Recently in tech·nol·o·gy Category

I love reading. I read a lot. I read every night before bed. I probably read 20-30 books a year.

I love books. I love the smell of a new book. I love being the first one to read the physical copy of a book. I like being the person who cracks the spine.

So I’ve mostly dismissed e-readers. The Kindle looks interesting and the linking with the Amazon book is a smart feature and I did muse about the value of buying one. But it wasn’t available in the UK and then the iPad was announced ….

So I started wondering could I read books really on an electronic device? Could I give up all those things I like about books. The quality of CDs is way higher than MP3s but I pretty much listen exclusivity to MP3s now. My CD play isn’t even connected to my amp anymore. Convenience beat out the smallish loss of quality and that was that for music requiring actual media. And it was the iPod and iTunes where that convenience came in. I remember the days of loading songs on my 512 MB iRiver for the gym. I still listened to CDs in those days.

So I know if something becomes easier to use you soon forget about the reasons for not shifting. You just shift your behaviour without realising it.

But books are different right?

Well I thought I would try an experiment. I would read a book on my iPhone and if that was ok, I would consider buying the iPad. I’ve seen several comments on the web about people reading books on the iPhone’s and that the experience wasn’t that bad.

Roughly around this time @Reynolds wrote a interesting piece on the Amazon vs MacMillan spat, where he linked to his two books, in digital format for free. So I made a deal with myself. I would download and Blood, Sweat and Tea (and the sequel) and if I liked them I would buy the books and give them away to friends. I’ve met Tom at a blog meet two years ago, and follow him on Twitter, and he’s a nice bloke, so if I liked the books, I felt I owed him at least the cover price. Although sending him a tenner would net him more cash, most authors would rather be read.

I did enjoy the books. Immensely. They are really fascinating, well written and human. I highly recommend them. I bought two copies of Blood, Sweat & Tea off Amazon and gave them to my friends Ross and Andrew. With a deal. When done they to pass them onto someone else. Hopefully by spreading the book around ,Tom will get more people recommending it, and more sales in the end.

So what was it like reading a book on my iPhone?

Surprisingly after about 5 pages I forgot about the fact I was reading it on my iPhone and was just reading. I used the excellent Stanza App which made it really easy, and even with no iBookStore or KindleStore it was all pretty simple to get set up. I actually found the "tap to page turn" mechanism much easier than reading a paper book. Also reading in the dark while other people are trying to sleep in the same room an unexpected benefit. I also tend to flip from side to side with big books as I read on my side, and one half of a book is normally heavier than the other. With an iPhone this wasn’t an issue.

So what was a problem?

Well the formatting was off. I’m not sure if this was the ePub format or something else but having glanced through the properly formatted printed edition this was definitely a loss. The other issue was the amount of text easily visible on an iPhone is a bit less than on a normal printed page. However this I expect to not be an issue on an iPad or Kindle.

The "digital" aspect vs paper was never noticed once. In face some unexpected easy ways to bookmark pages, look things up in a dictionary and cut and paste text all where great additions that easily outweighed it not being paper.

I unrelatedly played with a Sony eBook reader in Waterstones yesterday. The flash black/white when turning a page would drive me super batty (I think). Looks like the Kindle has this effect too, so I’m way more likely to get something like an iPad than an Kindle. Of course I would need to play with an iPad first to know if it’s worth getting but based on my iPhone experience there’s a higher chance of it now.

I’ll probably blog more on eBooks at some other time, but for them to take off I really think they need to learn the lessons the music and film industry seem to have failed to make. Including

• No DRM. Seriously, All it does is annoy paying customers.
• Formatting. Seriously how hard can it be to format something that has to start digitally to begin with.
• Easy easy easy easy. Make it easy to buy. Easy to load. Easy to read.
• Available everywhere. On your own store. On Amazon. On iTunes. Don’t make me need 4 apps depending on where I buy a title from.
• Make it cheaper. Don’t knock $3 off the cover price and bemoan the cannibalisation of hard covers. I also can’t resell or lend an ebook, and you also don’t have to chop a whole fucking tree down and truck it around.

Sadly so far, the book/publishing industry seems content to make the same mistakes all the other media industries have made.

The best way to beat piracy is with connivence. Well that and a decent price. Man up and be innovative for a change.

I think I use email quite efficiently. I'm sharing some of those thoughts. This is sevitzdotcom's guide to email and this is Part 4. There are 7 parts

Introduction

1. Why you should have 3 email addresses
2. Why you should have your own domain
3. Why you should use server side email
4. Why you should use Google for Applications (gmail for your domain)
5. How to set it up Google for Applications
6. Setting up mail on your iPhone and Mail.App Correctly
7. Smart folders and ways to manage your email

You know I wish this all would work better. It's one of those technologies that should work perfectly (we're almost there) but doesn't. It causes a lot of frustration. I believe email is more than just email these days. It's the whole caboodle, email, contacts and calendaring. (and event perhaps tasks/todos, but I think is almost a special part of calendaring and won't cover that here).

