I just listened again to your Golden Age of the Solar Clipper books – Quarter Share, Half Share, Full Share, Double Share and Captain’s Share.

Although they are no longer new to me, they still grab me as great stories; the life of Ishmael Wang from the death of his mother, setting out as a sailor in space and up until his becoming a captain is quite the epic tale.
Though it takes place in space, the references to seafaring and the parallels to stories like Forester’s Hornblower books make Ishmael’s story fit into a genre with a proud history.

It is inspirational in the sense that Ishmael’s desire to bring out the best in everyone and to encourage everyone to seek their full potential makes for developments in the story – and which everyone can take to heart. Your frequent emphasis on the kind of ideas which aren’t complex but which people just never thought of should make any reader and listener look closer at their situation and surroundings before accepting the situation as it is. This comes out very well in the sections where he deals with trading, and when he advances, how he seeks to acommodate the crew. It is also a good idea to emphasize the way people’s complaints don’t always echo their problems.

So, to make a long story short(er), I am writing to thank you for these well-written books; and since I got to know them as audiobooks from Podiobooks.com – particularly inspired by the mentions on the Linux Reality Podcast and your interview with Chess Griffin – I should also say that you have an excellent storytelling voice.
Your last two books were chosen as Founders’ Choice on Podiobooks, and I noted you were a finalist last year at the Parsec Awards with Double Share – and once again nominated with Captain’s Share. I wish you all the best with that, and although the submissions have you up against authors like Phil Rossi with both Harvey and Eden, Alex White with the very interesting The Gearheart and a fresh make of Hutchins’ 7th Son: Descent, you are a strong candidate to take this one home.

The only story I didn’t yet get back to this time was your spin-off story South Coast. It has yet to get on my audio player – but it is going in there.

Yours,

Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér

Lately, I have been reading Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the autobiography of the physicist Richard P. Feynman – in the sense Feynman told the stories, and Ralph Leighton wrote them down. This book has been on our shelves for quite some time, as I gave it as a Christmas present to my wife a couple of years ago along with a biography on Albert Einstein (did I mention that our son recognizes Albert Einstein?). The dog ate the Einstein biography (true story), but spared Mr. Feynman.

There are a couple of themes that keep recurring. Curiosity is one – Feynman’s desire to explore the world is this incredible hunger that puts him in the most peculiar situations. I resist the temptation to list all of the examples, because part of what makes the book interesting is the way you can never really tell where it goes next. I will say this, though: He seems to apply a scientific method to the world around him. The very first chapter tells about young Richard falling in love with fixing radios. His enthusiasm is apparent from the first paragraph of the book:

When I was about eleven or twelve I set up a lab in my house. It consisted of an old wooden packing box that I put shelves in.

He goes on to telling about how he would set up a lamp bank in his laboratory, playing with bulbs in serial or parallel connection and making switch systems.

Also, from the start, Feynman is quite a trickster and almost gets into trouble. His electrical experiments set off a small fire in the house, which he manages to hide from the parents. He discovers that his radio will pick up a radio channel with a show all the children listen to – an hour before they usually listen to it! And he will join them afterwards to make clever comments about what next to expect in the plot… and the first thing he describes from his time at MIT is stealing a door and hiding it; later, he finds out how to open the safes at Los Alamos to demonstrate their inadequate security – an amusing parallel to how Steven Levy describes in his classic book Hackers the later practice at MIT of picking the locks because everyone should have access to information, and a computer shouldn’t stand around without being used – and of course, the similarity is that it is not just a practical consideration, but also a brain game. A challenge that, once encountered, can only be met and resolved accordingly.

He describes a difficult youth. Even when he gets older, he has his problems with women. At MIT, he puts great thought into the right way to just walk past the girls. And, of course, the physical awkwardness that seems associated with the natural sciences – often discarded as prejudice, and yet repeatedly confirmed – is summed up in a side comment on sports:

I was never any good in sports. I was always terrified if a tennis ball would come over the fence and land near me, because I never could get it across the fence-it usually went about a radian off of where it was supposed to go.

This actually makes for an interesting contrast and again, a good reason for reading this book: In most of what Feynman comments on in the book, he is confident bordering on (and sometimes beyond) cocky, but he is also extremely honest about his weaknesses and fears as a human being, which makes the book a very personal and charming read. As he describes how he conquers his challenges, he mixes some rare insights with a human story. He does get married, but his first wife dies from tuberculosis in 1945 while he is working at Los Alamos, and this chapter is very personal. He marries a second time in 1952.

