I read recently that less than 3% of people at MLB games keep score (gnaws on flimsy interlocking NY Yankee pencil)
So before covering some high school softball and baseball this past week, I downloaded a free “scorepad” app and fooled around with it at home to see if it was worthwhile.
Long story short, as good as the idea sounded, ahem, on paper, in practice, it was a pure debacle.
All it did was remind me how scoring a baseball game, even in this increasing digital world, is a simple, timeless joy.
Maybe this is going a wee bit overboard, but there’s actually a level of zen found tracing the little diamonds and filling them it. It’s fun, too, getting into an official scoring debate with a colleague or a fan over whether a batted ball was a hit, error or fielder’s choice.
Yes, it’s purely baseball nerd stuff, but those little details and debates are a vital part of why the sport is ingrained in our American culture, even if it’s less and less every passing year. It’s partially why it always warms my heart when, at a high school game, I can run over to the home team dugout between innings and ask the kid keeping score if he or she ruled a play a hit or an error and I get something back other than a blank stare and a shrug.
Our apps and iPads might improve plenty of aspects of our lives, but every now and then, it’s OK to keep things like they were in the 1900s or even the 1800s.
Repoz
Posted: April 29, 2012 at 08:18 AM |
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My favourite history professor was also an accomplished organist and choir leader. Every now and then he'd break into thematically relevant song. Such as when listing the points in the Act of Uniformity.
Of course, history can benefit from alternative methods too. Playing 30 hours of Crusader Kings II in the past week has certainly helped me brush up on my medieval inheritance laws.
Yeah, yeah. I was more interested in defending the whole concept of ebooks than Amazon's specific implementation of it. There are a million free public domain books on gutenberg.org.
2) We can pass aggressive, heavy-handed legislation in order to facilitate effective enforcement.
3) We can adapt to a world where nearly unfettered digital reproduction and distribution is a reality.
Those are not the only alternatives, I bet we'll do what we do best, muddle along. DRM can't really be made 100% secure, but it often doesn't have to be. A speed bump will do.
There are also a new alternative from the video gaming world, that the game periodically needs to phone home to get vital data that is needed for it to function. Such things are hard to crack quickly (you need to have all the pieces that can be downloaded, so there will be a delay even if someone bothers). Games that feature online play can of course have even stronger enforcement.
illegal filesharing has been going on for quite some time and there have been very few end users getting serious judgments (and even those are not certain to hold up, and even if they do, bankruptcy may allow the defendants to evade judgment).
While filesharing lawsuits no doubt is viewed as a profit center for downmarket law firms, the big content makers are just interested in making piracy look like a dangerous activity, not lawsuits as something profitable in itself (which would be hard given how much they have put into it). Driving people into bankruptcy or tying them up in court suits them fine.
I agree. I have a Kindle and I love it. But I've only bought one book on it. I've been reading all sorts of public domain books on it (Haggard, Doyle, Austin, etc.). My current serious debate is whether to start reading A Song of Ice and Fire by purchasing the paperbacks or on the Kindle. And it's not the cost, either. On the one hand, I actually want to own the copy. On the other hand, I don't really want to carry around the book while I'm reading it.
There's also a big difference in passing down physical objects that connect you to the next generations, and leaving what amounts to nothing but a virtual representation of those objects. And in terms of taking up space, it's no more difficult to dispose of a book collection than it is to get rid of furniture or other household objects that you don't want or need. When my late aunt in New York died in the late 80's, I was thrilled to get her book collection and be able to see what she'd been reading since she'd moved to her apartment in the early 1940's. I wound up keeping some of the best ones and gave the rest to charity sales, but seeing the physical books was like seeing her photographs or other mementos. OTOH if all she'd left had been a Kindle with those same 500 titles on it, it would've been far less interesting and far less connective a moment. This whole idea that books can be reduced to nothing but "information" has always sounded a bit too alien to me, even if I fully understand the need for space and simplicity that often accompanies it.
