Mixed feelings about Kindle, bookstores’ inevitable demise

I have to be the only guy alive who finds holding an Amazon Kindle for the first time a little emotional.

I’ve always been a voracious reader, sometimes going through several novels at once. I love to kill time at a bookstore, especially ones with tons of used books. There’s nothing like going on a treasure hunt through some attic full of dusty old paperbacks.

I blame my mom. She read to me religiously when I was little. Together, we went through quite a few books during my tender years.

The Kindle is Amazon’s electronic tablet for reading books. I missed that bandwagon by about a year. In fact, the Kindle I held wasn’t even mine; it was a colleague’s. Holding that liquid-crystal-powered reader for the first time was a mixed experience for me because I am fascinated with the promise it holds, but morn what toll it will take.

I love books and exploring book stores.

Yes, good ole, tree-derived, Gutenberg-inspired, pulpy-white-page-filled, books. I almost feel curmudgeonly about it.

But I’m not a curmudgeon. I just have don’t know what to think about the coming digital conversion. Whereas newspapers going from print to digital doesn’t bother me at all, the venerable book’s changeover makes me a little sad. My inner-gadget-geekness stands in conflict with my inner-printed-book-lovingness.

I like the escape. So much of my day is spent in front of something electronic. Although I wouldn’t call a stack of dead tree-derived pages organic, leafing through a book does seem a little more relaxed and natural. Here’s some irony: I prefer teaching myself about Web design through printed books.

As this recession wrecks havoc on many businesses, bookstores are equally being punished. Borders Books and Music is particularly vulnerable. The mega book seller is sitting on a mountain of debt and declining sales. (Barnes & Noble appears to be in better shape.) Even its late return to selling books online doesn’t seem to be helping. After seven years of using Amazon as its online bookshelf, Borders relaunched its own .com last year. Much like newspapers, Borders watched the Web revolution fly by and reacted too late.

I feel some attachment to Borders — it was the first really large book store outside of a library that I had ever been in. My 10-year-old mind nearly exploded the first time I stepped into one.

I’ve used electronic readers before. What makes Kindle different, though, is its ease of use and backing from Amazon. Some hail it as the printed book’s version of an iPod. I found it easy to read, fairly resistant to glare, but lacking a back light. Graphically, again, the text is crisp but all pictures and text are just in black and white. The screen isn’t green, but it did remind of  Nintendo’s original Game Boy. You can access the Kindle bookstore without a wireless connection via Sprint’s mobile network. Authors can even self-publish their works in the online store.

I’ll tell you one thing — my sore back, which lugged at least 18 pounds of books in college, would have loved one of these babies. Who needs sentimentality when you’re walking around campus like pack mule?

TechDirt asks: Is the physical bookstore a thing of the past? Revolution, in whatever form it takes, won’t happen overnight. Still, I fear my beloved brick-and-mortar booksellers and printed books are writing their last chapters.

Struggling industries will try anything

What do you do when you want to save your business from failure? Seek taxes, sue your customers or find some government protection, apparently.

Although the auto and financial industries’ troubles are the obvious, in-the-news examples, many other traditional businesses have been struggling for years too. Think movie, music and newspaper companies.

The Internet being the great disruptive force it is has thrown many firms into a tailspin trying to protect their old business models from its influence. Here are some recent examples.

• Record companies in Canada receive 29 cents — recently up from 21 cents — for every blank CD sold in the country. The Canadian copyright board levies this charge in an attempt to “compensate” artists record companies that are suffering loses due to music piracy. IPods, flash drives and even DVDs are not taxed.
• This guy — who is a professor, god help us — suggests newspapers should seek an antitrust exemption so they can collude and start charging for online subscriptions.
  

  Now, here’s my idea: The newspaper industry should ask the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption that would allow publishers to collaborate on a decision to begin charging for their Web sites. No paper would have to charge, and each paper could determine its own price. But if most papers in a region - San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, for example - began charging for Web access at more or less the same time, many readers would likely subscribe.

• Speaking of papers, this writer and others think the government should revive the Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project to put unemployed journalists to work.
• Ever wonder why sharing music is such a pain in the butt? Blame DRM, which many record, movie and software providers use to block you from sharing their works. What happens when companies put particularly intrusive DRMs in their products? Revolution.

  The Dark Knight, which grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide, was 2008’s most-pirated movie. (Could have all the piracy actually encouraged people to pay and see the blockbuster movie?) Spore, a popular computer title, and despite its DRM, was ’08’s most-pirated computer game. Have they not learned?

  Sony widely received criticism for putting DRM malware in its CDs in 2005. The protection software actually opened users’ computers to viral attacks. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the technology.

  Say what you will about piracy/sharing’s legality, but the Web makes “owning” intellectual property in the 21st century very difficult.

• The Recording Industry of America rushed to shutdown two last.fm-like music-sharing Web sites because the group couldn’t collect royalties. Never mind that these sites encourage more music consumption and exploration.
• The much-hated RIAA has shifted its failing strategy of suing its customers to suing Internet Service Providers. One record company exec has even suggested taxing universities for all the music their students steal.