This honesty is a recurring feature as well. He descibes being in Brazil to teach, and he encounters an interesting phenomenon: That the students on the face of it seem to know the curriculum completely, that the questions they are asked are answered in full – but when he starts asking them questions with scenarios, it turns out that they do not know the answers; and he discovers that they memorise everything without actually understanding it! And that is how they perceive learning. Of course, he tries to promote the inquisitive mind, genuine curiosity and debate about the topics, but it turns out that each student is so deeply trained in never admitting doubts, confusion or mistakes that the idea of a study group is discarded beforehand.
Feynman spends a lot of time on this, and he never fails to stress that it is his curiosity, his need to understand, that has brought him far and will bring him further – and being honest about what he doesn’t understand, and what is not yet understood in general, is a necessary part of that.

For the same reasons, he comes across as rather harsh when he is asked to be on the board reviewing schoolbooks. Not only does it very soon become clear that the other reviewers are barely skimming the books in question before giving their recommendation, it is also clear that the books are of an appalling quality and completely unfit for, you guessed it: Stimulating curiosity and creativity. He also rages against the politics of it: When one of the publishers offering the books at an earlier date, another does the same – and at a reduced rate! So, Feynman concludes, it seems that when you push the timeframe, the books become cheaper as well!

There is one interesting point where it is clear that Feynman is a product of his time. I have already mentioned Los Alamos, so perhaps you know – he participated in research for the army during the 2nd World War and cold war that followed – and actively encouraged his fellow scientists to do the same. As a result, he takes part in the research in nuclear weapons as a patriotic duty and is present at the nuclear detonation of the Manhattan project. While his personal opinion seems to go a bit back and forth on this, this biography contributes an interesting personal portrait of people like Oppenheimer who were involved in this research, and whom history has not only been kind to. There is also an interesting description of the clash of cultures between the army way and the academic approach.

Feynman’s curiosity is expressed in a different form – namely, his eagerness to examine other areas. In Princeton, he visits classes of other fields like biology and philosophy. In a series of discussions with a friend, an artist, he concludes that their lack of agreement is based on the fact that the artist does not know science, and he himself does not know art. So he sets out to learn drawing – and learns it with the help of his friend, and also painting – and suddenly he has a small business on the side selling paintings!
His interest in music also comes across – he learns to play drums quite well during his time in Brazil and gets to play with local bands; this also earns him some interesting friendships over time after he comes back to the States. In the time before he goes to Brazil, he learns Portugese, and spending some time in Japan, he learns some Japanese. Confronted with the riddle of Mayan hieroglyphs, he goes into deciphering an archeological find, a Mayan calendar.

I could say that Richard Feynman eventually ends up winning the Nobel Prize, but that would not be fair. While he certainly finds the discoveries that earn him the prize important and fascinating, the prize is of less interest to him and does cause him to get more attention than he wants and, one might say, the wrong kind of attention: The attention you get because you are a Nobel Prize laureate, not because you are an interesting or otherwise relevant person. As you will see, this rubbed against his view of the world.

This book was first published in 1985, a few years before his death in February 1988, and in the time after his death, what I find about him is mostly his literature, the materials he has written for teaching and, indeed, popularizing physics, and he is said to have been especially proud of being awarded the Oersted Medal for notable contributions to the teaching of physics.

The book is partly educational for the scientific content, the historical description of how certain discoveries came about, interesting portraits of great scientists – and partly a human story of an occasionally very shy and occasionally very extroverted, but always inquisitive person.

Bibliographic references are available from the Open Library page on this book.

This book is not something I would usually have picked up, and I did in fact buy it thinking it would be something else. Whereas I was expecting a thriller, it is actually more of a documentary on the book collection industry.

It is the story of a book thief, Charles Gilkey. The author tells the story of the hunt for Charles Gilkey and the man who has caught him, Ken Sanders.
Besides the obvious – the hunt for a criminal – what makes the book interesting is the fact that Mrs. Bartlett does extensive interviews over time with Gilkey, Sanders and others in the book collecting business. This yields some interesting insights.
For one thing, Gilkey is not actually a reader, and this seems to be the case with a lot of the book collectors. He is much more interested in owning the objects, much as one would want a sculpture or a painting. And of course, since the value of these items is huge, one would never actually touch them. Several of the book collectors interviewed in the book talk about having their collection and reading books… but of course, not reading the collection books, for they are for safekeeping.