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If you are bothered by the DRM as a practical matter there are easy-to-use methods readily available to crack Kindle books, even plugins for Calibre (a pretty nifty ebook management program). I've never done it, there are reader programs for all my devices, and as I have all books stored locally I can crack them at my leisure if I ever found a need.
Well, sure, but if Andy buys a Kindle, chances are that he downloads his books wirelessly and never plugs his Kindle into a computer at all. He's incapable of cracking the DRM and getting his books onto another platform*. So when Amazon goes under, he uses his Kindle for a while longer, then when the battery is shot and won't charge anymore, he throws the Kindle on the shelf and cannot read his books.
Again, not likely to happen any time soon, but it's possible. As I said, it is a caveat to the "you can always have your books" that Amazon and others are pushing.
*No offense Andy, I'm making assumptions here.
Greg, the only wrong assumption you've made here is your assumption that I'd know what a "DRM" is. (smile)
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My current serious debate is whether to start reading A Song of Ice and Fire by purchasing the paperbacks or on the Kindle. And it's not the cost, either. On the one hand, I actually want to own the copy. On the other hand, I don't really want to carry around the book while I'm reading it.
That makes sense if you read books in a variety of places. I read them in two places only, at home and when traveling, either on a plane or in a motel. At home, the books are all there. When I'm traveling, I never would want to take more than 2 or 3 books with me to begin with, since most of the books I enjoy take many hours to get through.
The lack of an ability to lend books to friends is a concern, but I feel like that's an issue that can be renegotiated in the future.
One would think that it would be a very minor cost for publishers to have that enabled outside the US, I assume there are loads of legal crap in the way.
Still, as a highly self-restrained book collector and an addicted reader, I probably give away at least 3/4 of the physical books I buy anyway, often immediately upon opening them and deciding I don't want to read them. (This works best with 66¢ thrift-store books :) So the idea of deliberately using a Kindle to assemble ephemera does have its appeal. I collected all of Sue Grafton's alphabet series at thrift stores and the like. If I'd done so on a Kindle, they would be easier to store, easier to work with if I wanted to write something about them, and when Amazon vanishes in 30 years, if I should live that long, nobody will care if the books vanish too.
One obstacle is still the 66¢ price: I don't think I can get I is for Innocent that cheap in e-format. (Checks: it's $7.99 for Kindle.)
I've bought so many pristine hardback books on Amazon for less than $7.99 that I've long ago lost count. And if I were willing to settle for ex-library copies or paperbacks I could've had the vast majority of them for $2.99 or even $0.01, which is a common Amazon price even for hardbacks that are in new condition. The only times that the Kindle versions are almost always cheaper are when the books are relatively recent or when they're from a hyper-specialized publisher like McFarland that controls the size of their print runs with hyperbolic zeal in order to maintain the list price.
This is probably an irrational element for me. I do love the selection amazon provides, but aside from getting very specific books I kind of like books to find me rather than the other way around. I guess at heart I'm highly indecisive, but I enjoy walking into a cheap book store and having books I'd never heard of jump out at me. The bookstore sale at my old university was an annual trip to heaven for me. I'd get a stack of 20 books for $20 or so and sort through them later. Also one time I bumped into one of my more rascally profs there and he claimed to have made this great find - a new book that had just come out that year EXACTLY in my area of study! I got it for $1.99 from a full price of $50 or so. A few weeks later I came to the realization that he had taken it off the full-price shelf, marked it with a red pen as a sale book, and passed it off to me. He's one cool dude.
I never lost money in any year my book shop was in operation (though Thank God for posters), but I could see the writing on the wall when customers who formerly would come in looking for one title and buy many others, would simply find that one title on Amazon and leave it at that. At the height of my sales curve in the 90's, the overwhelming majority of my sales were of books that people had NOT come into my shop specifically looking for. But after about 2000, the Amazon habit had cut into the number of people like that to such a great extent that only poster sales kept me solidly in the black.
Of course now that I'm on the other side of the ledger, Amazon is my best friend, even if in the long run I don't trust its intentions.
