Kindle 2 Usability Review

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Jakob Nielsen likes the new Kindle.

The new version of Kindle, Amazon.com’s dedicated e-book device, recently shipped with an improved display and various other upgrades. It now provides good usability for reading linear fiction (mainly novels), though it’s less usable for other reading tasks.

As an experiment, I bought two copies of the same book: a trade paperback and a Kindle download. Alternating for each chapter, I read half the book in print and half on the Kindle screen. My reading speed was exactly the same (less than 0.5% difference), measured in words per minute.

Of course, one person reading one book is not a proper measurement study. So I can’t say for sure that Kindle has finally reached the nirvana of equal readability for screens and paper. But it did feel that way.

When I was carrying Kindle through the house, I felt like a Star Trek character with a datapad. But when I actually sat down to read the novel, I became so engrossed in the story that I forgot I was reading from an electronic device. This fact alone is high praise for the device designers…

What the broadcasters tried next

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From BBC NEWS.

Project Canvas will bring together content from some of the UK’s biggest channels, including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five. Viewers will be able to watch on-demand content through their television via a special set top box, expected to cost between £100-£200.

It is being described as Freeview Mark 2. The BBC’s director general Mark Thompson called it “potentially the holy grail of future public service broadcasting provision in the UK”.

The service will run in addition to existing on-demand efforts such as BBC iPlayer and 4oD, and content on Canvas will require no extra subscription – just an existing broadband connection.

The Last Two Journalists in America

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Lovely WashPost column by John Kelly.

The last two journalists in America sat at a card table in the middle of their empty newsroom. They faced each other, about to flip a coin.

The coin was to decide which one would be the second-to-last journalist in America and which one would be the last journalist in America.

The last two journalists in America were dressed oddly; not poorly, as journalists usually dressed, but in what appeared to be costumes. The woman looked as if she’d stepped out of a black-and-white movie. She wore a tight-waisted woolen [sic] dress with angular shoulders. There was a seam up the back of her stockings. Two pencils stuck out of a bun of tightly-gathered hair at the back of her head. The man had on flared pants, a loud, collared shirt and a necktie as wide as a dinner napkin.

She was from "His Girl Friday." He was from ‘All the President’s Men.’

“Call it,” the man said, flipping the coin in the air.

They’d known this day was coming — had spent the past 10 years watching it get closer — but even so it was a bit of a shock to see it arrive. The newsroom that had thrummed for so long was vacant. The computers and phones were gone. The desks had been sold for scrap. Their contents — spiral-bound notebooks, computer printouts, government documents, letters from inmates, soy sauce packets, Freedom of Information Act requests, paper-clip chains, journalism awards, eraserless pencils — had been push-broomed into huge drifts that dotted the cavernous room like termite mounds on the savanna.

“Heads,” the woman said…

Tweetdeck

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I like and value Twitter, but find it impossible to keep track of everything that’s going on. In particular I’m always missing direct messages. So in the end I took the plunge and installed Tweetdeck. Looks good. Who knows, maybe one day my contacts will realise that I’m not intentionally rude.

Young listeners deaf to iPod’s limitations

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Fascinating piece in The Times about the impact that MP3 compression has had on music fans.

Research has shown, however, that today’s iPod generation prefers the tinnier and flatter sound of digital music, just as previous generations preferred the grainier sounds of vinyl. Computers have made music so easy to obtain that the young no longer appreciate high fidelity, it seems.

The theory has been developed by Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at Stanford University, California. For the past eight years his students have taken part in an experiment in which they listen to songs in a variety of different forms, including MP3s, a standard format for digital music. “I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s,” Professor Berger said.

He suggests that iPods may have changed our perception of music, and that as young people become increasingly familiar with the sound of digital tracks the more they grow to like it.

He compared the phenomenon to the continued preference of some people for music from vinyl records heard through a gramophone. “Some people prefer that needle noise — the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves,” he said. “I think there’s a sense of warmth and comfort in that.”

Music producers complain that the “compression” of some digital music means that the sound quality is poorer than with CDs and other types of recording. Professor Berger says that the digitising process leaves music with a “sizzle” or a metallic sound…

Worth reading in full.

Hey, you there in B14!

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From The Inquirer.

MOVIE INDUSTRY BOFFINS have come up with another weapon in the war against toe-rags who sneak video cameras into cinemas and make crappy copies of blockbuster movies to sell at car boot sales.

Video watermarking has been around for a while now but this technology can only reveal in which cinema a recording was made. The latest invention goes one step further and can tell investigators exactly which seat the cammer was sitting in to an accuracy of 44cm.

The drunk, the lamp-post and Amazon’s Kindle

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This morning’s Observer column.

Know the old joke about the drunk and the lost keys? A policeman finds a guy scrabbling under a lamp-post and asks him what he's doing. “Looking for my keys,” he replies. “Is this where you dropped them?” asks the cop. “No,” replies the drunk, “but at least I can see what I’m doing here.”

When it comes to technology futures, we’re all drunks, always looking in the wrong place…

LATER: Interesting stuff about the upcoming eReader from the Cambridge firm Plastic Logic.

STILL LATER: See Jakob Neilsen’s review of the new Kindle.

The Founders got the copyright term just about right

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Rufus Pollack, a Cambridge economist, has published an interesting paper in which he estimates the optimal length of copyright. Turns out it’s about fifteen years — pretty close to the fourteen favoured by the guys who wrote the US Constitution. The Abstract of the paper reads:

The optimal level for copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. This paper contributes several new results on this issue divided into two parts. In the first, a parsimonious theoretical model is used to prove several novel propositions about the optimal level of protection. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) optimal copyright falls as the costs of production go down (for example as a result of digitization) and that (b) the optimal level of copyright will, in general, fall over time. The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fifteen years. This is substantially shorter than any current copyright term and implies that existing copyright terms are too long.