{"id":2876,"date":"2008-11-11T05:00:22","date_gmt":"2008-11-11T09:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=2876"},"modified":"2008-11-09T18:03:44","modified_gmt":"2008-11-09T22:03:44","slug":"cant-start-a-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/cant-start-a-fire","title":{"rendered":"Can’t start a fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

I meandered around a Borders store for the second time in a week! This time, my wife was getting her hair cut on Saturday afternoon, and I figured I could spend a little time among the books to feel guiltier about not participating in National Novel-Writing Month<\/a>. (I really meant<\/em> to, but my paralyzing neuroses reminded me that I needed to clean the garage last weekend. . .)<\/p>\n

While I looked at some of the recent releases, a woman walked up to me and asked, “May I show you the Sony eBook Reader?” She held the device between us.<\/p>\n

I got over my momentary puzzlement — I thought I’d turned my “mood of revulsion” force field on — and said to her, “Actually, I already have an Amazon Kindle.”<\/p>\n

“Oh,” she said. “That’s our competition.”<\/p>\n

“I know. I love the design of the Sony, but the Kindle’s wireless access to Amazon’s store and the book-samples sealed the deal for me,” I told her.<\/p>\n

We thanked each other and as she walked away I noticed that there was a Sony eBook Reader kiosk nearby. Since it appeared that Sony & Borders were collaborating, I thought that a great way for them to combat Amazon’s superiority in online retail would be to have e-kiosks in Borders stores, where people could plug in their Sony eBooks and buy\/download titles while in the store. Of course, the kiosks here were just holding a couple of eBook Readers.<\/p>\n

At home that evening, I checked out Sony’s eBook online store<\/a>, to see how it measured up to the Kindle store (which is integrated with Amazon). I scrolled down the Sony storefront, I noticed this banner for some available books:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Just to make the obvious and crude joke: Deepak Chopra’s Jesus<\/em> is caught between the Decadent Duke<\/em> and Swallowing Darkness<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Well, who am I not to click through Swallowing Darkness<\/a> (uh-huh-huh-huh . . .), I thought?<\/p>\n

That’s when I discovered that you can’t actually buy<\/em> a title for the Sony eBook through the eBook store website; you need to have the eBook Library Software<\/a> installed on your computer. And that software? It’s not available for the Mac, so Mac users can only load PDFs and public domain books on it.<\/p>\n

Just so that’s clear: Sony’s biggest advantage over the Kindle is elegance of design, but Mac users \u00e2\u20ac\u201d who tend to put a premium on elegance of design \u00e2\u20ac\u201d aren’t able to buy books for it.<\/p>\n

Bang-up job there, Sony.<\/p>\n

BONUS: And that Sony\/Borders partnership? It yields this great and useless website<\/a>, which only has two active links: one for that library software and one for a promo to get 100 free “classic” titles, with purchase of an eBook Reader . . . by Sept. 30.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I meandered around a Borders store for the second time in a week! This time, my wife was getting her hair cut on Saturday afternoon, and I figured I could spend a little time among the books to feel guiltier about not participating in National Novel-Writing Month. (I really meant to, but my paralyzing neuroses … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Can’t start a fire”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,4],"tags":[127,432],"class_list":["post-2876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-business","category-literature","tag-kindle","tag-sony-ebook-reader"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-Ko","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2293,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/catch-a-fire","url_meta":{"origin":2876,"position":0},"title":"Catch a fire","author":"Gil","date":"August 21, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't agree with all of this guy's points about the future of digital books vis a vis the success of the Kindle. I'm optimistic that the presence of the Kindle and other e-readers will help drag book publishing out of the horrifically dysfunctional returnable bookstore model that it's currently\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B001CBMX7Y","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2104,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/kindle-part-1","url_meta":{"origin":2876,"position":1},"title":"Kindle, part 1","author":"Gil","date":"June 18, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Ahoy, dear readers! I'm awfully busy at the BIO show in San Diego. But rather than leave you without your daily dose of my ramblings, I thought I'd post this e-mail I wrote a pal in response to his query of, \"How do you like your Kindle?\" I have more\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B000FI73MA","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2833,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/me-and-e","url_meta":{"origin":2876,"position":2},"title":"Me and e","author":"Gil","date":"November 2, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Virginia Heffernan has a nice piece in the NYT Magazine about Amazon's Kindle e-reader. The biggest complaints I hear about the Kindle from tech geeks is that it needs to have an color touchscreen with a high-powered browser, cellphone service and maybe a camera. Which is to say, they miss\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Design"","block_context":{"text":"Design","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/design"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1526,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/style-and-not","url_meta":{"origin":2876,"position":3},"title":"Style and not","author":"Gil","date":"May 29, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Over the weekend, I read a neat article about the differences between Apple stores and Sony Style stores. One of the funniest comments came after the writer noticed the huge disparity in foot traffic (a lot more people were in the Apple store) in the two stores in a Palo\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3413,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/payback","url_meta":{"origin":2876,"position":4},"title":"Payback!","author":"Gil","date":"February 10, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Evidently, if you click through this and order a Kindle 2 from Amazon, I'll get a 10% kickback! I really like my v.1 Kindle, and the improvements in v.2 aren't significant enough for me to upgrade, but if you're on the fence about whether to get one, you can read\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"us_banner_kindle_468x60_04_08_115","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/us_banner_kindle_468x60_04_08_115.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2023,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/kin-and-kindle","url_meta":{"origin":2876,"position":5},"title":"Kin and Kindle","author":"Gil","date":"April 29, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Once upon a time, Robin Williams said, \"Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you have too much money.\" This week I bought a Kindle. It costs $399 (but I had $150 in gift-credit, so I pretended it only cost $250), can download books wirelessly from Amazon, is perfectly\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B000FI73MA","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2876"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2883,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2876\/revisions\/2883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}