That's the worst thing about Amazon. I don't want just the book I want! I want to browse. And "People who liked this book also bought this other book" does not adequately replicate the experience.
I mean, although I've been defending ebooks, I'd like to make it clear that I own thousands of actual books and go to Powell's a couple of times a year. Physical books and physical bookstores are the best.
Well, plus the inevitable $3.99 or $5.99 shipping/handling, which I suspect often overcompensates for "handling." Still a great deal in most cases, though, like paying a $5 fee to get a 99¢ baseball ticket on StubHub.
People who liked this book also bought this other book" does not adequately replicate the experience
No, though it can offer a different kind of experience if you're trying to see what kinds of books have been done on a certain topic. But I agree, the jumble of a bookstore or library is amazingly productive of connections. I went to the library this winter to get a book about bananas that wasn't there, and walked out with one about tea and another about the history of menswear. Of course, my short attention span helps me at such times :)
I hate the Amazon recommendation system. It seems to work by taking the single most unusual book you've rated highly and recommending thirty books like it. So if you've enjoyed one book on quantum physics, that's all the recommendations you'll be getting for the next few months.
And that is the greatest thing about a library with open stacks. I don't so much care about owning books (although I do own some of course), I want to read books. While I appreciate the recommendations of others, I like to feel that I am capable of discovering reading material on my own. In any event I am firmly on the dead tree side of this discussion; I spend 9-10 hours a day wrestling with computers at work and I'm damned if I'm going to deal with them in order to read a book.
That is how I found my Master's thesis topic that ultimately led to my dissertation. I was browsing, thinking I was going to write on the Lansing-Ishii agreement, an obscure U.S.-Japan negotiation prior to U.S. entering WWI, when I found in the stacks, right before Lansing's memoirs, the memoirs of John Mercer Langston, an African American who had served as U.S. minister to Haiti in the Gilded Age. I was blown away that there had been black diplomats in the 19th century, and before I knew it, it became a central part of my research. There is nothing better to me then just browsing the shelves to find something interesting.
And that is the greatest thing about a library with open stacks.
A good open stack university library is one of the world's great treasures. When I was at Duke, I probably learned more about 20th century history by just letting myself loose among the bound periodicals than I did in all of my history classes combined. The average person has no idea what can be found in those stacks** if you enter them with no pre-conceived notions about what to look for. Those Amazon recommendations are sometimes helpful, but the truth is that you can get even better suggestions by paying close attention to the footnotes' sources and the bibliography at the back of the book you're already reading. The strength of Amazon (and abebooks) consists of giving you the ability to find just about anything, and to find just about anything below the "rare and scarce" category for a trifling amount of money. I find myself continually amazed every time I buy books there just how cheap 95% of the best ones are compared to their inherent value.
**beyond the usual corpses and fornicators
It's a curious experience to recall, but finding Powells while wandering around in a city I'd been in all of an hour (circa 1993) made me truly concerned I had been actually hit by a car crossing the street and was possibly in fact dead and/or hallucinating.
"That's the worst thing about Amazon. I don't want just the book I want! I want to browse."
Also the worst thing about people reading news online instead of by reading a newspaper.
It's "serendipity" that tends to be lost - just stumbling across something you didn't know you were looking for.
And there's no explaining to someone that they've lost something that they aren't aware exists.
I did do browsing of the stacks of libraries and bookstores, starting when I first started to seriously read as a kid until 15 or so years ago when I really got into internetting. But, even back then, I usually started with an idea of what I wanted--a book or author who came to me from a book review. I religiously read the review sections of magazines and journals--Time, Newsweek, Life, the old Saturday Review, Commentary, Commonweal, The New Yorker, later The New York Review of Books, and always especially the book sections of the NYTs. Even magazines like Esquire and Playboy and the like played their part.