Ken Sanders is elected the security chair of ABAA, Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. In this capacity, he receives and distributes warnings about scammers and thieves. Selling collectors’ items in this business would be as complicated as unloading a stolen race horse or the Mona Lisa, if not for the fact that the booksellers seem to be extremely private with their information, and a lot of Sanders’ efforts go into lobbying the business to share their experiences about the people ripping them off.
Interestingly, Sanders comments on the fact that it is a challenge to make the police take this kind of crime seriously, even if the value of the first edition of a classic can get extremely high.

Gilkey’s personality adds a lot of flavor to the story. A man with a well-behaved and cultured appearance, he manages to cheat the booksellers out of works of a considerable value. A little way into the story, he is caught, imprisoned, released – and goes back to stealing books again! Over time as the author talks to Gilkey, he seems increasingly insistent that life owes him. Whenever he is arrested, put in prison or just slowed down by events, he feels that life owes him another success. And so, he goes at it again.

It seems clear that Allison Hoover Bartlett start out trying to find out how this collectors’ mentality actually works; and while going into this, she not only comes across some fascinatingly bizarre/bizarrely fascinating personalities, but also gets into the business in such a way that she can’t help exploring it more deeply. The book is a spinoff of an award-winning magazine article, which she decided to expand upon.

Sometimes I feel a poor book critic for insisting on writing about books that I like. I have, in fact, finished a lot of books that I don’t like – with a few exceptions (yes, Jean Auel, I am looking at you here). I am the kind of reader who keeps going, because a lot of books start out slowly and gradually gain speed or the author feels that the right approach is to (very) gradually home in on the main theme, and if that takes the first 100 pages, well, so be it. What this also sometimes means is that you will keep going, hoping for more… and keep going… and hoping… and the book ends. So be it. But I can’t be bothered to write about those, in part because it depresses me, and in part because there is no reason to emphasize the negative when I can just as well praise those who deserve it.
And so, to make a long story short(er): I rather like this book. I am sure that the ‘I’ form will annoy a lot of readers deeply, as recently discussed on the Litopia podcast – an author interviewing people, gathering the puzzle pieces of a story and then telling them from a first-person perspective, talking about the characters, but also about her own reactions: Fascination, doubt, frustration and just that little bit of collectors’ mania, which all the people she interviews have.
I quite like her personal approach, and I recommend the book to those who have accumulated a lot of books as readers and are just a little bit curious about the darker side of collecting.

Bibliographic references are available from the Open Library page on this book.

Declared foundation of the Russian liberation movement:
Proponent angle

A large group of Soviet soldiers wanted to fight for the liberation of Russia or the nations of the Soviet Union from the existing system lead by Iosif Stalin.
An opportunity to achieve this goal was presented with the German invasion. In June 1942, leaflets encouraging Soviet soldiers to lay down their arms and welcome Adolf Hitler as the liberator were dropped at the front and in the areas being occupied. As a counter-move, the Soviet leadership attempted to paint a picture of the German as an evil enemy – the Germans, who were allies a short time ago. As Soviet citizens were accustomed to reading between the lines in the official statements, this campaign made little impression on the population. Part of the Soviet soldiers and civilians had had contact with Germans in the 1st World War and could not match their personal impression with the one offered in official publications.
Also, this alliance gone sour produced another alliance with the former (and later) arch enemies Great Britain and USA. This strengthened the impression that the priorities of the Soviet leadership were not in reality what they were officially.
And so, there was an interest in an alliance with the German state. This because it was impossible to imagine that it could be the intention of German leadership to conquer and continually occupy all of the Soviet Union, due to its massive size – not to mention the experience with the Russian geography done by Napoleon. Ergo, it would be in the interest of Nazi Germany to cooperate with a group interested in creating an alliance, in which the Soviet Union – or Russia, depending on which interest group was consulted – would exist as a democratic republic – or, as some suggested, a monarchy again – which would be a supportive military and trade ally of Germany.
Germany was seen as a nation with positive associations, because it was part of a European traditionally shared cultural community. It also had a certain effect that it was a practising Christian society, as opposed to the Soviet Union, in which the state had made a substantial and rather heavy-handed effort to eliminate religious practice.
The figurehead of the movement was Lieutenant General Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov, a decorated war hero, who had made his way up through the ranks of the Red Army, based on merit. In the autobiography of one of the leaders of the Southern Front, responsible for the defence of Kiev – and later General Secretary Nikika S. Khrushchev, Vlasov is mentioned as an able commander.
After the defeat of his 2nd Shock Army in the summer of 1942, Vlasov is captured by German forces. He offers to fight in an established Russian liberation army.
While working on this, he stresses some good things with the Soviet system as opposed to Imperial Russia, but he also stresses that which is unacceptable in the new system – that the system is not, what it is pretending to be. The German army responded positively to the idea, but postponed taking full advantage of it due to the scepticism of the political leadership, based on ideological issues. Vlasov was allowed to travel to POW camps and occupied areas, where he presented his cause – which was popular, and the soldiers already active in the Wehrmacht, albeit not as part of a common coordinated force, started wearing the ROA insignia, as they saw themselves as part of a shared cause – a liberation army.

