Just Updated: Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, Second Edition

My ebook, Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ was a best-selling compendium of tips, tricks and explanations about how to use iTunes to wrangle your digital media collection. More than a year has gone by since its release, and, even though Apple didn’t up the version number by an integer, iTunes has undergone enough changes to warrant a thorough update to this book.

Take Control Books has just released Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, Second Edition. To quote a TidBITS article presenting the book:

Since iTunes 10 originally came out, Apple has revamped its approach to online media, bringing us such new features as iCloud and iTunes Match. This book answers the many questions that users have about these features, including a new chapter dedicated to the Cloud.

At 173 pages for the PDF edition (page counts aren’t relevant to ePub and Kindle versions), there are more than 30 pages of new content in this second edition. Priced at $15 (with special upgrade prices for owners of the first edition), this book helps you appreciate and understand the process of bringing media into iTunes, tagging it, adding album artwork, and organizing it into playlists.

Once you’ve become an import specialist and tagging genius, you can enjoy your music, movies, audiobooks, and ebooks, and more without hassles when it’s time to find a particular item or when you want to do something special like sync a select subset of music to your iPod, create a party playlist, identify music you haven’t heard in a while, listen to the chapters in an audiobook in the proper order, or get the most out of iTunes in the Cloud features, including iTunes Match.

So, if you want to be an iTunes power user, get a copy now – in PDF, ePub or Kindle format, or any combination of the above – from Take Control Books.

A Harsh Attack on Steve Jobs, By Way of a Review (Not Mine) of His Biography

It is not often my wont to criticize what other journalists and bloggers write, but I came across a review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs on the elitist New York Review of Books web site (the same one which, a couple of weeks ago, a conspiracy-theory fueled article about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair). I’ve subscribed to the NYRB off and on over the years, but the type of attack articles they’ve taken to publishing pretty much ensures that I won’t do so again.

I read the Steve Jobs biography, which is certainly no surprise, since I write about Apple products. (If you haven’t read it yet, it’s about half-price on Amazon.com.) Fittingly, I read it on my iPad. I have to admit that I found it painful to read. I had long heard stories about Jobs’ mercurial personality, but reading it in such harsh detail was brutal and shocking. I think it’s fair to write about the biography, and about Jobs, and point out strengths and weaknesses in books, but the NRYB’s approach is to tell the entire story of a book in a “review,” which is especially problematic for a novel. Do you really want to know most of what happens in a novel before you read it? Over the years, I managed to avoid such reviews, unless I had already read the novels in question.

In this “review,” then, the author, Sue Halpern, tells the story of Steve Jobs. She is harshly critical of Jobs, and of Apple in general. Of Jobs himself, she says:

Steve Jobs cried a lot. This is one of the salient facts about his subject that Isaacson reveals, and it is salient not because it shows Jobs’s emotional depth, but because it is an example of his stunted character. Steve Jobs cried when he didn’t get his own way. He was a bully, a dissembler, a cheapskate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator, and sometimes he was very nice. Isaacson does not shy away from any of this, and the trouble is that Jobs comes across as such a repellent man, cruel even to his best friend Steve Wozniak, derisive of almost everyone, ruthless to people who thought they were his friends, indifferent to his daughters, that the book is often hard to read.

I have to agree with part of the above. While I wouldn’t use some of the adjectives that Halpern uses, I did find the book painful to read, and ended up skipping over parts of it.

But where Ms. Halpern goes wrong is in blaming Apple for the woes of the world:

The day before Jobs died, Apple launched the fifth iteration of the iPhone, the 4S, and four million were sold in the first few days. Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’s art.

Ms. Halpern seems to think that Apple is, if not the only manufacturer of computers and cellphones, most likely the largest and most responsible for their impact. In fact, Apple’s market share for computers is in the single digits, and while iPhones sell well, Apple’s market share is slipping in that sector. (Apple actually only sells fewer than 5% of all cellphones in the world.)

