Take Control Books 50% Off Sale

Now through August 3, all Take Control books are 50% off (including mine). If you don’t know the great Take Control book series, it’s a set of ebooks about using the Mac and related software and hardware. Check out the sale now.

And if you’re interested, I’ve got a new Take Control book coming out at the end of August… I’ll be posting more here soon.

Kindle Prices Plummet

Amazon has introduced another new Kindle model, and this time the prices are starting to get low enough that this device may, indeed, become a commonplace appliance. The 3G version – which lets you get books almost anywhere, over the 3G network, is $189. But the real news is the wi-fi only model, which, for most people, is more than sufficient. Since Amazon has to pay for the 3G access, this allows them to offer a much cheaper wi-fi model: only $139. I’ll predict that there will be a $99 Kindle by Christmas, and the future of these devices will begin. At less than $100, people will easily buy ebook readers.

However, the iPad is still going to keep on selling like gangbusters, because of the many things it does. Will Apple release a smaller iPad designed more for ebook reading, at a lower price point? Time will tell.

Cult of Mac Endorses App Piracy

I used to thing the Cult of Mac blog, was interesting, even though I found lead author Leander Kahney to be often a windbag. But after publishing an article not only endorsing app piracy but explaining, step by step, how to do it, I was quite shocked. The decision to publish such an article is so incredibly stupid and contemptuous of the developers that the blog often claims to support, that it can only be seen as link bait.

So the corrected version comes as even more of a surprise.  This sort of comment is so idiotic that I really wonder of such journalists should be allowed to write for any “major” web site:

The intent for the Superguide is to be straightforward and frank — a one-stop shop for everything people want to know about jailbreaking. We don’t condone piracy, but it’s a fact that a lot of people jailbreak their devices to experiment with things like Installous. I find it dishonest and hypocritical when publications skirt around issues like this; like publishing BitTorrent guides and pretending that no one’s going to download a pirated movie.

However, it’s obviously disingenuous to say we condemn piracy in a post that shows readers how to pirate software. Personally, I’ve always believed publishing information is one thing and acting on that information is another. I’ve always liked publications that informed me about things we’re not supposed to do. I can then make my own moral decision whether to act on that information or not

The thing is, this has always been Kahney’s blog; its name comes from the title of a book he wrote. So it’s him or nothing, as far as I know. But this crap about publishing it because it’s available elsewhere doesn’t fly; if people are looking for such information, they’ll find it, but that doesn’t mean you should not only publish it but endorse such illegal activity. Kahney’s attempted explanation is disingenuous and suggests that he’s really not aware of what he’s writing about. I hope people stop reading his blog; I know I will.

Library of America Launches New Blog

I’m a big fan of the Library of America, a non-profit organization that publishes excellent volumes of works by America’s great authors. Just for the many volumes of Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William James alone, this would be a great enterprise. But they publish great authors from the founding fathers to contemporaries, such as Philip K. Dick and Philip Roth.

Their new blog, Reader’s Almanac, will feature posts related to the authors and volumes in their collection. I’m looking forward to their posts, as a way of learning more about the many great authors I’ve discovered as a subscriber to their series. (I have more than 100 volumes from the Library of America already.) If you are interested in American literature, you should check it out.

Apple Updates iBooks: PDF Display Suffers

I use Apple’s iBooks on my iPad for reading epub books, and since PDF support was added, I’ve tried it out a few times. But the $0.99 GoodReader has so many more features, that I haven’t found it very useful to use iBooks for PDFs.

Apple has updated iBooks, claiming that there were improvements to PDF support. I tried a few PDFs in iBooks, and if this is improvement, Apple has become experts at newspeak. When moving from one page to another in a few PDFs, it takes about two seconds for the program to correctly render a page. At first, the text is visible but blurry, then it slowly snaps into the right display after those two seconds. GoodReader doesn’t have this problem, most likely because it pre-caches the pages so the rendering doesn’t take place when a new page is displayed.

I never really expected iBooks to be an ideal PDF reader, and it has very few of the many features that make GoodReader my tool of choice for reading PDFs. But this “downgrade” to iBooks is disappointing.

MobileMe E-mail: Junk Filter Can’t Be Turned Off

Since Apple recently updated MobileMe, I’ve spotted something a bit disturbing. I use my MobileMe account for some of my e-mail, and I was noticing that some messages to mailing lists weren’t coming through. When I looked on the web, I noticed that some of those messages were trapped in the Junk folder. Since I access my MobileMe account via POP, I wasn’t seeing these messages on my Mac. But most of what was flagged as junk was not spam. I had to manually tell MobileMe, for each message, that this was the case.

When I looked in the preferences – where I had previous turned off junk mail filtering – I found that there is no such option any more. This is disturbing; I don’t want my mail filtered on a server where I cannot access it the way I get my mail (POP; if I used IMAP, I would indeed see a Junk folder). If you use a MobileMe account and access your mail via POP, you should check regularly to see what’s been blocked.

This is a bad feature; Apple should clearly restore the option allowing junk mail filtering to be turned off.

Books I Want: Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’ve got lots of books; probably too many. But there are some books that I’d like to own, bu I simply cannot afford. My tastes are varied: from Stephen King to Henry David Thoreau, by way of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Robert B. Parker, Peter Robinson, Robertson Davies, William Shakespeare, and much more.

But one of my favorite authors is Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was one of America’s finest thinkers, and reading his essays, lectures and journals is one of my favorite pleasures. I have a couple of editions of the journals: the recent two-volume Library of America selection; a 1909 ten-volume edition, which is a different selection from what, at the time, was a relatively un-scholarly edition, and a few paperback books that offer selections from the journals, both from early editions and from the 16-volume Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson published by Harvard University Press.

This scholarly edition, published between 1960 and 1982, is the ne plus ultra of Emerson journals. It is a true scholarly edition, with all changes, corrections, deletions and other details noted carefully. (You can see an example on Google Books.) They contain much more than just the journals themselves, but also contain the “Miscellaneous Notebooks,” which include drafts of Emerson’s lectures and essays.

In any case, I’m not planning to buy them soon, but found a complete set online from a German bookseller at a price well below list. Tempting, but it’s still way above my budget for now. But this is a series I’d like to get, and I may try looking for used copies of the individual volumes online.

Find Out What You Listen to Most in Your iTunes Library

Have you ever wondered what you’ve listened to most in your music library? Not just songs (which you can see by sorting your library by Plays), but also albums, artists, or even genres? Doug Adams, the AppleScript wallah, has released a neat application called Spins which tells you just that. It scans your iTunes library, then lets you choose a number of ways to sort: by unique tracks, pooled tracks (all tracks with the same name by the same artist, to include different versions), album, artist, and you can get stats about which genres you play the most and even the total play time for your iTunes library.

Spins is fast: with my 56,000-track library, it scans the file and displays info in just a few seconds. It offers all kinds of sorts, and is perfect for those who are into statistics. For just $10, find out much more about your listening habits; you may even be surprised.

Oh, by the way, it’s Mac-only. Sorry to all you Windows users…