if:book has some interesting thoughts about e-books and

… about the difference between digital text and digital music, and why an ebook device is not, as much as publishers would like it to be, an iPod. This is not an argument over the complexity of literature versus the complexity of music, rather it is a question of interfaces. It seems to me that reading interfaces are much more complicated than listening ones.

… the main argument being that you do not need to interact with a music player while listening, whereas reading devices (paper or electronic)…

are felt and perceived throughout the reading experience. The text, the visual design, and the reader’s movement through them are all in constant interaction.

I’ve tried two e-books / e-readers: the Rocket eBook and the Sony Librie. Eric likes e-books (which is why we have them) – he finds them convenient, especially for books whose paper editions are about as portable (and easy to handle) as a brick, and he likes not having to find space at home for books he’s read once and never intends to read again.

While I thought both readers did an adequate job, neither came close to the experience of reading a “real” book – even disregarding technical issues such as resolution and contrast, which will surely get sorted out soon. (And DRM of course! – which I am less hopeful about.)

Most importantly, the individuality of books disappeared. All books looked and felt more or less the same. And they felt very utilitarian. To me, books are more than the sequence of characters that makes up the text. The information content is only a part of it: the tactile and visual elements are also important. The size and weight, the feel of the paper, the cover design, the typography, all contribute towards the full reading experience.

Perhaps if e-books came with beautiful leather covers… in multiple styles for differing tastes, or for different kinds of books?

Paper books have a feeling of permanence, of existing. They remain in the bookshelf after I’ve finished reading them, and can remind me of the experience of reading them. This, of course, can be both a good thing or a bad thing – not every book I read is worth that kind of permanence; some are not worth the space they take up. E-books on the other hand, while less permanent, are very portable. In the same physical space as you would need for one paper book, you can fit tens or hundreds of e-books.

This aesthetic-physical aspect of books is just nostalgia and habit, of course. If paper books had never existed, and all I knew was online streams of characters, I wouldn’t miss these “extras” that books have.

But even from a practical point of view, I find e-books generally inferior to paper books. No e-book sits as comfortably in my hand as a paper book. Perhaps they would feel better if I could just grab and hold them any which way, without worrying about the relatively fragile screens, or about leaving thumbprints in the middle of the screen.

Current e-books steer the reader towards a one-way reading process. Paper books on the other hand are easy to skim, flip through, browse – basically, easier to explore. I can skip back a few pages while keeping a finger at my current position, and jump back instantly. I can look ahead to see how many pages I’ve got left in the chapter (do I have time to finish it before bedtime?). I can see, without even picking up the book, how far I’ve read and how much I’ve got ahead of me. I can navigate visually: quickly flick through pages until I find the one that has that orange box in the top left, or the one I scribbled on (for travel books and other reference materials). Even with fiction, I remember which part of the page described a particular scene, and find it based on that.

E-books also offer the possibility to manipulate text: search, look up words and add notes. You can do these things with paper books as well, but less conveniently. Cross-referencing and hyperlinks could make e-books a lot more useful, especially for non-fiction – textbooks, instruction manuals, travel guides and other information-dense materials. I’m already happy to read those online because of the extra functionality that provides. But that would require the content itself to be reworked, rather than just pushed into a text file.

I think that is the direction e-books would need to go in order to become interesting: they need to add new capabilities, rather than repackage old ones. And they should probably focus on non-fiction, where these new capabilities would add more value. For fiction, I cannot see that I would switch to e-books any time soon.

Related articles / blog posts / essays I found interesting:
fantasy ebook – What would it take to make the ebook absolutely irresistible?
Booke & eBook – philosophical commentary on connections between reading and consciousness etc.

Footnote: I haven’t “read” any audiobooks. To me they are not really books, and don’t compete with books – they are more akin to radio (except that they’re on-demand) or theatre (but a very limited version). Again, the content of a book may be there, but the presentation is so different that to me it is no longer a book. Books are written and read: I determine the pace; I am not a passive receiver of information.

I just noticed that it’s suddenly October. And it’s like autumn came overnight. All of September was sunny and warm, around 20°C. Today has been filled with thunderstorms and heavy showers – the kind that make you really happy to be inside. Indoors it got cold enough for me to put on socks (I’ve been barefoot at home since spring) and wear something with sleeves. And sunlight was sufficiently weak that I turned on the lights when having breakfast.

