gizmos Can Amazon Save the E-Book?

Amazon.com unveiled its Kindle e-book reader last week with a PR extravaganza that might impress even Steve Jobs. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos brandished his first hardware product on Charlie Rose and the cover of Newsweek, and secured testimonials from such dead-tree luminaries as Toni Morrison and Lemony Snicket. The marketing seems to have worked. The $400 Kindle is already enough of a success that, as I write this, it's back-ordered until Dec. 17.

If you go by the wisdom of the blogs, however, the Kindle is less the iPod of books than the Apple IIc of books. Early adopters have groused about the oversized PREV PAGE and NEXT PAGE buttons, which make it tough to pick up the device without accidentally paging through the book you're reading. They've also sneered at Amazon's copy protection, which is so crippling that you can't even buy an e-book for a Kindle-owning pal.

My first six days with the Amazonian e-reader have confirmed that these criticisms are on target. I'd be startled if, at least in the pricey gizmo's initial incarnation, this is the product that gives e-books iPod-like ubiquity. Still, unless Amazon caves quickly, it will probably be the closest thing to a mainstream e-reader yet. For everything Kindle isn't, it remains the best attempt so far at making e-books make sense. To borrow the famous left-handed compliment that Alan Kay gave the original Macintosh, it's the first e-book reader that's good enough to criticize.

Amazon's e-reader doesn't look special from the outside. It's plasticky, white, and a bit chunky, about the size of a 200-page trade paperback and weighing in at 10.3 ounces. The device's greatest innovation is hidden inside. Earlier e-readers—including Sony's svelter, cheaper, still-extant Reader—made you buy your books on a PC and then copy them to the unit via a cable. Kindle, though, has built-in wireless broadband, courtesy of Sprint's nationwide EVDO network. Preconfigured and provided at no additional charge, Amazon's Whispernet service lets you browse for e-books and other content on the device itself. You can download a book in seconds anywhere Sprint has coverage.

It's a remarkably seamless experience, the purest expression of Amazon's 1-Click approach to shopping. Roaming the aisles of a local Borders with Kindle in hand, I bought and downloaded Elmore Leonard's Up in Honey's Room in a lot less time than it would have taken to locate it in the stacks and make my way through the checkout line. I also paid $9.99, rather than Borders' $25.95 plus tax.

When it comes to book selection and pricing, Kindle is far superior to its predecessors. At launch, almost 90,000 books are available for purchase compared with 20,000-plus at Sony's online store. That's puny compared to the millions of volumes that Amazon sells in printed form, and the selection is strongest in high-profile books and public-domain oldies. You can buy 100 of the 112 titles on the New York Times best-seller list, for example, but Vladimir Nabokov and Ian Fleming are both missing in action. On the plus side, almost everything is a tempting $9.99 or less.

Beyond books, Amazon has sealed deals to deliver 11 newspapers via Kindle, including the New York Times ($13.99 a month) and Wall Street Journal ($9.99). Eight print and Web-based magazines (including Slate) are available for between $1.25 and $3.49 a month, as are 300 blogs, for 99 cents or $1.99 apiece each month. Most of this content is available for free on the Web and in some cases via full-text RSS feeds, with better formatting and more interactivity. But Kindle's approach offers something of the convenience of traditional newspaper and magazine subscriptions. As long as you leave the wireless connection on, fresh content is downloaded silently in the background even if Kindle is turned off, so it's ready to read when you are.

While Amazon has integrated its hardware and e-commerce services, you aren't dependent on the company for content. You can e-mail any text document, such as a tome from Project Gutenberg's free book catalog, to your Kindle for a charge of 10 cents per file. There's also a rudimentary Web browser tucked behind a menu option labeled "Experimental." Kindle calls this feature "Basic Web" and cautions that it works best with sites that are mostly text. That's about right—it's essentially the equivalent of a middling cell-phone browser, only on a large, monochromatic screen. (There's no wireless data service charge for surfing the Web or using the Kindle store.)

Like the Sony Reader, Kindle can display images, but it's fundamentally a text-oriented device. Both machines dispense with LCD in favor of a 6-inch grayscale "electronic paper" display using technology from E Ink Corporation. E-paper draws so little power that Kindle can run for two days with its wireless connection turned on, or for a week with the wireless shut off. And it doesn't flicker or wash out in the sun—as long as there's enough light it looks more like paper than an electronic display. (The Sony Reader has a slightly more advanced implementation with slicker typography and eight shades of gray vs. Kindle's four; the difference isn't enough to stress over.)

But in an age in which even cheapo cell phones have vibrant color screens, e-paper's dark-gray-on-light-gray color scheme is drearily retro. The Kindle refreshes much more slowly than any device with an LCD screen, resulting in a perceptible pause and flashing effect as you flip pages. Since the display's refresh problems preclude even simple animations like a moving cursor, Kindle's designers have created a workaround—a thumbwheel that moves a cursor up and down a skinny, secondary display to the right of the main screen. To navigate, you point the cursor at menus on the main screen and click to select them. It's kludgy and a bit primitive but gets the job done.