I'm a reader who if he really likes a book reads other books by that same author. I have to see how an author who's really hit home plays himself out. When I read reviews of Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, or John Fowles's The Magus, or John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy, or Peter De Vries's Let Me Count the Ways, they struck a chord with me. These novels all came out within a year or so of each other when I was a teen young in beauty reading. I read the books and then just had to read other stuff by them. It was that simple. Reviews are kind of like Consumer Reports; browsing stacks at bookstores or libraries are too much like going through a car lot under the guidance of a salesman. Although I always like blurb comments, and they could make a difference.
With the internet, I've done the same as I did with magazine book reviews, only it's blogs, message boards, etc., as well. Since now I read mostly non-fiction, sites like Edge and Arts and Letters Daily and The Browser are vital. As well as ezines. Doing it like that, browsing Amazon is not much different than the way I've always done it. I usually browse Amazon with a purpose.
Also, I would never buy books promiscuously (not with public libraries and inter-library loans). When I was young, I neither had the money nor the room to do that. I bought what I wanted to have forever, something I would re-read and refer to always, or maybe stuff that back then you didn’t find in libraries, like Matt Helm paperbacks. This habit has stayed with me. I only buy what I want to keep and re-read. Books that mean a lot to me. Only now it’s liable to be things like The Selfish Gene or The Language Instinct. But, really, these days most of my reading comes from the internet itself.
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Chicago or Portland?
I have to admit that I never was a big fan of the Portland Powell's, mostly because their prices were always so high compared to other shops in other towns with better quality (used book) selections. In the mid-80's Portland had nearly a dozen first rate used shops (Holland's, Paper Moon, David Morrison, Great NW, etc.), all with distinct personalities and eclectic selections, but by century's end Powell's had pretty much ground nearly all them into the dust.
The other thing about Powell's is that their near-monopoly position (meaning that they were the only shop in Portland with any real name recognition outside the hardcore book buffs) meant that they could get away with paying virtually nothing for even the best quality books. Coming from the DC area, I had several buys on the West Coast where I was told that books I was paying $10 to $20 apiece for had been taken to Powell's, and Powell's was offering $2 and $3. It's nice to see an independent store still prospering in this sort of an economy and in the sorry current state of the book business, but in many ways Powell's acts much more like a chain store than a real independent, and its net effect on bookselling in Portland has been a distinctly mixed blessing.
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Also the worst thing about people reading news online instead of by reading a newspaper.
It's "serendipity" that tends to be lost - just stumbling across something you didn't know you were looking for.
And there's no explaining to someone that they've lost something that they aren't aware exists.
You're absolutely right. It's kind of like trying to explain baseball to a Frenchman. Browsing the printed paper is infinitely easier and yet gives you far more ability to spot a gem than simply scrolling down a web page. For one thing, with most newspaper websites going from page to page can be agonizingly long, as opposed to the ability to flip printed pages with a flick of the thumb.
I love the Amazon recommendation system, it's amusingly horrid. Buy a book about about finance and get all the "Get rich in the commodities market in 21 days for dummies" books, buy a book of poetry and get drenched in horrid little collections about dead swans in stagnant pools. It's all hilarious. And knowing that this is the state of the art of AI makes me sleep better at night. No way the machines are going to rise up this year.
I've actually gone through the whole recommendation list once or twice (for me it runs to around 1000 books), because that's the kind of guy I am, and I think it got more interesting towards the end, but that's probably not something to recommend.
Also the worst thing about people reading news online instead of by reading a newspaper.
It's "serendipity" that tends to be lost - just stumbling across something you didn't know you were looking for.
And there's no explaining to someone that they've lost something that they aren't aware exists.
It's not like an ordinary newspaper site is less of a jumble of stuff than the paper version ever was.
There are plenty of sources of semi-random material on the net, Reddit is probably the most popular these days, there's even a big site called StumbleUpon. For books there's sites like Goodreads. On Amazon you can simply click on reviewers you think are insightful and see what else they have reviewed.
Portland for me. I'm sure there are wonderful bookstores elsewhere in the country, but if you're in Seattle like me, the Portland Powell's is the perfect size and distance for a book-centric road trip. And I'm going there to buy, not sell, so that end of it doesn't really affect me.
Portland.
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