It’s convenient to attack Apple as a poster child for the computer industry, as was common with Microsoft a decade ago. But it’s not hard to look up statistics to back up the claim quoted above, which is the final paragraph of Ms. Halpern’s review. I’ll accept her judgement of the book, but her knowledge of the computer and cellphone industry is seriously lacking. The New York Review of Books could use some fact-checkers to avoid such a blatant personally-motivated attack.

Review: The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare on CD

Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon FR

Note: This article is originally from 2006. I repost this article from time to time, because these recordings are so enjoyable that anyone interested in Shakespeare should own them.

“We might be better off with public readings of Shakespeare,” says Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. “Ideally, of course, Shakespeare should be acted, but since he is now almost invariably poorly directed and inadequately played, it might be better to hear him well than see him badly.” Not being as qualified to judge the quality of current Shakespearean performances as the erudite Bloom, I suffer from a dearth of Shakespeare here in the French countryside.

While we cannot always find such public readings, we can listen to recorded, dramatized versions of the plays, as with this set of Shakespeare’s 38 plays. With a cast of hundreds, most actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company, these works come alive through a skillful combination of reading, sound effects and music. As radio used to do when dramatizing works, the Arkangel set gives you the acting and the atmosphere. While one may be a bit irked by the “original” music, a sort of Coltrane-inspired Elizabethan music–why didn’t they use actual music of the period, including that composed for Shakespeare’s plays?–the overall production quality is about as good as it gets. Each play comes in a single CD jewel case containing two or three discs, with an insert containing a synopsis and cast information, and the discs are tracked by act and scene (with a handful of scenes that are split at the end of one CD and the beginning of the next one). When I imported a few of these discs to iTunes, the Gracenote CD Database, which iTunes uses to display track information, showed precise tags for each track, including, in the case of scenes that were split, the precise line numbers for the ends and beginnings.

The quality of these performances is excellent. While the occasional actor or actress sounds less convincing that they should–which may be because these actors are trained for working on the stage, not recording in studios–most of them are top-notch. One is quickly enveloped by the atmosphere, both textual and sonorous, and the plays roll on with astounding energy and verve. The tone is that of radio: not the radio of today, of course, but the time when radio was a source of performance and drama. But there is now “old-time” sound in these productions–they are modern and vibrant.

The recordings use the text of the Complete Pelican Shakespeare, an excellent and very readable edition of the plays. (This edition has thick enough paper to make reading easy, unlike some others, and the texts of the plays are in two columns with notes at the bottom of each page.) While there are some minor changes in the text (listening to King John, I noticed that “God” was replaced by “Heaven” throughout), reading the plays while listening is an enlightening experience. You get the advantage of clearly knowing which character is talking (which can be difficult at times when simply listening), you can see the spelling of unfamiliar words (and check the notes), and you get the emotion and intonation that you miss when only reading. Together, the recordings and printed text provide much more immediate understanding of the works.

At just under $400, this set is expensive, for sure. However, that comes to about $10 per play, and how can you put a value on Shakespeare? For fans of the Bard, or for those interested in discovering his work more deeply, this is a worthy investment. You may want to check and see if your library has this set, at least to sample one play before purchasing, but you really can’t go wrong with actors of this caliber, impeccable production, and a huge, heavy box that will impress your friends.

(Note that there is also a very good set of the plays from the BBC on DVD.)

Book Review: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo

Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon FR

Dogen’s Shobogenzo is the most profound and perplexing work of the Zen canon. Written in the 13th century by the founder of the Soto school of Zen, the Shobogenzo is a collection of texts written over a long period of time that examine the concepts and practices of Zen.

This edition is a milestone, representing a complete English translation of the Shobogenzo, in an extremely attractive set of books. The two volumes are, while a bit expensive, very well produced. The paper is thick and opaque, the font is very readable, and the binding will last one or more lifetimes. Volume one has introductory matter about Dogen’s life and the composition of the Shobogenzo, and the first part of the texts (fascicles 1-47). (For a more thorough discussion of Dogen’s life and career, as well as an analysis of his thought, see Eihei Dogen: Mystical Realist, by Hee-Jin Kim.) The second volume contains the remainder of the texts (fascicles 48-95 plus a 96th fascicle not included in the original edition of the Shobogenzo), and an extensive glossary explaining the terms used in the books.

