating proprietary formats, and making the booksellers choose. So if you dropped $500 on Joe McShmo’s Reader, you had to buy Joe McShmo-formatted eBooks which might not be available for the book you want. Then there was the price issue: it was rare to see an eBook significantly cheaper than its print counter-point. A lot of people, me included, gave a very big “what’s the point?” and didn’t think twice.

Granted, Kindle is proprietary (why?!) so you can’t use the other formats, or even PDF without first converting it through software on a computer (even though a “selling point” of the Kindle is that “no computer is required”–you can buy books directly from the Reader). I think that’s stupid, but, with 90, 000 eBooks priced better than anywhere else, it might just work. Maybe eBooks just need a monopoly for competition to start barking.

Try It First

Another thing that Apple did with the iPhone was let people touch it. Apple and AT&T has them all over the place. People knew what they looked like, so they asked strangers to look at the them. They were (are) sexy as hell. But the Kindle? Where am I going to see it? Outside tech blogs, I haven’t seen any promotion for it. I’d love to give the Kindle a chance, but at $400? When I can buy those same bestsellers for not a whole lot more than $10? Very unlikely.

Post Script

I REALLY want a good eBook Reader. I want to buy books as easily as I buy mp3s. Things are changing RAPIDLY, and I’m not looking forward to what is going to happen to the book industry. 10 years ago, Coach House Books starting digitizing books and eventually created an Online Books Archive which still exists today. [Check out a small love poem and try telling me that literature doesn't belong in a digital form.]

Why did their project stop in 2002? It didn’t make enough money to sustain itself–probably due to a lack of distribution and interest in eBooks. That was due to a lack of eBook Readers that people wanted to buy and use. So, grant funding ran out and they were unable to support perpetual creation. It’s hugely disappointing and I hope they get the chance to try it again–they’re one of the best forward-thinking publishers in Canada.

The folks creating digital products for readers and lit people should try talking to readers and lit people before releasing new products.

Girls and CSS from Ryan Sims on Vimeo.

Matthew Gruman 6 months ago
“Knows CSS” is on my Dream Girl list

Your nerd?s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It?s the word your nerd says when he?s not listening and it?s always the same. My word is ?Cool?, and when you hear ?Cool?, I?m not listening.

Information that your nerd is exposed to when the irrelevance flag is waving is forgotten almost immediately. I mean it. Next time you hear ?Cool?, I want you to ask, ?What?d I just say?? That awkward grin on your nerd?s face is the first step in getting him to acknowledge that he?s the problem in this particular conversation.

Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerd?s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates. When your nerd is staring at a stranger, all he?s thinking is, ?I have no system for understanding this messy person in front of me?. This is where the shy comes from. This is why nerds hate presenting to crowds.

- Via Rands In Repose.