• User experience of browsing, buying books, etc. is nicely integrated, though browsing the Kindle Store on the device itself is a little like browsing Web 1.0 pages on a black-and-white, 640×480 computer over slow dialup. (The omission of Wifi is baffling.)
• Pricing model for books is defensible: bestsellers $10 (typically that’s less than half price of the print hardback), mass market paperbacks around $6, older titles as low as $3. If you consider the device a sunk cost, it often makes good economic sense to buy a Kindle edition, even compared to buying a used print copy.
• The user experience of actually reading is great. It’s lighter and easier to hold than even a mass-market paperback. 
• I’m often in the middle of several books at a time. Flipping among them is trivial and your bookmarks are automatically remembered. This will make me read more, by eliminating the minor inconvenience of getting my butt out of the chair to swap out books.
• Most important by far: I traveled with 10.3 ounces, rather than about 15 pounds. With per-bag luggage fees, carry-on limits, and just the fact that I like to travel light, this trumps virtually every weakness of the device.

THE NOT-SO-GOOD:

• I’ve been carping about the lack of PDF support. (Amazon’s PDF “converter” is terrible, yielding mostly-unusable versions of anything that’s not mostly text.) However, I’m beginning to come around to the fact that this device is a one-trick pony: it’s my non-work-documents reader. I’m looking at an iRex Iliad, which has a letter-size display that’s also touch sensitive, handles PDF’s, and allows annotations with a stylus, as a companion device for technical documents. In a sense, complaining that I can’t read letter-size technical articles on this device would be a bit like complaining that a mass-market paperback is not the right format for technical books.
• Although you can change the font size while reading, apparently you can’t change the actual font. There’s evidently one sans-serif font (Helvetica) and one serif font (blockier than Times) on the device. They’re fine to read, but you lose any aesthetics of typography. This is fine if your reading material would otherwise have been mass-market paperback; it may be an annoying omission in other cases, especially for typography geeks like me. 
• Amazingly, while the table of contents of all books I purchased were hyperlinked, neither footnotes nor indices are. It doesn’t seem like this would be hard to do in a markup format (which is evidently what’s being used here,I assume something like DocBook as opposed to a page-description format).
• The page-flip buttons are arranged in such a way that it’s easy to hit them by accident. A simple fix would be software-controllable configuration of what those buttons do (e.g. so I could disable the ones I don’t use, since the functionality on some buttons is redundant).
• The scroll-wheel menus are awkward for “two-dimensional” GUI displays, which crop up occasionally when you’re browsing the Kindle Store on the device itself.
• In general, the Store UI could be streamlined to minimize the number of (SLOW) wireless roundtrips and screen redraws when exploring a book title, reading reviews, etc. I assume a forthcoming software update will fix this.
• As is well known, the selection of titles available for Kindle is a tiny fraction of the print title selection (though still a lot better than for any other ebook reader AFAIK). But if you read as much as I do, there’s always something worth having.
• Why does this thing have an MP3 player (which I didn’t use, and for which there is no comparable “seamless” download experience) but not Wifi?  Who listens to music while reading?
• The price is way too high ($360 currently) but I’m sure it’ll go down. I’d like to see these kinds of devices more widely adopted if only for the positive environmental implications. For now, it’s a luxury for those of us who read a whole lot and are willing to pay a premium for early adoption.
• I’m not going to wring my hands over DRM right now; Apple’s iTunes Music Store eventually became DRM-free once there was a large established market for the product (which isn’t yet true of Kindle ebooks) and a seamless buyer experience (which largely is true of Kindle), so there’s no fundamental reason this couldn’t happen for ebooks. 

SIMPLE THINGS I’D LIKE TO SEE: 

• I’m going to try running Amazon’s HTML-to-Kindle converter on the output of latex2html, which usually produces a very usable HTML version from LaTeX source. That might at least give me a way to read documents for which I have the LaTeX source. 
• I’d like to identify a “one-click” formatting pipeline for putting public domain etexts (eg from Project Gutenberg) on the Kindle. Anyone know of one?
• I’d like to see the DRM extended to allow me to “loan” a Kindle book to another user not registered to my same account. During that time, the book would be unavailable on my Kindle until the other user “returns” it. My guess is this would dampen a lot of the fair-use handwringing and be a reasonable compromise. Note that the machinery for this already exists, since you can “return” a Kindle book you didn’t mean to purchase, causing it to be erased from your Kindle before your money is refunded. (Note that you can buy up to 6 Kindles registered on a single Amazon account, and titles can be shared among those.) 
• Similarly…I’d like to be able to “borrow” one of a fixed number of circulating e-copies of a book from, say, the San Francisco Public Library.  The New York Public Library and a few others currently do this for Mobipocket format (DRM’d) ebooks, but these can’t be read on Kindle (although a hack allows non-DRM’d Mobipocket format books to be read on Kindle).
• The decision not to include Wifi (falling back to EVDO, iPhone-style) is baffling. In Mexico I had good Wifi access but no EVDO. At home, the EVDO bandwidth isn’t great and I’d rather use my home Wifi.
• The UI is inconsistent and sometimes confusing. What’s a “clipping” vs. a “note” vs. a “hilight” vs. a “mark”? The navigation UI for these annotation-type things is not very graceful.

BOTTOM LINE: I like it and I’m keeping it. I probably will never travel without it; the extent to which it replaces print books (especially as I’m a big library borrower) for at-home and at-work reading remains to be seen.

I’m no longer considering the Bookeen Cybook after one of its users reported that full-page (letter/A4) PDF files are often unusable due to the smaller screen. I intend to read not only technical books but technical papers, so that’s a dealbreaker for me, and I’m looking seriously at the Iliad as a result.