Some of the texts in this collection have been published previously, in Moon in a Dewdrop, Beyond Thinking, and Enlightenment Unfolds. In fact, many readers may find those there volumes sufficient in content, and more agreeable in overall price. (Another useful book is Realizing Genjokoan: The Key to Dogen’s Shobogenzo, by Shohaku Okumura, which is a detailed, and very accessible commentary on this section of the Shobogenzo.)

This glossary in volume two is essential to the reading and study of this work. Readers will need to look up terms to get a better understanding of what they really mean. Often a single word, or a short phrase, may seem obscure when reading, but the glossary goes into detail to explain it better. In addition, the glossary serves as an index, with references to where the terms are used.

But the glossary is a bit problematic. At more than 200 pages, this is a big chunk of the text, and it is, of course, only available in the second volume. If you are reading the first volume, you still need to have this glossary handy, so you’ll need to have both books. I wish that Shambhala had included the glossary as a separate volume – perhaps a paperback – so it could be more easily consulted. Or, if they could provide an e-book version, popping it on an iPad would make reading and consulting it more practical.

This doesn’t detract from the overall work, which is, I must say, an amazing feat of translation that has taken decades. The text is beautifully rendered, and, while just one interpretation, it certainly has the weight of experience both of the translators as translators and as practitioners. This set is a monument to the work of Dogen.

Coming Soon: Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, Second Edition

I’ve just finished my update to my ebook Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ. Unlike what Apple usually does, incrementing the iTunes version in the fall, this year they released iTunes 10.5, which is in spite of its version number, a fairly important upgrade. The iCloud features added to iTunes may change the way you use the program.

So, since we can’t name the book Take Control of iTunes 11, we’re appending a “Second Edition” to the title, to show that it is a major overhaul. All together, there are about 30 pages of new content, and dozens of pages that have been updated, revised or tweaked, as I have found new solutions and tricks, and in response to questions from readers.

This book will be released early January, and there will be a special upgrade price to owners of the first edition. Those who have purchased the book in the past few months (I don’t have an exact cut-off date yet), the upgrade will be free, and if you buy a copy now, the upgrade will, of course, be free as well.

As soon as it’s available, I’ll post more information here.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

You can love him or hate him, disagree with some, much or all that he said, but there’s no denying that Christopher Hitchens was one of the great journalists, nay, writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An insatiable lover of life, Hitchens was known for the large quantities of alcohol he could consume, yet still be able to meet his deadlines. As Graydon Carter writes in Vanity Fair today:

He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades.

As a writer, I appreciate the always precise and incisive prose that Hitchens produced. Reading his columns and articles shows just how mediocre the rest of us can be, and hearing him speak, often in debates, shows just how weak most of us are when arguing a point.

Hitchens’ opinions were carefully thought out, and he annoyed the left, who felt he had turned his coat, and the right, who had trouble countering his arguments. He wrote about politics, literature, and the cancer that cut his life short with verve and wit. In his memoir, Hitch-22, in his essays, such as the recent collection Arguably, and in his polemic God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens wrote unambiguously and intensely. Like him or not, agree with him or disagree, you can’t deny that he had a way with words, and that he said what he meant every time.

See all of Hitchens’ books on Amazon.com.

Book Notes: Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon UK

Update: Reposted in memory of Christopher Hitchens, who passed away yesterday, December 15, 2011. A fine way to remember Hitch would be to listen to the audio version of this book, which he read himself.

It is, of course, nothing more than chance that the day after I finish Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22, I come across this statement on the Vanity Fair web site:

I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice.

(The engagements he mentions refer to his book tour.)

Ah, Hitch, all that smoking and drinking is catching up to you. Let’s hope you win this battle.