The Soviet official position:
Critical angle

A minor group of Soviet citizens cooperated with the German occupation force. The collaborators were either former prisoners of war or soldiers and civilians, who changed sides during the war.
Having surrendered to the invaders, the prisoners of war were already counted as traitors by Soviet definition, as these were considered people, who were not willing to make an effort and sacrifice to defend their country – who had let themselves get surrounded on the battlefield and taken the easy way out by surrendering instead of fighting to the end. Volunteering for the liberation movement after capture demonstrates their weakness, either by making the choice based on threats of physical abuse, or allowing themselves to be bribed with pay, food and relative freedom.
The soldiers and civilians, who changed sides, were perceived as cowards and opportunists in the same fashion, as people willing to sacrifice the future of their homeland to be on the (apparently) winning side, where it was possible to gain something for oneself. It was seen as typical for the kind of people who are weak and deceitful by nature – or as a variation of this, people who had lost land, fortune and privileges with the people’s revolution, well-off families and large-scale farmers (kulaki), who had no interest in the preservation of the Soviet Union. Vlasov had allowed the defeat of the 2nd Shock Army and surrendered to the German army in order to live comfortably and benefit. He, too, was a chameleon, who made his alliances, where he found a winning side. Upon capture, he let the Wehrmacht use him as a propaganda marionet, partly to weaken the moral of the soldiers of the Red Army, partly to keep the prisoners of war passive and partly to recruit troops, that could be used for various purposes of use to the Wehrmacht. This treason was compounded by the establishment of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR), where he not only let his German masters lead him, but actively took control in the campaign against his homeland.
The assumptions about Vlasov are confirmed by the circumstances around his capture by Soviet soldiers; he was captured on the way to the American sector, where he was found to be in possession of a large amount of money. This is interpreted as meaning that he had gained what he could and was searching for a new winning master – yet another capitalist state, which the USSR had allied with temporarily, but which should be treated with caution. During the final trial in 1946, he admitted to having lost heart, that he was offended by his country, and admitted to his treason. So, when he and his inner circle were hanged, they got the punishment which was to be expected and deserved for traitors of such a caliber.

References

There is a lot of material on the topic – as you may suspect from the view expressed above, it is a challenge to find balanced material on this.
I have found the following two to be the most comprehensive:

• Catherine Andreyev: Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement Soviet Reality and Emigré Theories. Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, 1990. (Openlibrary entry)
• Joachim Hoffmann: Wlassow gegen Stalin. Die Tragödie der Russischen Befreiungsarmee 1944/45. Herbig, 2003. (OpenLibrary entry)

There are also interesting memoirs:

• Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt: Against Stalin and Hitler. Memoir of the Russian Liberation Movement 1941-5. Translation by David Footman. London: Macmillan, 1970. (OpenLibrary entry).
  Translated from: Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt: Gegen Stalin und Hitler. General Wlassow und die russische Freiheitsbewegung. 2. Aufl. 1970. (OpenLibrary entry)
  On Strik-Strikfeldt’s experiences as an interpreter for the German army, ending up as a contact officer between the German leadership and Vlasov and his group.
• Артемьев В.П.: Первая дивизия РОА. London: Издательство Союза Борьбы за Освобождение Народов России (СБОНР), 1974.
  About the activity of the 1st KONR division, which Artem’iev was in.
• Казанцев А. С.: Третья Сила. История одной попытки. Изд. Посев. Frankfurt-am-Main, 1974.
  Mr. Kazantsev was a journalist and writer who was with the press department of the Russian liberation movement.