So, why should you shell out $400 for Kindle when even the most cut-rate printed volume is easier on the eyeballs? As with previous e-book readers, the biggest selling point is portability. I wince at the prospect of lugging even one hardcover on a plane trip, but Kindle can hold the equivalent of 200 in its internal memory, and it has an SD card slot for further expansion. Other conveniences include six text sizes to choose from, full-text searching, annotation, and easy access to the Oxford New American Dictionary and Wikipedia. Most of these features use Kindle's keyboard, which works quite well, though it adds to the device's bulk and detracts from its aesthetics.

The proof of any e-book reader's worth, of course, is in the reading. Here, Kindle proves a mixed bag. I breezed through Steve Martin's memoir Born Standing Up, reading at least as quickly and enjoying myself at least as much as if I'd sprung for the hardcover. When I flipped the last virtual page, I was sorry it was all over.

But the book's photographs, crisp and evocative in the printed edition, are barely decipherable on the e-paper screen. And although Kindle contains a welcome letter from Jeff Bezos declaring his goal to have the device "disappear in your hands," in mine it occasionally behaved like a buggy piece of first-generation consumer electronics. At one point, it inexplicably decided to display the book as center-justified text before abruptly switching back to left-justified format.

For all of Kindle's rough edges, it's the first e-reader that's left me believing that content-consumption tablets could one day be everywhere. My hunch is that they'll resemble flashy, oversized iPhones more than Amazon's resolutely bookish device, though. For now, I'm looking forward to spending time with a well-stocked Kindle on my next cross-country flight. The only downside: Unlike any book I've ever traveled with, it will need to stay stowed during takeoff and landing.

hot document
The Sock Puppet Who Loved Me
Megan Meier's home town makes cyberstalking a misdemeanor.
By Bonnie Goldstein
Thursday, November 29, 2007, at 6:07 PM ET




From: Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Thursday, November 29, 2007, at 6:07 PM ET

Thirteen year-old Megan Meier did not know that her MySpace friend "Josh Evans" was a sock puppet (i.e., artificial Internet persona) created to manipulate her. Lori Drew, an adult living down the street from Megan in Dardenne Prairie, Mo., devised the prank to exact revenge after Megan ended her friendship with Drew's daughter. It was not difficult for Drew to create Josh, an imaginary 16-year-old boy, or to win the trust of the socially insecure middle-school student a few houses away. Pretending to be a cute, new-in-town high-schooler, Drew gave Megan weeks of attention and emotional companionship, then abruptly turned on her and started posting hateful messages. After receiving one particularly hostile post, the despondent Megan hanged herself in her bedroom closet.

Four doors away, Drew deleted Josh Evans from My Space, attended Megan's funeral and kept quiet about the hoax. Six weeks later, a confidante of the woman's daughter who'd been pulled into the ruse confessed the scheme to Megan's parents. The shocked parents also learned that neither Drew's cruel harassment of Megan nor her online impersonation had been illegal.

Remarkably, it was Lori Drew, wishing to "inform law enforcement of a neighborhood dispute," who called police to help her "confront" the Meier parents "in reference to their daughter's suicide." In the incident report, officers recorded that Lori Drew wanted to "just tell them" her side of the story. When she and her husband tried (by "banging on the door") to communicate with Megan's heartbroken parents, "Mr. Meier told them to leave." The hoped-for rapprochement never came about, and by last April, Drew had called the police several more times, once after a brick was thrown through her kitchen window.

Earlier this month, a year after Megan's death, her mother, Tina Meier, finally shared her outrage with the local St. Charles County Journal. The paper did not use Lori Drew's name in the account, but angry readers quickly identified the neighbor. Her personal information is now well-documented on the Internet, where she has been universally pilloried. Ironically, any effort to prevent future harassment of girls like Megan could also protect Drew. Last week Dardenne Prairie aldermen passed a resolution (below and on the following two pages) making cyberstalking a misdemeanor within the city limits.

Got a Hot Document? Send it to documents@slate.com. Please indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous.

Posted Thursday, November 29, 2007, at 6:07 PM ET

Posted Thursday, November 29, 2007, at 6:07 PM ET

The Homeland Infrastructure Threat and Risk Analysis Center, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, collects data and analyzes terrorist threats to various assets and resources, including food and agriculture. Below and on the following nine pages are excerpts from the risk analysis center's PowerPoint briefing for an Agriculture Department workshop in September.

