road to knowhere

@NiemanLab tweeted a pretty interesting PCWorld article today, announcing an update to Kindle software that will allow you to share book passages on Facebook and Twitter. I’m pretty excited. I know my little Kindle will never be the powerhouse the iPad is, but I’ll continue to stand behind it for its elegance and simplicity.

As a print designer, it’s kind of hard for me to type that. The typography on every book comes in the same font on the Kindle. I definitely have to be selective about which books I’ll read in Kindle form, but then again the book I’m reading now is 500-some pages and I don’t think the type is going to go sideways anywhere or that I’m going to turn a page and find 3 illustrations. Most novels, after all, are the last sanctuary where our culture doesn’t “shudder at large blocks of uninterrupted text.”

And not being part of the “Forty percent of the people in the U.S.” who Steve Jobs said “read one book or less” in 2007, I can’t wait to share my large blocks of uninterrupted text with all my online acquaintances. I recently started syncing the Kindle with my iPhone, and one of the first things I noticed was I can’t copy/paste passages like I can with most text on the iPhone. I’m sure myriad copyright considerations keep them from allowing me to, so I’m even more interested to see how Amazon will dodge that pitfall in their new update.

Oh, and one more thing, on iPad reading. I love this video, but son, stop shakin’ your dang book. Just read the thing.

A friend of mine who celebrated his birthday last month did something I haven’t seen anyone do in a while: he created an Amazon Wish List. Even my closest friends don’t usually exchange gifts but once every several years. We’re 1. too lazy, 2. too cheap and 3. too cluttered already. It was actually fun to shop for a friend and get something more tangible than words and less ephemeral than a shot (not to mention it was convenient to have it shipped to him).

With work commitments, an upcoming move and some family health issues lately, not even my folks have gotten around to buying me gifts this year. I’m just fine with that. My boyfriend and I are downsizing from our 2-bedroom to a one-bedroom a town away next month, so acquiring more things to move is not exactly at the top of our priority list.

Last weekend I set out to create my own wish list to give them some inspiration. I have never been good at naming what I want. To make matters more difficult, I received a Kindle this past Christmas and a Roku to play Netflix and Amazon the year before. I’m patiently awaiting the day when we can easily gift each other movies, TV shows and books on these because I really don’t need any more DVD cases or 2-pound hardcovers now that I can stream or download most of my entertainment.

So the items I’ve found I might actually enjoy are Wii video games. I have not been keeping up on what’s coming out, so I pored through customer reviews and watched videos before making selections. I can’t trust my parents to find good games of course, and my brother might mischievously egg them on for a gag. That’s right. I’m talking about you Candace Cayne’s Candy Factory and Mini Desktop Racing.

Now what I find is that the top review of nearly every single game I look at is 5 out of 5 stars. Commenting in the past several years has become a new form of trolling with everyone submitting having some personal or corporate vendetta. Many of these 5-star reviews are placed to counter everyone else’s negative comments and it reminds me of that Kanye-Swift moment — “I’ma let you finish, but…

• “I thought I’d write a review of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (which I ordered from Amazon) to balance out the few bad reviews that were being written.”

or, for Ghostbusters: The Game

• “I’ve never written a review on here but I was motivated to by all the negative mainstream reviews surrounding the Wii version of this game.”

It’s often about the Wii because the graphics are worse than PS3 or Xbox360, but pulling the ghost into the ectochamber with your Wii-mote or pummeling on a guy with your own real-world pummeling skills is so dang cool! I’m going to wait to get settled next month before I plan our family belated birthday celebration, but I might just steer the folks toward the physio ball and iPhone accessories this year.