Also, a couple of additional articles of interest:

• Катусев А. Ф., Оппоков В. Г.: Иуды (Власовцы на службе у фашизма). Военно-Исторический Журнал 6/1990, p. 68-81. Москва: Изд-во “Красная Звезда”, 1990.
  About the trial and motives of the KONR leadership.
• Кринько Е. Ф.: Коллаборационизм в СССР в годы Великой Отечественной Войны и его изучение в российской историографии. Вопросы Истории 11/2004, Moscow. P. 153-164

A somewhat less expected side effect (although that might also have been spotted on the horizon) was a fetish for… metadata. This has popped up occasionally – from time to time I have written about bibliography applications like OOo’s Bibliographer, JabRef, KBibTeX and the like – but it was my discovery of The Open Library that got me thinking.

Open Library is a website with an ambitious goal: To have a page representing every book in existence – with a picture, description, search tags and library categories for the most common library systems. The goal is to have a high quality source which libraries can access and use to have as exact metadata as possible. I have made a few contributions, among others the page on Catherine Andreyev: Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement. Soviet Reality and Emigré Theories, where I added some additional information and a table of contents.

A worthy goal. This is not a project anyone can disagree with. Though it is a hugely ambitious task, it is not a hugely complex one, and adding and editing new entries is actually easier than adding to Wikipedia (even if lacking knowledge never kept anyone from posting there).
Considering how to deal with data like that will naturally bring up a longer discussion, and voila, enter a new, fascinating element: The professionalism of librarians. Looking at the OpenLibrary discussion mailing lists (powered by GNU MailMan, of course), you come across debates like a long discussion on how to deal with doubles in the entries, is a different version of a publication a new book and, by extension, how should a book be uniquely identified in the system, how should OL interact with Google Book Search in a fashion that would make usable, non-amputated metadata available, if a text is freely available, should it be linked/inkluded – and so on. And on.

The entire material is published under a Public Domain license, so under all circumstances it is freely accessible. I would routinely prefer to use Creative Commons licenses, but public domain offers a different level of freedom… perhaps. Well, that is another discussion for you there. I would assume the licensing is chosen to to sync it with the rest of the Internet Archive.

In conclusion: This is an interesting project which I will be keeping an eye on and contributing to. A highly qualified professional discussion of how to deal with this kind of data makes it even more appealing.
The project has also made me aware of the technical implications of the registration of library data, and though it will hardly be interesting to everyone, I have found some interesting articles in the Code4Lib magazine – mostly articles on principle, since I am hardly a library hacker – and the website of Karen Coyle, the OL metadata guru, came to my attention. She has some interesting observations – also of interest for those who are into the copyright discussions going on at the moment.

The plot is quite original. Dexter, the main character, has some very serious flaws in his personality; he is what one in another setting would call a homicidal maniac. Dexter experiences practically no human emotions and finds it difficult to understand people around him, since he is, essentially, without empathy. There is a side of him which compels him to kill – his Dark Passenger, as he calls it – which comes to him with great temptation. Dexter enjoys killing and doing it well, with meticulous preparation and flawless execution.

Now, that makes him elegible for the role of Bad Guy in thousands of books already written and read, but – there is a twist to this one, because Dexter was adopted as a child by Harry Morgan, or as Dexter refers to him in his internal monologue, The Good Cop. And at an early stage in Dexter’s life, Harry pulls him aside and tells him that – yes, he knows that Dexter is different. And he knows what Dexter did to the neighbour’s dog, which disappeared. And Harry explains to him that sometimes, being a policeman doesn’t make the necessary difference, sometimes one simply can not stay within the lines and still get the job done. So maybe there is something to be said for someone like Dexter if he can learn to control his urges and direct his focus in the right direction since – “There are plenty of people, who deserve it, Dexter”.

This advice sets Dexter in the direction where we find him in this book – as a forensic investigator in Miami, a scientist specialised in blood spatter. He follows his everyday work and comes into contact with those that need the kind of attention that the police force can not provide. Dexter examines the situation carefully and deals with it – cleans it up, so to speak – in accordance with the code of Harry. His step sister Deborah, who is an officer in the Vice department but hates it and hopes to find a place for herself in Homicide, comes to Dexter from time to time to seek his advice, since he seems to understand the killers’ minds quite well. Dexter has learned to act normal and charming – and he has his place and does a good job without raising anyone’s attention.

