One of the great things about competition in a capitalist economy is advancement. Someone develops and produces a product, shortly there after someone else creates a slightly better version. This goes on and on until we end up with movies directed by Michael Bay. In an example of this, Barnes & Noble released the Nook today. Everybody who preordered the new Nook eReader emailed me today and they both have mixed feelings about the Nook.

B&N played it smart by aiming for the same hetro audiences that plunk  down cash to see a Michael Bay movie by making the Nook more badass, social, and compatible. They drastically cranked up the “eBook badass dial” to eleven. The Nook has a secondary screen that allows users to scroll through book covers ala iTunes. Sure, the Kindle has a keyboard, but that is only for people who like functionality. As everyone knows, the target audience for badass things like Michael Bay movies reads voraciously, so B&N will make a killing.

The Nook has taken new steps twaords making the eReader experience more social. Those with kindles know that reading in public leads to spending almost as much time talking about the Kindle as reading it. Amazon just doesn’t do brick and mortar, but since the money is in the content, basing a store on selling the Kindle hardware and limited accessories is about as smart as putting a battery-draining LCD on an eReader so that users can squint and barely distinguish titles with similar covers. The Nook, however, has a book sharing feature that lets users loan out books to others. This feature is not only cool, but rather necessary. Because the initial launch of the Nook has a rather long load time for books, this gives users the ability to discuss which books another might wish to borrow.

Quite unlike the Kindle, the Nook supports the more common eBook formats, such as ePub, in exchange for the proprietary formats than Amazon’s Kindle forces users to adapt to, such as TXT.

One area that Amazon has decided is a priority to gain an edge in the competition is full support for the seeing impaired. No longer will the blind be forced to wander through the Kindle’s muted interface. In the not too distant future (looks like summer), the Kindle with receive an option to navigate through its menus audibly. Jumping on this bandwagon of making products accessible to the visually impaired are Ford and Colt Firearms. Looks like next rear will be great year to read at home, away from streets, and blind people driving cars.

So, which is more important, the word or the medium? I believe that the content trumps the content’s media of delivery. There are those who rationally and passionately argue the other way and they are, for the most part, fags.

One look at Alan Kaufman’s The Electronic Book Burning pisses me off. Fags like this are more in love with the fag-book-coffee-small-business-book-store-ass-pirate culture. First, anyone who wants to rant about the demise of the fag-book-coffee-small-business-book-store-ass-pirate culture and wants his argument to be taken as a serious, intellectual, hetro, and broad criticism of the eBook, should not write about the demise of book stores in San Francisco. Second, remember to close the fucking center tag so that you’re shit doesn’t have two paragraphs of left-aligned text followed by the rest of the page centered. Third, the horizontal bars that simulate a growing fire are awesome, keep that. Fourth, go fuck yourself.

The eBooks are not about a single entity (Google) controlling electronic content. The new media is not a cultural change. For fuck’s sake, how many people bitched about the demise of the community and university library when the sum total of all human knowledge became available to every household able to afford the baud? The world will become free of its paper anchor. Anyone will be able to publish anything from anywhere. The value of authorship is in the creation of the content, not the media the content is delivered.

For the love of god, these book-loving Neanderthals cry about the loss of a book’s tactile sense, the smell of old paper, and the taste of some dude’s dick they met at fag-book-coffee-small-business-book-store-ass-pirate club meeting. The way these pieces of shit cry about longing for the smell of a worn book reminds me of a Japanese pervert who buys used panties from  a vending machine so that he can get an erection while watching two cosplay ducks dry-hump in a park surrounded by people throwing pickle-chips.

Did we cry when we lost the warm smile of the milkman in favor of purchasing milk from a market? Who bitched when modern refrigeration became installed in American households and we lost the companionship of the iceman? What about the automation that did away with the friendly Ma Bell operator? What about the smell and feel of a horse lost to the adoption of the automobile? How about the nostalgia felt for stone in the age of iron? How about the loss of the scroll? Who the fuck doesn’t miss the days when college students hauled around a semester’s worth of baked clay tablets prominently featuring all to the wedges necessary to facilitate each course’s required consumption of knowledge?

In short, fuck off.

The recent patch for the Knidle provides an extended battery life, native PDF support, and screen rotation. Others see this as a blessing as well as a rather minor update that could point to something bigger. But in reality, it is fucking pathetic.

I love my Kindle 2. It is the best piece of technology that I have ever acquired. The home computer brought computing into the house, but it didn’t radically alter life. The Internet, however, completely changed the way a large portion of the population lived and interacted with each other. I still see the interweb as a research tool. Many of my generation, see the Internet as a communications tool. In truth, this is because they are ignorant savages bereft of intelligence. With the research tools available today, there is no need to ask anyone a question ever unless there is a lack of documentation, the person asking doesn’t know how to use the internee, or the person asking the question if a fucking re-re. Most of the ‘tards of my generation are as clueless as how technology works as my parents.

What I am trying to say is that as much as the interweb changed the lives of my generation from that of our parents, the Kindle has changed my life. I always have it on me. I used to keep a notebook listing books referenced by other books that I would look at and/or acquire at a later time. Now I just switch on the wireless and grab the book in question. Reading a normal book has begun to piss me off because it requires both hands to turn the page. The kindle is a fantastic piece of hardware. The hardware is elegant in every way and well thought out. Which begs the question, why the fuck is the software so shitty.

Why can I not let other users borrow books yet. This should have been there from the get-go. Native PDF capability should have been there at launch as well. i am a graphic artist and I can convert from any type of format to any other type of format. Anyone in my generation who doesn’t have their head crammed way up their ass distracted with sports and finding the latest bit of ass could convert a PDF into any other type of format. So, Amazon added the PDF capability for the fucking idiots who can’t get their shit together. The biggest sin in the Kindle software is the list. The inability to organize 1K+ books by topic or directory if fucking retarded. It made since in the original Kindle with that damn scroll wheel on the side, but with the Kindle 2, it makes as much since as running an Alienware system with OS/2.

So, yeah, the patch is nice, but for the fucking love of God, fix your broken shit.