I’ve long complained that if only the Kindle supported PDF, I’d buy that, but I’m not so sure anymore: virtually all the other readers support the Mobipocket format (which has both DRM’d and non-DRM’d variants), and if there is anything worse than a DRM’d ebook format, it’s two incompatible DRM’d ebook formats (Amazon Kindle has its own .AZW format, and while the Kindle supports Mobipocket, it’s hard for me to get behind a device whose main contribution seems to be a new DRM format).

I definitely want to have one of these loaded up with stuff before our big family vacation in August, so I guess I’ll have to make a decision by then…you’d think academics who read a lot and cart around sheaves of papers printed out from PDF files would be a great early-adopter audience, but only the iLiad seems to be targeting them…

Amazon’s Kindle has a pretty good selection, and they’re at least priced intelligently (~50% of print edition), but you can’t view PDF documents on it. Yes, I know about the “converter”. It doesn’t process tables or figures, making it useless for any technical PDF’s, which for me is most PDF’s. The CyBook uses the Mobipocket DRM format, which is sold by dozens of half-assed retailers whose selection and reputation aren’t even a fraction of Amazon’s and whose pricing is stupid—the ebook costs the same as the print edition, and I can’t even donate it to my library when I’m done with it. But the CyBook does render PDF, so I could at least use it for geek books, technical articles, Gutenberg downloads, etc.

Some libraries have started ebook lending. But the NY Public Library, whose print collection exceeds 50 million volumes, has exactly 945 Fiction titles available in ebook form—most available as only one or the other of Mobipocket or Adobe eBook. Given that Adobe manages to crap on every product they put out, and that Adobe Reader still holds my grand prize for crashing Firefox & Safari, I don’t even want to go near Adobe’s ebook format, which they popularized in part by distributing DRM’d versions of Gutenberg etexts.

The book industry seems to be doing its very best to imitate the visionary RIAA and MPAA. I imagine at some point the book industry’s proctologist will call them to tell them that he’s found their head. Until then I’ll keep lugging dead trees around.

Download the free trial version: 750 MB.

The downloaded disk image contained a non-folder icon called “Adobe CS3″.  So I did what Mac users always do—I tried dragging it to my Applications folder. The Finder popped up a dialog that eventually stabilized at “Preparing to copy 109,775 items.”

Well, that’s going to take awhile. I stopped the copy and poked around and finally realized the non-folder icon is actually a folder—nice job, Adobe—inside of which I  found a Setup program.  Aha, I thought, the Setup installer should be faster than actually trying to copy 109,775 separate files.

Wrong. The installer took 45 minutes on a 1.5 GHz PowerPC G4 Mac.

Then I had to download a 58 MB software update to get the Flash Lite 3 functionality recommended for Chumby developers. Not including download time,  the updater took 1 hour and 45 minutes to apply a 58MB “patch”.

During this time, you’re not allowed to open any Web browsers, as the updater insists on updating various browser plug-ins. (But it doesn’t tell you when during the 1 hour and 45 minutes this occurs, so you have to forgo Web browsing the whole time.)

This “free trial” download experience does not encourage me to shell out the $995 Adobe wants for the product. (Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product.)

Maybe Adobe is used to Windows users accepting this level of user insult. Their PDF reader plugins for Web browsers are spectacularly unstable (Mac Preview is far superior), and even after CS3 was installed, it takes 30 seconds just to start up.

So it’s finally happened: I’ve found other desktop software that makes Microsoft Office a dream by comparison. How sad from the company that basically invented PC imaging and multimedia. If I can find an open-source toolchain for Chumby development, I’ll use it even if I can get an Adobe academic license for free. This product deserves to LOSE.

Lesson learned: I’m always bringing my iPhone in the future!  Although I did make a couple of calls on Mother’s Day ($1/minute) and send a couple of text messages (50 cents each), and I did find a number of Wifi hotspots (often free), I also:

• Took pictures, a couple of which I sent in real time to Tonia
• Used it as an alarm clock when sleeping in hotels that didn’t provide one
• On my laptop in Wifi zones, looked up stuff on the Web (walking maps, etc.) and sent it to the iPhone (via email) once I had the exact map(s) I wanted
• used it as an iPod
• downloaded podcasts of walking tours of Edinburgh, and transferred them to my iPhone

On this trip I had my laptop since it was for business. What would be great is if the downloading of generic MP3’s (not from ITMS) worked seamlessly on the iPhone without requiring syncing. I’m sure it can’t be far off.

Bottom line—always take your iPhone. Kick ass.

Anyone done this at other schools?

Anyone done this at other schools?

the source code to the ORIGINAL version has been found! not the Don Woods enhanced version, which looms large in hacker lore and whose source can be found here and which was the basis of early text-based adventures like Zork on the Apple II, but the earlier version (1975-76) that Will Crowther wrote based on the real-life Colossal Cave in kentucky. There’s a corresponding scholarly article in a humanities journal (possibly it has moved here) about the source code.

The source code was found in an archived copy of Crowther’s account at stanford AI lab about a year ago.

It is neat to peruse. it’s in Fortran IV, the total source code is 13K with an additional 19K file of text data (game messages, numbers describing the connectivity graph of the areas in the game, etc.) I couldn’t get it to compile using g77, i assume because of syntactic differences between Fortran 77 and Fortran IV.

It’s our heritage as hackers! I think of it as the equivalent of trying to read Chaucer in the original (which, by the way, is another fascinating exercise i recommend if you haven’t tried it).

UPDATE: Someone has ported the code to compile under g77!