According to the briefing, the government lacks adequate information about terrorist threats. There is "no baseline to evaluate" and "incomplete data," and what data exist are often inconsistent (Page 6) and difficult to analyze (Page 7). The presentation cites previous false alarms such as an incorrect report that a stolen Home Depot truck was loaded with ammonium nitrate (it wasn't) and a threat on Montana's Fort Peck Dam that turned out to be the product of one citizen's supposed psychic vision (Page 8).

One bulleted slide warns, Al-Qaida documents and training manuals indicate interest "in animal and plant disease agents" and "in food contamination as an attack method" (Page 4). But the slide show concedes that Homeland Security "lacks credible information to indicate transnational terrorist planning for an attack" on the food and agriculture sector (Page 10). It's hard to know what to make of this conclusion, given that the risk-analysis center has already acknowledged that its information is woefully incomplete.

The Agriculture Department briefly posted a link to the 27-page document but has now removed it. A video of the presentation remains on the Agriculture Department's Web site. The slides were copied onto Wikileaks.org, where they remain available.

Got a Hot Document? Send it to documents@slate.com. Please indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous.

Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007, at 2:57 PM ET

Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007, at 2:57 PM ET

Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007, at 2:57 PM ET

Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007, at 2:57 PM ET

Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007, at 2:57 PM ET

Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007, at 2:57 PM ET

Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007, at 2:57 PM ET

Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007, at 2:57 PM ET

Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007, at 2:57 PM ET

(For discussions of the latest topics, check out the Human Nature Fray.)

Engineers are integrating robots into animal societies. Latest example: Four robotic roaches persuaded 12 real roaches to congregate in an unnaturally dangerous place. Key trick: coating the robots with roach sex hormones. Objectives: 1) Study how animal groups make decisions. 2) See whether robots can fit in well enough to participate in those decisions. 3) Make robots better at learning and adapting. Other examples: robotic spiders, snakes, dogs, and monkeys. Scientists' official reassurance: "We are not interested in people." Fine print: "The scientists plan to extend their research to higher animals," starting with a robotic chicken designed to commandeer chicks. Warning: The roach robots were freed from ongoing human control, and in 4 out of 10 cases, they followed the decisions of the real roaches, instead of the other way around. (Related: a robot controlled by a roach; a robot controlled by a moth brain; a robot controlled by a detached eel brain; remote-controlled pigeons; remote-controlled rats.)

A study documented widespread distracted driving in New York City. Sample: 3,120 drivers observed at 50 red lights. Findings: 1) 23 percent were talking on cell phones. 2) Half of these were holding the phone, which is illegal. 3) 6 percent of all drivers were smoking, 4 percent were drinking, 3 percent were eating, and 2 percent were grooming. 4) One of every three drivers was guilty of at least one of these distractions. Libertarian spins: 1) The study shows that banning handheld cell-phone calls backfired, since people on hands-free phones, thinking they're safe, are "the most likely to engage in grooming, eating, drinking and smoking" at the wheel. 2) It shows "people are smoking in their cars because it's banned in other venues," so we're forcing people to smoke in the most dangerous place. Public safety spin: No problem, we'll just ban smoking in cars and talking on hands-free cell phones, too. (Actually, we're already banning smoking in cars. For examples, look here, here, here, and here.)

Update on male birth control: A "selective androgen receptor modulator" succeeded in animal tests. Mechanism: The drug stops sperm production by suppressing a hormone in the brain. Regimen: You'd take the pill for two months or so to wipe out your sperm count. Results in rats: 1) 100 percent effective after 70 days of use. 2) 100 percent fertility restored after 100 subsequent days of nonuse. Possible bonus: "boosting muscle mass," since drug companies have already been researching the drug to prevent muscle loss. Fine print: The drug shrank the rats' prostates, so it'll be a while before it's ready for humans. Related: 1) Another sperm-suppression drug. 2) Drug companies won't develop male birth control. 3) Actually, the government is funding it. 4) Men fail to complete the vasectomy process. 5) The joy of spray-on condoms.

Scientists reportedly cloned a monkey and derived useful stem cells from its embryonic clones. If confirmed, it's the first time any primate, including humans, has been truly cloned. Key breakthrough: a technical tweak that surmounts the previous obstacle to primate cloning. Next obstacle: The scientists "tried to implant about 100 cloned embryos into the wombs of around 50 surrogate rhesus macaque mothers but have not yet succeeded with the birth of any cloned offspring." Liberal reaction: Human therapeutic cloning is next, thank God. Conservative reaction: Human reproductive cloning is next, God help us. Liberal reassurances: 1) "No one who is in a position to actually try to apply to humans what the … scientists did with monkeys has any interest in using cloning to reproduce or mass produce people." 2) "Cloning to create actual people is still very hard to do." 3) "A cloned embryo in a lab dish has no ability to develop into a person." Skeptical view: Let's make sure this isn't fraud like the last time somebody claimed to have cloned a human. Human Nature's view: Fetal harvesting is a more likely danger than reproductive cloning.