Because brave trees still give their lives so magazines can be printed (with apologies to The Lorax), why not honor them by reflecting on the past decade’s running narrative as told to us by magazine covers.
Will your favorite magazine stay in print long enough to be in next decade’s montage? Do Kindle readers judge magazines by their cover? Remember when album art mattered?
Quick, scroll through your iTunes – how many of those songs did you pay for? I’ve burned every Hold Steady CD from friends who beat me to the record store, but I’d like to think I make up for my thrift by buying tickets for their homecoming gigs – and even bought my favorite t-shirt at one of the band’s First Ave shows. Eventually, we vote with our dollars for stuff we like.
Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail,” has again landed on the New York Times Bestseller list – this time by putting the premise of his latest book, “Free,” to practice by inviting thousands of freeloaders to download it. “The point was to let people sample the book in full,” said Anderson. “If they liked it, we hoped that some would buy the hardcover to keep or at least spread the word.”
And yeah, “Free” found its way into my summer reading via the ol’ five-finger discount, but here I am spreading the word.
Reading the New York Times online is free, but to me the better bargain is having the (now six-dollar) dead-tree Sunday edition strewn about my couch for the rest of the week. Well-worth reading is the Ping column of last Sunday’s Times (Business section, page 4) about Evernote, a free web application that lets users make and keep notes from web clips, voice memos, business cards, pictures, videos and more – with the ability to retrieve data from multiple devices.
(Disclosure: The Nerdery helped develop parts of Evernote’s forthcoming revamped website, along with design agency partners Factor Design.)
Even though three-fourths of Evernote users quit it cold turkey, the company is betting that as more people use it to organize their constantly accumulating data, the more members will pay for account enhancements like more storage and being able to scan PDF notes to find a certain word. It stands to reason that the more notes a user puts in for free, the likelier they’ll be to pay to more easily extract the data that drives their personal and professional life.
“Free is not a loss leader,” said Evernote chief executive Phil Libin to NY Times columnist Damon Darlin. “If we can get a small percentage of users to pay we start to make money…We are committed to being free.”
Me too – if it’s free, I’m free to do it.
As a full-fledged booknerd, I follow news and views about Amazon’s Kindle pretty closely. The Kindle fascinates me, as do the people who use them. If your nerdly predilections are of a different bent, you might have missed the story about Amazon removing 1984 from user’s Kindles due to some sort of copyright infringement. Of all the books in all of the land to delete, the only one that could me more ironic than George Orwell’s 1984 (which has a lot to do with the government editing the news) would have been Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (about government outlawing books).
But this isn’t about irony. No, this is about the slippery, slide-y ownership issues of electronic files and who gets to control the devices that hold those files.
My mind can’t quite get around the fact that even after someone has purchased a Kindle and purchased a book from Amazon (sure under hinky circumstances but that’s besides the point) that the company can still go into their device and erase that book.
Sure on a rational level it makes sense that Amazon would recall 1984 to avoid a copyright lawsuit, but the fact that they can even do that gives me the creeps. Do consumers really want a company to have that kind of control over their stuff? But more importantly did Kindle users even realize that Amazon had that power?
Yuck.
Can you imagine if Apple exercised the same power over an iPod? I would wager you’d be hard-pressed to find an iPod that didn’t contain an ill-gotten, illegally downloaded song. The outcry if such a thing happened would be deafening.
You can’t swing a dead cat around the Internet today without reading all about Amazon’s Kindle 2. I find the buzz puzzling.
Essentially the Kindle is an e-book reader. Sure you can get some blogs and newspapers and such, but what they’re really trying to pimp is the ability to download and read any book you want, instantly! Here’s why I find this so puzzling, in 2007 only one in four US adults claimed to have not read a single book that year. Not one.
Sure, sure the NEA has reported that for the first time in a decade or so the percentage of adults reading “literature” (ironic air quotes intentional from the booknerd) is on the rise, but still, are these the people who are going to shell out $300+ for an e-book reader?
As I’ve mentioned before. I’m a booknerd. I know a lot of booknerds. None of them are clamoring for a way to carry their entire library with them all the time. Unlike music, it’s not like you can shuffle on to a new book every four or five minutes. Heck, most of the people I know can’t even start reading a new book until they have finished the last one.
I’m convinced the Kindle is purely a device for the gadgethead and not the booknerd. It makes me wonder if makes the gadgetheads actually use their Kindle to read books or is it something they get and play with for two weeks and then resign it to the scrap heap with all the other toys?
Besides, no booknerd in their right mind would spend $359 on a device to read books when they could spend that money on 25 actual books.
The Genius Collection
Who couldn’t use a small pack of geniuses hanging out at their desk to provide inspiration and encouragement? Plus, these are just about the cutest little action figures ever. And if geniuses aren’t your thing, there’s also a Revolutionaries, Scientists, and Artists. Oh, and a writers collection sure to please nerdy bloggers everywhere.
You Rock Letterpress Cards
I can tell you from experience that these cards do, in fact, rock. This awesome design comes on beautiful, heavy card stock. The best thing about these cards is that they’re all occasion — thank you, happy birthday, Valentine’s day — is there any event where this sentiment isn’t appropriate? No, no there isn’t.
A Beautiful Tea Pot
I am resisting the urge to make a ‘cup of tea’ joke here. It’s difficult. What I don’t have to resist is talking about how beautiful this tea pot is. Look at it! It elevates making tea to an art form. Pretty rad for the tea-fanatic in your life.
These are cool, and not just because I have a Superman thing or because I spent all weekend reading Identity Crisis. Sometimes after a hard day fighting crime or making the Internet safe for surfers even the superest of heroes might like to knock back a shot of tequila. [Buy at Etsy]
Ampersand T-Shirt
Ampersands seem to appeal to both font nerds and designers (and well, let’s face it, all people with impeccable taste), so much so there is an entire blog dedicated to this special character. Here I show you the Baskerville tee (because it looks most like the Caslon one I’ve got tattooed on my arm), but they’ve got 10 different fonts to choose from.
Robot Pint Glasses
Last week while out to lunch with my friend Seamus I boldly proclaimed that robots are cooler than pirates, ninjas, cowboys, and zombies. These glasses just prove my point. It doesn’t matter if you’re drinking chocolate milk, a nice lager, or Tang, you’ll look infinitely cooler when you’re sipping out of a glass with a robot on it. Trust me, I wouldn’t steer you wrong.
The Future is Unwritten, a Joe Strummer Documentary
This one kind of breaks the “no batteries required” theme I had going. I blame it on my cubemate, who I call Trip Shakespeare. Trip’s a musicgeek and when I was looking for a music-geeky gift, this Joe Strummer documentary was the first thing that came out of his mouth. It’s a safe bet for the musicgeek in your life.
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
This is the gift suggestion that gives me the most trepidation. It’s a gamble putting a novel on a list like this, but I’m going for it. Why? Because not only was The Gargoyle one of the best books I read all year, it’s also the one which will have to broadest appeal. This tale of a former-pornstar who is severely burned in a car wreck who, while recovering, meets a bi-polar sculptress who claims to have been his wife, a former nun, back in like the 1300s. And that’s just the part that’s easy to summarize. Part fantasy, part romance, and all the way awesome, this genre-bending book will please everyone from snooty lit snobs to hardcore genre-loving-geeks. I promise.
Need more ideas? Try these:
The Zeus Jones Holiday Gift Guide
Mighty Goods’ 16 Perfect Gifts for Geeks
The Pioneer Press’ Tech stuff to tuck under the tree
Vitamin’s 10 Web Geek Gift Ideas
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