September is a great time of the year, especially when it turns out this nice. Not too hot, not too cold. And it’s a great time to be vegetarian: fruit & veg departments are full of fresh English stuff. Fresh local vegetables (well, not quite local but from within a hundred miles at least) do taste different.

The berry season has not yet ended, so you get strawberries (not as good as Estonian or Swedish ones, but far superior to Belgian or Spanish ones), raspberries, blackberries, redcurrants etc. This is the brief period when strawberries are not sold as just “strawberries” but actually have names – most of which start with E, for some reason: Evie, Elsanta, Everest. And Jubilee.

Same with apples: there are juicy flavourful English apples with interesting names like Early Windsor and Worcester Pearmain, instead of just the standard 4 (Royal Gala, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Granny Smith), all of which are rather boring, and have generally been shipped halfway around the world so even the flavour they might have had is mostly gone.

September is also mushroom season, so it’s occasionally even possible to find chantarelle mushrooms and other such delicacies (even if those do come from Romania and not Sussex).

Blump has now finally settled in a head-down position: there have been no somersaults in over a week now. Ready to dive. Yesterday I had my regular checkup with the midwife, and she confirmed that Blump has moved down into the pelvis, and as she put it, “is not going to move out of there… except when she or he is coming out.”

Not that that stops him/her from moving around otherwise. Now that Blump is taking up most of the space inside, there is less of a buffer between me and his/her sharp little knees and elbows. I feel every kick very clearly, especially those aimed outwards, and I really can’t understand women who say they cannot feel their babies moving! For me it’s gone long past the point of feeling them – now the distinction is between normal movements, somewhat uncomfortable movements, and movements that actually feel painful.

Yesterday was my last day at work. After the intensity of the last few weeks – when I was literally dreaming of code, and seeing Excel sheets in my mind’s eye when I lay down to sleep – this feels very strange. It will take a while to get used to the idea of being at home. Every day of every week.

I’ll spend the weekend just catching up with everything that has been piling up at home. I’ve got two weeks’ worth of snail mail to go through: I’ve taken the time to open them and check that there’s nothing urgent inside, and then just added them to the pile. Laundry had also been accumulating for at least two weeks, until I made a dent in it today. And I last had a haircut… let’s see… maybe around 6 weeks ago?

All of that will be done in another day or two. Then I’ve got a hobby project to keep me busy for a day or two (Roman blinds for the bedroom). But after that, I need a plan. I can only read for so many hours in a day, and only see so many movies, before I need something more active to do. And given that first babies often arrive late, this could go on for a month. I don’t believe I could just hang around and do nothing in particular for more than a week.

Of course, Blump could arrive early, which would change things a bit.

ParcelForce are completely incompetent. Avoid them if you can. And don’t send any large parcels to the UK without warning the recipient.

I bought a pushchair / pram from Ebay just over two weeks ago.

First I waited. Nothing happened. I gave it a week, then emailed the seller to check that they’d shipped it. They had indeed sent it off that Friday, and gave me a tracking number. I went to ParcelForce’s web site to see what’s happening.

It turned out that they had tried to deliver the parcel 3 times. First Monday morning 9:25. Then that same Monday afternoon 17:43. Then Tuesday 17:00.

It’s pretty absurd to expect anyone to be at home at those hours. Even someone with a 9-to-5 job wouldn’t be home at such times. But that’s OK, I was fully expecting them to turn up unannounced in the middle of the day, because that’s what ParcelForce does. It’s stupid, but at least it is predictable. They do that, then they leave a card, you call them and ask to redeliver on a Saturday or send it to the local Post Office. Fine.

But this time I did not get any notice of any of those three attempts: none of the usual cards (“we tried to deliver but you weren’t home”). No letter telling me that a parcel was waiting for me. Had it not been a parcel I ordered, I’d never have known that it had been sent, and it would have gone right back to the sender.

So on Monday I called ParcelForce’s call centre to ask them to send it to the local Post Office. (Their call centre is, of course, closed on weekends.) While the web site promises that it will be available after noon the next day, for some reason they told me it wouldn’t be there until Wednesday, but at that point another day’s delay didn’t concern me much.

Today Eric and I went to the Post Office to pick it up.

