Q: Why doesn’t Amazon support the popular “e-pub” standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

I call Shenanigans on this line of argument. Kindle supports PDF and plain text files, for heaven’s sake! Plain text files don’t have Whispersync either, but it’s still nice to have support for other formats.

It’s not as if adding ePub support would be hard, either.

Want to see how hard it is to support ePub? Follow along.

1. Go download the ePub version of this book. It’s a good one, trust me.

   

2. rename the file from .epub to .zip

   

3. Open the zip
   

See, ePub is just a zip file full of XHTML.

So what’s the deal, can the Kindle not render HTML?

Nope. The new Kindle comes with a webkit browser, so I’m pretty sure it can handle HTML rendering.

There’s really no excuse for the Kindle not to support ePub.

I still have an old-ass first generation Kindle, that won’t even read PDFs, let alone ePubs. I read a lot of PDFs for work, and the old Kindle isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Although Amazon added PDF support for Kindle a few months ago, they neglected to issue the update for Kindle 1, to my great consternation.

I suppose I could stomp out in a huff and buy a nook, but I already have something like 60 books in the Kindle format.

So, despite my sense of indignation at the lack of ePub support and general grumpiness at being overlooked for the PDF upgrade. I went ahead pre-ordered one of the shiny new Kindles.

Vendor lock-in is a bitch.

With the Kindle and its sizeable e-book store, Amazon has established itself as the early market leader in the digital reader industry. Yet, it keeps the Kindle system “closed” – it only works with e-books bought from Amazon, and those e-books cannot be read on other e-readers. (emphasis mine)

This is utterly, totally, false, and it’s a lie I see all over the internet whenever people are trash-talking the Kindle.

You can get books from Amazon, you can get books from manybooks or feedbooks. You can read any unencrypted MOBI files. There are all sorts of free utilities available so you can convert from unsupported formats into supported formats.

You can even email a PDF book to amazon, and they’ll send it back to you in Kindle format for free.

I have had my Kindle for about a year and half. I’ve read maybe 40-50 books on it. Less than half of those have come from Amazon. The idea that Amazon is the only place you can get books for Kindle is ridiculous. If the people at FT had spend 5 minutes on google, they could have spared themselves the embarrassment of publishing idiotic rubbish as news.

It’s a story about a murder, a stolen treasure, and the mysteries of colonial India.

There’s even an exciting steam-boat chase on the Thames!

I give it 5 Jihadis out of 5

One thing I noticed, is that Watson specifically mentions Holmes smoking a briar pipe. Every time you see Sherlock Holmes in pictures, he’s smoking a calabash. I was, therefore, always under the impression that Holmes smoked a calabash, when he really smokes a briar!

This changes everything.

Update:
Klinutor has pointed out that there is a Sherlock Holmes movie coming out this year. Judging by the trailer, it appears Holmes will be smoking a briar after all.

Of course, I always want to be the smug arsehole who reads the book first, and then prattles on about how the book was better than the movie.

Well, there’s no naked Kate Winslet in the book, but it’s a very good book nonetheless. It’s about the Holocaust, but it doesn’t club you over the head with gore and misery. It kind of boils the whole Nazi business down to one character (Winslet’s) and lets you think about whether she is a bad person or not, and about how you might have behaved were you in her shoes.

Also interesting to me were the ideas about what the German equivalent of the “baby boom” generation thinks of its parents. Tom Brokaw writes about how the WWII-era Americans are the “Greatest Generation,” but I imagine it’s a bit more complicated in Germany.

Anyhow it’s a good book, it’s not too long, and the short chapters kind of pull you though it pretty quickly. It’s got a lot of sex in it, and even some bicycle touring!

I give it 4 Jihadis out of 5

I know Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both thought Hamilton was a dick. On the other hand, George Washington seems to have liked him. I don’t know if that means that Hamilton wasn’t a dick, or maybe that Washington was just a bad judge of character.

People have started to notice that I am always trying to break my ten dollar bills to get his ugly face out of my wallet. He was never even a president, anyway, so what is he doing on my money in the first place?