What makes the book interesting – especially compared to the TV series – are the ongoing debates Dexter has with himself. A good example of this and the language used in the book is the reflection he has on having caught the attention of detective LaGuerta, an extremely ambitious woman in the Homicide department:

LaGuerta is very very good at kissing ass, a world-class ass kisser. She kissed ass all the way up to the lofty rank of homicide investigator. Unfortunately, it is a job where her skills at posterior smooching were never called for, and she was a terrible detective.
It happens; incompetence is rewarded more often than not. I have to work with her anyway. So I have used my considerable charm to make her like me. Easier than you might think. Anybody can be charming if they don’t mind faking it, saying all the stupid, obvious, nauseating things that a conscience keeps most people from saying. Happily, I don’t have a conscience. I say them.

Now, who wouldn’t like to have written that? It is a very good image of Dexter’s charming pragmatism and pragmatic charm. The case which Dexter works with LaGuerta on is an important theme of the story. As the story progresses, Dexter becomes increasingly fascinated with the way the murders are carried out – the killer’s neatness and cleanliness affect him deeply. I shall spare you you the spoilers.

However unlikely it seems, Dexter has a girlfriend, or what one should call it – Rita, a woman he goes out with, who has an emotionally very rough background and has remained reluctant to get more deeply involved, which, if not for the same reasons, echoes how Dexter likes it. They are not without conflict, however, and once again, Dexter tries to handle it the way a normal person would, even if he does not entirely understand what is going on:

I stopped once more, at a small dark park almost to Rita’s house, and washed off carefully. I had to be neat and presentable; getting yelled at by a furious woman should be treated as a semiformal occasion.
But imagine my surprise when I rang her doorbell a few minutes later. She did not fling wide the door and begin to hurl furniture and abuse at me. In fact, she opened the door very slowly and carefully, half hiding behind it, as if badly frightened of what might be waiting on the other side. And considering that it was me waiting, this showed rare common sense.

The last sentence goes a long way to show Dexter’s perception of himself as powerful and monstrous. The author does a good job with keeping up Dexter’s internal debate through the book, although it also seems he sometimes gets a little carried away with the concept and premise of the book. There are a few short passages, where Dexter’s preoccupation with killing people becomes almost whimsical, a flimsy gag, like in the following passage:

While the coffee brewed, I checked for the newspaper, more out of hope than expectation. It was rare for the paper to arrive before six-thirty, and on Sundays it often came after eight. It was another clear example of the disintegration of society that had so worried Harry. Really, now: If you can’t get me my newspaper on time, how can you expect me to refrain from killing people?

I trust you see my point.

In closing: Darkly Dreaming Dexter is a good thriller based on an interesting idea. Using the Dexter character means a lot of unexpected changes of focus and pace through the book, and this dynamic works quite well. Dexter’s distanced observations are very descriptive and sometimes very funny. As this is only the first book in a still-growing series, it will be interesting to see if Jeff Lindsay can keep up the unique tone in the books to come. I suspect it will either become overly forced or develop into a more distrinct and clearly established style – one can feel in this first book that the author is experimenting with the Dexterverse.

See the gallery for Kindle shots.

As for the content: They have certainly taken an interesting approach to integrating the gadget with the Amazon website. Included in the gadget is an unlimited access to the Amazon Kindle store online – which means that I can switch on the built-in wireless function and surf the Kindle store over Amazon Whispernet without having to attach anything else.
Surprisingly, they have not given into the temptation to lock the system down to Amazon-only text files. Maybe that is the lay of the land these days – that you can’t lock something like this to a single format, if you want to stay succesful (and aren’t Apple). It is certainly possible to use open formats and, even more surprising, use Whispernet to access eBooks files from other sources, most notably FreeKindleBooks, which offers a catalog of freely available books as an eBook, using which it is possible to download the book files on to the Kindle. These are from the Gutenberg project, an impressive project which collects electronic versions of books which are out of copyright. They scan the books and proofread the scans, crowdsourcing the effort using Distributed Proofreaders, where I have also contributed. The Gutenberg is an impressively massive text collection, and it is a beautiful that these materials are available; since these are materials out of copyright, there is a huge corpus of classics there.
Having said that, I have been shopping in the Kindle Store. I bought The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft – an anthology – for $0.99, which is quite affordable. I also bought an H. G. Wells Collection for $1.64, which I can just manage. The only book I got approaching full print price was The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross, a writer I find myself increasingly fascinated by; and that one only set me back around $7. So the pricing is okay.
Actually, there is experimental support for MP3s on the Kindle. What this means is not entirely clear – I have not used it, but I have seen people use headphones with it on the subway. Whether it adds the music files to the library or how it works remains to be seen.