Oh but I can hear you comment now "I just need email, not the whole caboolde". Well yes I suppose you do. But who are you emailing? Your contacts right? And really you want you contacts in the same way you want your email. That is to say,

• On the server so you can access it anywhere (and not lose it)
• Synced up with all your email clients (web, desktop, phone)

Everything I said about email really applies equally to contacts. It amazes me how many people lose their phone and lose their address book. I don't blame the people (up to recently) it's been quite tough to sync your phone electronically. This is changing though.

And calendaring? Well we all arrange events, and we all send invites, and we do a lot of this by email now.A good email/calandering system is the most efficient way of doing this and shared calendaring helps organise things. Many of my coupled friends (and now me to) use a shared calendar to avoid social conflicts or organise shared events.

However due to weakness in consumer electronic calendaring systems, I don't think many people use it. Or as many as would find it useful and effective. But I don think their uptake and use case will increase, especially with younger generations.

The best system for email/calander/contacts as a whole system is Outlook connecting to Outlook Exchange. Partly because it's all been designed by one company and partly because it was built for people who needed all three things. However it's not a real consumer option as far as I am concerned, and has many business functions probably not needed by consumer users. It's also relatively pricey.

I think the future will have a similar system where email (IMAP), calendaring (caldav) and contacts (LMAP/who knows) all work and sync seamless between devices, the web and applications. But we're not there yet, annoyingly so.

I think I use email quite efficiently. I'm sharing some of those thoughts. This is sevitzdotcom's guide to email and this is Part 3. There are 7 parts

Introduction

1. Why you should have 3 email addresses
2. Why you should have your own domain
3. Why you should use server side email
4. Why you should use Google for Applications (gmail for your domain)
5. How to set it up Google for Applications
6. Setting up mail on your iPhone and Mail.App Correctly
7. Smart folders and ways to manage your email

A few weeks ago in the same week a friend of mines computer died. So did my mothers. My friend lost no emails. My mother lost them all.

The difference?

I had move my friend the week before to using server side email. My mother still had everything sitting on the local PC. When the PC died so did the emails unlike with my friend who just set up mail.app on his wife's computer and was good to go.

I think I use email quite efficiently. I'm sharing some of those thoughts. This is sevitzdotcom's guide to email and this is Part 2. There are 7 parts

Introduction

1. Why you should have 3 email addresses
2. Why you should have your own domain
3. Why you should use server side email
4. Why you should use Google for Applications (gmail for your domain)
5. How to set it up Google for Applications
6. Setting up mail on your iPhone and Mail.App Correctly
7. Smart folders and ways to manage your email

I think about abstraction a lot. I don't know if this is because I am an engineer, or a geek or odd, or everyone actually does.

In my first part to this guide I was eseentailly talking about adding a layer of abstraction between your work and personal email addresses.

You should have your own domain because it abstracts your email address from your email service. Most people seem to see or use the two as the same thing, but they are not and they should be treated as such.

One of the points I made in Part 1 was as follows:

When you change jobs (and you will) no one needs to update their address books

The same is true of your personal email address. Most people tend to have it tied to their ISP (from back in the days when that was the only way to get email) or a free service (hotmail, gmail, y! mail). The problem with this, is that like tying it to your work address, it leaves you unable to change services without losing your email address.

As good as your ISP is, one day you'll change, or they will get bought out, or go under. As great as gmail is now, one day you may wish to switch to hosted outlook, or mobile.me, or some other service that offers you something you aren't getting now. But you can't switch.

Having a layer of abstraction removes this dependancy.

It means your email address can be applied to which ever email service meets your needs, and you can change email services should your current one fail, disappear or change.

For a cost of under $10 a year, and not much effort you can have your own email account. And if at some point you decide you want another email address you can just buy another domain and alias the two.

Plus

name@domain.com is way cooler than name@gmail.com, and in the job market I think more professional too (although if your domain is isuckmoneyballs.com I would get a second one for professional use too)

I think I use email quite efficiently. I'm sharing some of those thoughts. This is sevitzdotcom's guide to email and this is Part 1. There are 7 parts

Introduction

1. Why you should have 3 email addresses
2. Why you should have your own domain
3. Why you should use server side email
4. Why you should use Google for Applications (gmail for your domain)
5. How to set it up Google for Applications
6. Setting up mail on your iPhone and Mail.App Correctly
7. Smart folders and ways to manage your email

I'm still amazed at how many people I know use their work email address as their sole email address. Or failing that, at least their primary one.

When I see this I always think "Are you crazy". Some people think crazy is putting pineapple on a pizza. For other people it's going out mountain biking in the middle of winter in the mud and rain. For me it's using your work email address for personal mail.

Unless your work blocks other emails or is particularly restrictive, (and I'll cover this later) there should be no reasons to do this. Stop it. Stop it now. It's a awful habit.

You should have two clear and distinct email address's. One for work, and one for personal. (I'll get into the third later on).

Do not give your work email address to your friends. Do not give your personal address to work people. Keep them very separate and distinct.