up

Should I charge it      and wind it 

                                                  down?

                 up

Or wind it       and charge it

                                            down?

It's noon. Damn, the sun is shining!

Wait...it's actually raining.  Okay...give me a few minutes and I'll update this.

The Rag

 I grew up in a hodgepodge American neighborhood—virtually the quintessential melting pot.  Well, given the times, it was a segregated, hence, a white-only melting pot (but that’s another story).  Irish, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, HillWilliams—you name it.  But, at that time, the melting pot had not yet melted.  There were still some old immigrant types about who brought there quaint old ways along with them and stuck to them.  We called the old, quaint ones “DPs”—uncomplimentary slang for *deported persons*.  In any case, I well remember my childhood summertimes when just about twice a week in the late afternoon or early evening I’d hear the slurred beckoning of an old Jew coming up the street as he pulled his collection cart: “Papa rwags”  “Papa rwags”.  Paper.  Rags.  He’d just call out as he’d pull his wooden cart down the street and wait for peeps in the neighborhood to emerge from their houses with the appropriate refuse which he’d collect.  As a child, I always thought the guy was a big loser.  But now I realize he was a futuring recyclist.  It seems as if Paper/Rag is the most pivotal dirty-able commodity indispensable to civilization.

 

On the Rag, Baby

 

A couple of years ago, when Bill Gates touted the comeuppance of the eOffice, or totally electronic workplace, ePaper was supposed to supplant wood-pulp paper to such an extent that filing cabinets and document racks would become atavistic.  The electronic document as ePaper compiled into eBooks would liberate the workplace of that *dirty-able commodity* and introduce a new pristine efficiency that would save innumerable trees from unnecessary slaughter.  Right.

 

Of course, this vision went askew as mutantly-articulated computerized half-eOffices found ways to generate more, not less, typical paperwork than ever before.   Think of a high-tech lawnmower that, as it mows, also furtively fertilizes the grass with a hyper-isotope of radioactive Miracle Grow setting the stage for more frequent and more aggressive mowings in the future. 

 

Where We’re At

 

Although a lot of local bookstores have taken a hit from the online sales of books, the books that are sold by the bookselling dot.coms are still largely the traditional paper/rag book and not books in an eBook format.  Oh, the eBook readers are available, the two most popular being the Microsoft Reader and the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader.  But don’t expect to download these, go out to Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble online and buy any book in a virtual instant.  Nope, the offerings as eBooks are still slim pickings.  Why?  That, of course, is the challenging befuddlement for many e-marketeers.  But, if you ask me, people still prefer and will continue to prefer to handle a dirty-able, tactile, luggable commodity.  Hence, with a relatively small demand for eBooks, the variety in their supply is quite constraining.

 

Yet despite their limited selection, eBooks are not just a fad.  They can offer certain readers advantages that traditional tomes will never incorporate.  Such as:

 

• external html linking using the web as an information resource
  
• built-in dictionaries to assist the terminologically-challenged
  
• adjustable font size to assist with acuity issues
  
• entire text search of the book for any word or phrase
  
• colorful bookmarking, highlighting, and notes that don’t deface the text
  
• text-to-speech capabilities so you can listen to your book if so desired or necessary.

 

There are also a few “marketed advantages” provided to make eBooks more attractive:

 

• activation on 4 devices (at least, Microsoft Reader) –you could actually buy the book once and share it with three other friends with the eReader anywhere in the world.
  
• sometimes, a price discount below the traditional book cost
  
• earlier release (sometimes up to several months) than the traditional first edition date.
  
• availability of new selections anytime and anyplace downloading is possible.

 

These advantages clearly are not trivial, and for some, in certain situations, may be critically convincing.  And yet… And yet… I want the feel of a good book in my hands !  is the continuing lament.

 

So What’s Next?

 

eFabrics!  I blogged about them just a while back.  Hot damn, we done going someday to build ourselves a dirty-able eRag that, with embedded microchips, will accommodate all the features above (and more) in serving as a malleable, reprogrammable display yet retain the tactility, thumbability, and creature-ness of a good old Gutenberg typecast. 

 

You know that book you love?  The one with the leather cover that you’ve been reading while commuting back and forth to work on the bus? Would you love it more or less, if you were able to program it instantly as The Hobbit, The Bible, or A Beautiful Mind?

 

eFabrook!

Although most bloggers routinely use their posts for personal journaling, there is always the possibility that an occasional post here of there might resound with live, earth-shattering news.

There are, indeed, some professional journalists for magazines and newspapers who keep a blog to publish "news" they either can't or don't care to run by an editor.  They tend to view their blogs as news/information outlets and ponder the revolutionary possibility that eventually an amalgam of disparate, de-centalized bloggers can congeal to form a news-web capable of rivaling the behemoth institutions like CNN and Times/Warner.

And blogdex's slant on blogging is precisely that:

"Weblogs" are a relatively new method of distributing personal news, essentially an individual's log of activities, news, and thoughts presented in a public manner on the web. As a publishing medium, weblogs are ultimately democratic, often as timely as traditional news sources, and have a potential distribution much greater than print media. One problem with these personal information sources is the inability to find an audience. Blogdex is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses.

Revolution?  New art form?  The ressurrection of community? A new cult of celebrity?  Weblogs have been credited/accused of all such and more.

Here's a book I'm waitng to read:

We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture
by Editors of Perseus Publishing (Introduction), Rebecca Blood (Introduction)

Instantaneous and raw, unedited and uncensored, Weblogs are self-publishing at its best and its worst--occasionally brilliant but often pretentious, sometimes shocking but always fascinating. We've Got Blog is the first book to explore this phenomenon, which has been quickly rising from obscure Webpages to national attention in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Weblogs are free, searchable journals of opinions and links updated daily by an individual or a group and they have become some of the hottest Websites. We've Got Blog has pulled together some of the best writing explaining their history, the mavericks who created them, and how they are changing the way we use the Internet.

My question, damn it, is that if this is such a hot topic, why don't Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com have this item already pre-released as e-Book instead of touting its release as June 2002?  e-Book--what's that?  Good question!  I've been playing with a few e-Book formats lately, examining the business model, and will have a few things to say about it all soon.  Like noon 

Orange juice at midnight is such a delight.
Muxh better than coffee before going to bed.

I wonder who's committing a crime tonight
Here in their Xanga blog.

I can sense it--something's not quite right.
Yet I don't know where to look.

Go ahead, blow white smoke.  You just might
Proclaim that the Pope has died.

When Christ was a child under star bright
Which of the Wise men was the secret pedophile?

Nope.  Something's not right.
I can sense a sinsister hunger virtually haunting Xangaland..