The Post Office knew nothing about our parcel, couldn’t care less about our parcel, and definitely weren’t going to do anything to help find out why it wasn’t there. We went home again and checked the web site, and sure enough, there was no notification there about it having been sent to the Post Office – it was still sitting in the depot.

By now I was getting slightly worried, because they only hold the parcel for 16 days – any longer than that, and it gets returned to the sender. I couldn’t ask them to deliver it on a weekend, because that would take me past that 16-day limit. And if I asked them to deliver it to the office instead of home, and they for some reason couldn’t get it done within 1 day, then that would again be past the limit. And I’m sure that it wouldn’t matter to them that the delay was because of their procedures. So I decided to bite the bullet and pick it up at the depot.

The web site told me where the depot is. Out in the boondocks, of course: in Charlton, which is 10 minutes by tube + 20 minutes by train + half a mile’s walk.

What it didn’t tell me was the opening hours. You have to call the depot for that. So I tried to call the depot to check their opening hours, and to confirm that I could turn up to pick up the parcel without advance notification. After 15 minutes of queueing, the voice on the phone said they were too busy to answer, and forwarded my call to the call centre again. Which, as I’d already discovered, was closed on weekends. The next call ended the same way.

Not seeing any other option, I went to Charlton anyway, hoping that they would be open. After a bit of wandering around in an empty industrial estate, I found the depot – only to see a man pushing the gate closed. It was 12:28 and it turned out they closed at 12:30. (Of course there was no sign saying that. If I had arrived 3 minutes later, I would probably have spent then next half hour looking for an open gate – because there was also no sign saying that this was actually the entrance.)

Anyway, he took pity on me and let me in, and found the parcel for me.

He also explained why the parcel wasn’t at the Post Office (after I complained about that). Apparently it was simply too big, and the Post Office wouldn’t have space for it. Which I can totally understand, after having seen the Post Office from the inside… But then why did they not tell me that on the phone? Or send me a notification? Or at least put a note in the tracking system? How was I supposed to know this?

It shouldn’t be a two-week adventure to get your parcel delivered. It shouldn’t take 40 minutes on the phone, one wasted trip to the Post Office, and then an extra 2-hour outing to somewhere that’s barely within our street map. It shouldn’t require lucky guessing of opening hours. It shouldn’t require advance knowledge (or a crystal ball to tell you) that a parcel has been sent to you.

Remember my complaints about delays at St Bart’s, and wondering how they could be so badly behind schedule already early in the day?

Yesterday I went to St Bart’s again, and was seen about 40 minutes after the appointed time. But that’s not the interesting part of the visit.

The interesting part was seeing, by chance, a summary of the doctor’s appointments calendar for the next 8 or 10 days on which he was seeing patients. I think he is only there once a week, so this would represent the next 2 months of appointments, although the scale doesn’t really matter here.

Out of those 8 or 10 occasions, 1 was blocked out, 2 were marked OB 1 for “1 overbooked”, 1 was marked OB 2, and the rest marked simply FULL.

If that is at all representative, at least 30% of his days are overbooked weeks in advance. It probably only gets worse closer to the time. No wonder he’s behind schedule every time I see him!

While I was there, the receptionist came in to ask what to do about booking a follow-up for another patient. There was obviously no space in the calendar, yet the patient needed an appointment. (That’s why the calendar printout was brought up.) So the doctor unblocked that single blocked day which he’d apparently kept as a reserve.

Time management the NHS way: time is a flexible, relative thing, to be stretched until it covers everything that’s needed.

… when you automatically aim for the side door and ignore the main exit on your way out when going home, because you know the main door is locked after normal working hours – and when the main door suddenly opens for you (because it’s an automatic one) your first reaction is confusion, and then the thought that you should talk to the friendly security guy outside to let him know that the door is still unlocked.

In the past 2 or 3 weeks I have received junk mail about parenting or children’s products from three different advertisers.

I have never before heard of nor been in contact with any of these companies. All of them have my address in the exact same format, and that is a format that I never use when asked for my address (spelling out the word “flat” and putting the flat number on a separate row). So I can be reasonably sure that my address hasn’t been sold by some unscrupulous company that I have purchased maternity or baby goods from.