But on to the book. If you don’t know Christopher Hitchens, he’s a polemicist, contrarian, journalist and defender of human rights. He’s been everywhere, from Cuba as a your revolutionary to Afghanistan as a reporter covering the recent war. He’s been to Iraq, both before and during the war, to India, covering the “case” of Mother Theresa, and to Bosnia as the hostilities started. He likes to claim that he’s the only writer to have been to all three countries that make up the “axis of evil”: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

This “memoir” is a loose collection of recollections and essays that give an overview of his life as a politically engaged journalist. Many people first heard about Hitchens a couple of years ago when his book God is Not Great was released. Hitchens went on a “crusade” to show how “religion poisons everything” and was involved in numerous debates (all polite and friendly) with religious figures around the US and UK. Unlike other “new atheists,” Hitchens is rather aggressive in both his beliefs (or lack thereof) and his argumentation. He pulls no punches, and this can be seen in most of his writing, and in this memoir.

Hitchens has been scorned by the left for undergoing many changes in his political beliefs over the years, starting out as a Troskyist, and ending up, as he says in the last chapter of Hitch-22, a “skeptic,” far more willing to look at multiple ideas than to accept the tenets of a party or group. This has led him to famously support the Bush war in Iraq, though, as he points out in the book, he was for the war long before it became a war. Together with a small group of human rights activists, after seeing what Saddam Hussein’s regime was doing to Iraqis, he fought for regime change in Washington. His literary friends include Martin Amis, Ian McEwen, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, James Fenton and many others.

Hitchens was born in the UK but became American after 9/11, having lived in the US since the early 1980s. He writes for a number of magazines, having run the gauntlet of left-leaning (and leftist periodicals), long writing for The Nation, and now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Slate and other publications.

What impresses me most about Hitchens is the quality of his writing. He has acerbic wit, and his sentences sparkle. His arguments are very convincing (even if you don’t always agree with him, which can be difficult), and he pulls no punches. This memoir is 100% Hitchens: from the descriptions of his days in school to the present, he tells it like it is (or was), with a style that glitters.

I listened to the audiobook version of this work, read by Hitchens himself. While I wouldn’t classify this as an excellent reading – Hitchens takes commas for periods, and this makes the reading a bit fragmented – hearing him tell his story in his own voice was worth the price of admission.

If you want an interesting read about politics, growing up, literary circles, and plain old contrarianism, Hitch-22 is a great book. You may not agree with all of Hitchens’ opinions, but at least he’s committed to them and presents them without waffling. Would that we had more political journalists willing to write like Hitch.

There’s a very moving interview about the book, but where Hitch also discusses his cancer, death and mortality, from the Charlie Rose Show.

You might also want to read Arguably, a huge collection of essays by Hitchens, published in 2011.

Writing a Novel for NaNoWriMo? Get My Take Control of Scrivener Book at Half Price

It was the best of months, it was the worst of months… With apologies to Charles Dickens, the annual National Novel Writing Month, commonly shortened to NaNoWriMo, is upon us, that month when anyone feeling a novel bubbling up inside can join a multitude of others in the camaraderie of putting pen to paper, er… placing pixels on, er… writing stuff down.

To aid in this most noble of tasks, we have a month-long, 50%-off sale on two Take Control ebooks: Kirk McElhearn’s Take Control of Scrivener 2 and Michael Cohen’s Take Control of TextExpander. Although we’re certain that Kirk’s literary homages to Herman Melville and Michael’s punning wordplay are worthy of emulation, plot and character development aren’t our focus with Take Control. Our focus is helping you with technology, and in this case we’ve slashed the prices on these two ebooks because the programs they help you master—Scrivener and TextExpander—are brilliant examples of how technology can improve the writing process, whether you’re writing science fiction, a what-if historical novel, or yet another zombie romance.

Each ebook lists for $10, so with this sale you can pick up either one for $5 or buy both for $10.

To buy either or both of these books, go to the Take Control Books web site.