It’s probably not healthy for me to be carrying around hostility towards a founding father who’s been in the ground for 204 years.

I recently saw that a new biography of Hamilton is available for Kindle. I also keep hearing Ron Paul supporters talking about how Hamilton is somehow wrapped up in “central banking”, the Federal Reserve, the gold standard, the end of the world, and other such crazy matters.

So I thinks to myself, “maybe I’ll read that biography of Hamilton and give the man a fair shake.” Then I see that the book is like 1,200 pages long, and I don’t even like the guy, so why am I going to spend all month reading about his stupid life.

Nevertheless, my political affiliations have been in flux lately, and it is healthy to read books you disagree with to help stretch your brains out. Reading 1,200 pages was just a bit too much time for me to dedicate to such a scalawag at this junction.

Then, I hears about this “Founding Brothers” book. It’s shorter, and dedicates one chapter to each founding father, so I can get just a little bit of Hamilton, to see if I am still interested enough to carry on with the more voluminous tome at a later date.

It’s a very nice book (it won a Pulitzer Prize and everything). The very first chapter is about the duel where Thomas Jefferson’s vice president shoots Hamilton dead for talking shit about him in the newspapers. I liked that part.

The rest of the chapters are also good. There’s one about Washington’s farewell address, and one about the Jefferson-Adams correspondence. The chapters are small enough that you don’t drown in detail (like you do in John Adams), but they’re long enough that you feel like you understand a lot of what went on between the constitutional convention and 1826.

One of the ideas I got from the book is that maybe I think poorly of Hamilton because he died young, and Jefferson and Adams got to talk shit about him for years afterward.

In any event, I’m still not convinced that Hamilton is worth my time to read that huge book about him, and now, I’m not even sure if I like Washington anymore.

The more I learn about history, the more I realize that what I thought I knew was totally wrong.

I give Founding Bothers 4 jihadis out of 5.

I saw the preview for the movie version, and wanted to read the book before I saw the film. It’s alarmingly good. It’s the only graphic novel on Time magazine’s top 100 novels of all time list.

It takes the super-hero comic book idea, and turns it inside out. It’s kind of hard to believe that anyone would write a super-hero comic after this.

Most of the super-heroes don’t even have any super powers, and they are all more or less crazy. If you think about it, only a crazy person would dress up in a goofy outfit to fight crime if they didn’t have any super-powers.^*

It’s a little slow to get started, there’s a lot of characters to introduce, and they all have long, convoluted back-stories, but before too long, the shit starts to hit the fan, and the suspension builds.

Then there’s a “holy shit, I can’t believe they did that” ending.

I give Watchmen 5 jihadis out of 5, and I’m excited to see the movie.

_{* Any police officers reading this can decide for themselves whether I’m making fun of their uniforms or their mental health status}

Gospel of the Living Dead is a solid summary of the entire Romero Canon and the various remakes of some of the films.

The structure is very logical — Pretty much one chapter for each film. Each chapter begins with an extremely detailed summary of that movie, and ends with a discussion of the religious issues raised by that particular film. The religious commentary was essentially limited to comparing Romero’s vision for hell-on-earth with one of the various circles of Hell in the Divine Comedy.

Frankly, I was a bit disappointed. There is entirely too much retelling of the movie’s stories, and not enough religious discussion. If I’m buying a book like this, I think it’s safe to assume I’ve seen the films.

The author is a professor of religious studies, so I was expecting something with more depth than just Dante’s version of hell. Maybe I was in an overly analytical frame of mind from having just read The Undead and Philosophy a few weeks ago.

If you are new to zombie movies, and want to get up to speed on the Romero quadrillogy, this is probably a good place to start. If you’re looking for Romero’s take on the ontological argument, you’re out of luck.

There is a good discussion of the social criticisms in the Romero films. Racism, sexism, and materialism/consumerism are all discussed in some detail. If you think zombie movies are just mindless violence and escapism, you’re wrong, and this book will help sort you out.