Interestingly, the Kindle has also lead to an interesting debate about the ownership of one piece under different media, which was covered on the Litopia podcast in the episode All the King’s Men. From the almost-amusing-but-not-quite department, there has been heated discussion about offering readings, versus having the Kindle do it for you. This was mentioned by the EFF, as one would expect, but also featured in a piece in the New York Times by Roy Blount jr, as the president of the Authors’ Guild. This is actually a very open-ended discussion of the technology offering what a human used to do.
The Free Software Foundation has an ongoing project called Defective by Design, who did a feature on the Kindle, which they like to call the Swindle due to the DRM (Digital Rights Management) features built into the machine, and the fact that the books purchased on the Amazon Kindle shop can’t be transferred to another one, as you would be able to do if you gave a printed book away after reading it.
It is quite possible that FSF goes into this application a bit more, because the Kindle, in fact, is based on Linux. In the enclosed product documentation – enclosed as in included on the Kindle – there is licensing texts of the included components. Of course the Kindle is not by a long stretch an open device – it is not the thing you can just modify – but still, it is interesting to see the Linux kernel deployed in an impressive mainstream product.

So, what is the conclusion?
That this is actually a very, very sweet device – elegant application . The ePaper concept means that it is possible to look at the screen in much the same way as regular paper – it is not like a laptop where the angle decides whether it is possible to view it or not. Also, the power is used the first time the text is displayed on the screen; this means that even though the appliance isn’t using energy, the text remains displayed on the screen. Fascinating. It was a great gift.

Tee is the author of the odd tale of Billibub Baddings. I listened to his book The Case of the Singing Sword (in print at Amazon). The unlikely basis of the story is the dwarf Billibub Baddings, born, raised and fighting in a Tolkien-like universe, who gets sucked into a portal – and is transported to Chicago, 1929, where he becomes a private detective. What could be more obvious?
In this curious blend of genres, we hear of Billibub’s Dashiell Hammet-style private investigator’s office, complete with secretary, gangsters (Al Capone’s in there)  and snappy dialog in the style of Bringing Up Baby, as also imitated by the brilliant Black Jack Justice series… but coupled with Billibub’s decidedly medieval axe-wielding angle. As an indication, the title of the first chapter is Trouble Is a Princess in High Heels.

I leave you with this; if you are not afraid of a little old-school genre blending, I recommend that you listen to this quirky tale of hoodlums, fedoras, beards, booze, guns, high society, spicy women and axe-wielding action.

This massive structure, as one would suspect, houses an immense collection of books. As the well-cultured and literate people we are, we came in, sat down and had a late lunch in their café. Which was good. Having taken care of those more basic needs, we started exploring the place.
What I should have expected, but had not taken into consideration, was the fact that the collection of Russian literature in this library is immense. In the short time we have been living in Brooklyn, I have heard Russian spoken on the street many times, and even the electronic ticket machines in the subway offer a version in Russian – not to mention the library website itself. And so, the library is most well-equipped. If we choose to stay in this part of the city, I will certainly have something to look at. Also, looking through their catalogue, I found a lot of interesting historical material. Good times.

Now, what I found most interesting was their incredible list of activities. Not just because it is extensive – they get into a lot of different areas – but because it is clear that a large group of volunteers put a great effort into helping with homework, teaching languages and the like. And it does remind me of something I often thought of back home in Denmark: The way it is possible for a community to tap into the resources in it. At one point I offered my experience and abilities in IT to the library in Odense, but it was clear they did not want volunteers, because they felt that it was a job for the library, a part of their service. Here in Brooklyn, however, I came across a Japanese class while browsing the Russian books. A small group seated beside the language teaching materials, they were going through the Japanese what is this, what is that questions. They were just sitting there in the open room with a lot of people passing by, while the teacher was showing the students how to go about it and directing the questions. This was a fascinating way to channel the cultural diversity into something enlightening.

Most of our stay here so far has been dictated by the need to find somewhere to live. A lot of practical questions have been resolved over the last couple of days, and since we came here – almost two weeks ago, how incredible is that – we have seen a lot(!) of this town, getting around to look at apartments with real estate brokers, one more colorful than the other. That is why it was such a positive experience to see a cultural side. We are not here for the real estate, after all.