On the other hand, the format matches the “official” address for this flat – as used by Inland Revenue, the local council etc. Very fishy. I strongly suspect that the local council has somehow been informed of my pregnancy – probably via the hospital or the clinic – and now they think they’re doing me a service by selling or giving my address details to companies they deem deserving.

Further strengthening this suspicion is the fact that the junk mail has been for one parenting magazine, one children’s book club, and (the latest) a language course for children that is somehow associated with the BBC. All “worthy” educational stuff, just the kind of thing that the local council would push in the belief that they know better – especially in a part of town with a high concentration of immigrants.

As most junk mail, the fact that it has been pushed to me without any request from my side is annoying enough. It is even more annoying that all these products are completely irrelevant to me – heck, I don’t even have a baby yet, even less one who’s old enough for book clubs! And if this is what I get before the baby has been born, how many will they send me later?

I replied to the first two and asked them to remove me from their mailing lists. It looks like that is pointless; if this is to stop then I’II need to go straight to the root and find out where they got my address from. Which they will probably refuse to tell me; and if they do, and it’s the local council, they will probably ignore me completely. I foresee an endless flood of junk mail for as long as I live here…

I am puzzled and fascinated by the amount of attention devoted by the media (and presumably the public) to the possible downgrade of Pluto from planet to something else. What’s in a name, after all? Apparently a lot. But then I always tend to take an unsentimental view of things.

Pluto gets 5000 news stories which is only barely less than the 6000 for Darfur, despite Darfur being a fair bit more urgent, and Estonia only gets 2000 even though it is a lot closer than Pluto. But of course Pluto, planet or not, is a lot larger and older than either Darfur or Estonia.

Best comment: Language log cites a reader:

One side thinks it all-important that what people were taught in school should remain true forever (hence, Pluto is a planet). The other side thinks that classifications should be based on observable facts about the universe really does, and revised when necessary (hence, Pluto is a Kuiper belt object).

One of the best gifts I got for Christmas was Lumines. After half a year, I had it thoroughly beaten: all slots in the high score list are showing 999,999, which is as high as it goes. While I still occasionally go back to Lumines, I feel like I’ve squeezed most of the fun out of it by now.

With excellent timing, LocoRoco has arrived to fill the gap (from the same source as Lumines: a gift from Eric).

(Side note: I also got Katamari Damacy a few months ago. I never really got into it, which surprised me a bit, since I’d heard so many good things about it. The concept was interesting, but I found the controls unintuitive and the game hard to master. I think it requires more experience of fast fiddly games, which I don’t have. Also, it had lots of tedious waiting between levels.)

LocoRoco is a kind of a platform game. You control a creature named LocoRoco, which is a cuddly amorphous yellow blob, sort of like a smiling water balloon. Well, the player doesn’t actually control the LocoRoco: you make it move by tilting the ground below it, making LocoRoco roll to one side. It can also jump, and be burst into smaller parts to get through narrow passages. So the game controls are extremely simple: the two tilt buttons at the top of the PSP, and one button to burst the LocoRoco.

LocoRoco rolls around in cheerful brightly coloured environments, backed by cheery songs, and grows by eating berries. Sometimes the LocoRocos separate themselves, line up like a children’s choir, and just sing. You’d think that a bright game with simple graphics and childish songs would get annoying, but the whole combination is surprisingly charming and amusing.

The game is commendably non-violent. The goal is to grow the LocoRoco by eating large red berries, which you discover by exploring each level, and to gather extra points by catching insects. Even the bad monsters are kind of cute. It truly is suitable for anyone from age 3 upwards just as the packaging indicates. Somehow, I find the idea of playing games meant for three-year-olds strangely appealing.

There are (according to reviews) dozens of levels, and each one looks and feels different. The difference is not just visual: the surface and terrain of the world also change. Some are icy and slippery, other are bouncy like jelly. While dexterity is required to get really good results in some levels, I found all levels perfectly manageable, unlike in Katamari Damacy, where I just got stuck.

Each level is quick to get through – around 3 to 5 minutes – which makes it great for brief bursts of playing. It’s easy to pick up the PSP for just one or two games, and that suits my gaming style very well. On the other hand, it encourages replay, since I’m always reminded of my best result for each level, as well as the best possible.

But the game’s greatest strength is that it keeps making me smile.

Screenshots at GameSpot.