Anyhow, I give Gospel of the Living Dead 3 Jihadis out of 5.

I am a big fan of Jim Kunstler’s work. I listen to the KunstlerCast every week, I loved his TED talk, and I read his weekly rant every Monday.

I like his work not necessarily because I agree with all, or even most of what he says, but because I love his bombastic “the whole world’s fucked up, and it’s all your fault” rhetorical style.

World Made By Hand is a piece of fiction set in the post-apocalyptic, post-peak-oil world of upstate New York.

The beginning of the book is almost all setting. The plot seems to function merely to move the characters around the town so the reader can observe how each of Jim’s predictions for the collapse of civilization have come true.

The setting is dire, even in comparison to Kunstler’s own predictions in his other work. People ride around on horses because there is no way to make bicycle tires without petroleum. All levels of government have ceased to function. A plague has decimated the population, and Nuclear explosions have destroyed Washington D.C and L.A.

After this tedious bit of exposition, the story picks up pretty quickly. There is a murder, a kidnapping, a jailbreak, and all sorts of high adventure and brigandry on the Hudson River.

Even in the midst of this nightmarish scenario, you get the impression that Kunstler thinks this is in some ways a better world than the one we have now. People talk to their neighbors. The townsfolk do things together, and get out of their living rooms, since there’s no TV to watch.

I really do not think the near future looks very much like Amish Wonderland Kunstler describes, at least not along the same timeline (around 2025, by my reckoning). Nevertheless, it’s a fun story in an interesting setting, and I look forward to the sequel(s).

I give World Made By Hand 4 Jihadis out of 5

You can read a sample chapter at worldmadebyhand.com.

There’s even a video trailer.

In Defense of Food is sort of a sequel to the Omnivore’s Dilemma.

It’s a condemnation of the whole idea of “nutritionism.” The idea that people need scientists with beakers and test tubes to tell them what to eat and how to be healthy.

The general idea is that we’ve outsourced our food production to the industrial agriculture system and food preparation to restaurant cooks. Nobody knows how to cook anymore, and nobody even knows what to eat without consulting a “priesthood” of nutritionists who will tell you to eat less carbs or more Omega-3, depending on the fashionable nutrient du joure. The result of all this bullshit is that now everyone is fat, diabetic, or has high blood pressure.

He goes on to recommend that people not buy stuff in the grocery store because most of it isn’t even food, but “edible food-like substances.” He encourages people to cook at home, subscribe to a CSA, and shop at farmer’s markets.

He frames these activities like they are an act of open revolt against the system. I am never so happy as I am when I feel like I’m sticking it to the man, so I am joining Spiral Path (our local CSA) this year, and Brandi and I are going to try to grow at least one edible plant in a flower pot on the back porch (we don’t have a yard to plant a garden in).

Viva la Revolución!

Here’s an (hour long!) YouTube video where the author explains this stuff better than I do.

Anyhow, I give In Defense of Food 4 jihadis out of 5

You can download an excerpt (90k PDF) from Michael Pollan’s website.

The Quotable Atheist is a collection of quotations from several atheists from ancient history to modern times.

It’s quite a fun book to read, and because each quote is very short, you can read it in tiny little intervals, which makes it an excellent toilet book.

Each entry consists of maybe a paragraph to introduce the author of the quote (so you have a little context), and then the quote itself. The editor often includes his own snarky remarks, which I found distracting.

Here are two of the quotes that I hadn’t heard before that I thought were funny.

“When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a
new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his
wisdom, didn’t work that way. So I just stole one and
asked him to forgive me.”
– Emo Phillips

“Several thousand years ago, a small tribe of ignorant
near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild
tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these
stories were embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn
into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled.
Finally, this material was badly translated into several
languages successfully. The resultant text, creationists
feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical
subject.” ( creation vs. evolution).

–Tom Weller

I give The Quotable Atheist 3 jihadis out of 5

I would have given it 4, but the editor’s goofy commentary in the middle of the quotes was really, really annoying.