CS and the City

To be fair, the problem isn’t so much one of the Kindle’s. It’s more of a problem with books. I’ve had PDF books for years. PDFs were the cheaper method of getting textbooks for classes that were not always useful and they were often the only source of technical documentation in the days before Amazon (did I just date myself?). Over these same years, I bought many more books. To me, the physical copy of the book was absolutely preferred over reading on a computer. That all changed with the Kindle (and presumably for eBook readers before it).

After centuries, books are about to have their very first format transitions. Here comes that famous blogger hyperbole: Print is obsolete.

You’ve probably been through at least one of these before: Buying Blu-ray to replace DVDs that replaced VHS only a few years before it or upgrading from vinyl to cassette to CD to MP3 in a matter of a few decades). Each transition becomes increasingly costly for consumers as their libraries tend to get larger over time.

What remains to be seen is whether book authors will gorge on users paying to convert their library or, perhaps having felt the pain of format obsolescence for themselves, allow their fans to enjoy the content they already have a legal right to for free. I’m certainly being an idealist but I’m hoping its the latter. Time for some empirical evidence.

The Experiment
I have a small number of books on a range of subjects sitting my to-read queue. All are in various stages of completion. I would rather continue to read using my fancy new device, but I’m very opposed to purchasing a new digital copy when I have a perfectly readable analog copy.

To this end, I propose the following experiment:

I will email each of the books’ authors with a simple proposition: I will return my copy of the book to the author (or give it to a friend, second hand store, whatever is the author’s preference), and in exchange, I will ask them to give me a digital copy of the book. I’d love if they were able to gift me the Kindle version, but I will take any digital version they have and do they heavy lifting to get it onto the Kindle. They are, or course, free to reject my offer (as I expect most will).

If I were to write a review, the title of this post would be the eventual conclusion. That said, let me bullet point out the pros and cons:

Things I really like

• Great Customer Service: My first one was defective when received (Back button was broken). A call to customer service had one automated menu, a real person, and a next-day replacement in under fifteen minutes
• I can convert PDFs using Amazon’s converter
• I can read anywhere, while only hauling a perfect sized tablet around
• Cute female book nerds everywhere are stopping me to ask “Is that the new Kindle?”

Things I don’t like

• Amazon is wasting the annotations feature by just dumping the results in a txt file
• The bookstore’s coverage is relatively weak
• I’m buying into the worst of DRM lock-in: I can’t give books to other people and I can’t read the files outside of my Kindle (and the Kindle app on iPhone)

Though it’s been a poor season of roll up the rim to win for myself, my parents managed to snag one of the Garmin Nüvi 250 GPSs.  I’m heading on a Canadian coast-to-coast roadtrip this summer and my parents graciously offered their prize to help make sure I don’t get too lost on the way.  

The 250 is very thin. The outside sports an SD card reader, mini-USB port, and power switch.  Booting it up for the first time, I was surprised to find that Tim Hortons had gone to the trouble of branding the Garmin with a Tims logo at the start.  My roommates joked that it might also have a “Find the nearest Tims” button.  We were even more shocked to find that it actually does.

According to Garmin, they’ve customized it to include more than 3000 locations.  For me, it seems to display the ten or so closest results, the furthest away being 12 km (gives you an idea of the saturation of Tim Hortons in Southern Ontario).  It’s a very cool feature, and makes these GPS prizes pretty unique for the winners.

I noticed that plugging the Garmin into my laptop to charge mounted the filesystem, which let me poke around for what makes the Tim Hortons GPS special.  As far as I can tell, the main directory has a number of .img files that store the map data.  By process of elimination, it looks like the Tim Hortons data is stored in a file called gmapoem.img.  This is a known filename for dealer customizations, and a quick look through a hex editor of my copy shows a few “TIM HORT” strings in the mix.

Seems like any Garmin owners should be able to get the same “Tims button” by adding the gmapoem.img file.  If there are any interested participants, leave a comment and I’ll send you a copy of the file to confirm this.

Beyond that, looks like this gadget has a number of avenues of customization and a features I haven’t discovered yet.  As interesting things crop up, I’ll be sure to publish my findings.