Even Web companies struggle making money off the Internet. The first dot-com crash showed that your .com needs a business plan beyond piles of venture capital money and unrealistic initial public offerings. (Goodness, Netscape had revenues of just $16 million when it went public and was valued at more than $2 billion(!!).) I believe the later days of Web 2.0 are showing that you can’t count on just advertising to sustain your online business.

Still, some companies successfully mix free and charge services. Basecamp creator 37signals is an oft-cited example.

Bottom line: Businesses are struggling to survive in a world of “free” online. Competition is fierce and creating a scarcity online is difficult. With the cheap cost of entry, anyone can undercut you by being a disruptor. Taxes, suing your customers and government interference are hardly business plans, though.

Nofollow? Yes, fix! Bring some link love to your commenters

WordPress may be blocking your thoughts from the world.

The blogging software automatically inserts a rel=”nofollow” after hyperlinks in the comment section of its blogs. Google, Yahoo and other search engines do not follow links tagged this way. But what if you are legitimately including URLs in comments on WP blogs? Don’t your brilliant comments/links that contribute to the value of the Web deserve a little link love from search engines?

You can’t do much for the comments you submit on other sites, but you can help out your fellow bloggers by:

1. Manually editing the “nofollow” out of your blog’s WordPress source code, or
2. Using a plugin.

Which option should you use?

Manual edit

You are a control freak, aren’t you? Hacking your WP source code isn’t hard, but it can be tedious, especially as updates become available. This means keeping track of your changes and making sure they aren’t erased when you copy over the upgrade files.

I don’t do this to the WordPress sites I manage because it’s too much of a bother to keep track of the edits. Laziness certainly plays a role, too.

Online marketing guru Douglass Karr said he had troubles with the Do Follow plugin and developed his own hands-on solution. In his blog, he gives some tips on how to manually pluck the nofollows out of your comment section.

Plugins

Perishable Press provides a comprehensive list of dofollow plugins. I picked the DoFollow plugin due to its very simple options. Others allow you to specify how many comments a commenter must make, or what length of time must pass, before his or her nofollow is removed.

No spam

I already use WP-reCAPTCHA to prevent comment spam and have Akismet, which comes with WordPress, turned on. Between the two, and moderating my own comments, spam *knock on my wood desk* isn’t much of a problem. Because I “trust” the comments I approve on my own blog, I’m not worried about blog spam, either.

Why nofollow?

Philosophically, the automatic inclusion of nofollow in WP comments makes some sense, especially for bloggers who lack tech savvy or install a blog and forget about it. But moderating your comments and installing basic anti-spam plugins is all a blogger really needs to fight evil spam. Having nofollows around blog comments hurts legitimate efforts to illuminate discourse and drive link love to useful sites.

Discussions about nofollow continue. Here SEOmoz talks with Google’s Matt Cutts, who helped develop the tag in 2005.

Free isn’t always free

Web standards advocates show their love for the World Wide Web Consortium’s recommendations every day through little buttons or links at the bottom of their pages. These links tout the sites’ sound use of W3C’s standards via popular free online validation services.

The movement’s most visible face is a growing and financially challenging component of the W3C’s budget, and the group needs your help to keep it alive. For a small donation, corporate gift (Hewlett-Packard gave a server) or volunteer time, users can help this valuable service stay in operation.

Open-sourcers find advertising antithetical to their movement. Passing on ads — a sure bet for the millions of hits the validators get a month — is a principled and costly decision.

However, the economic downturn is showing a lot of Internet companies that they can’t count on a giant pile of ad money to fuel their ventures. In a blog post, free Web dating site Plentyoffish’s founder laments about the advertisement downturn and a surging, but server-intensive, user base. He writes, “The bigger you get as a free site the less money you make per visit and the more it costs to service a visit.”

Some bloggers suggest the W3C mirror the validator and spread the bandwidth drain. Others think a desktop tool would do the job. (Enterprising developers can grab the open-source code.) As a central part of the standards movement, it seems most logical to host the validators with the W3C, but it may become necessary to spread the pain. Servers and bandwidth aren’t cheap. Even free costs something.

(Via RefreshCleveland)

5 WordPress pet peeves

WordPress 2.7 came out last week. With any software update, I wait until most of the public offers itself as a guinea pig before I upgrade. Sometimes so-called patches or upgrades just cause more misery. I haven’t installed it yet — although the list of new features and interface improvements seem to make 2.7 worth the  upgrade.

Researching other WordPress-powered blogs for major problems with 2.7 reminded me of some of my WordPress pet peeves, here addressed to news Web site and regular site operators.

1. A “Meta” section — Every install of WordPress comes with two default themes, both with a sidebar section called meta. This area contains links for users to login or register. Although probably useful as a WP newbie creates his or her first blog, these links need to go. Why would you provide access to the “secret” backend of your site? Yes, any seasoned user knows how to find the WP login without those links, but leaving them in your design makes it look tacky, almost like an untucked shirt or a piece of toilet paper dangling from your shoe. Seriously, delete this.
2. Disjointed WP installs — Your organization’s content management system will make or break you online. Eight years ago if you bought a crappy, proprietary CMS, you did so because you had no other options, and all that annoying hand coding of html you once did could be replaced by automation. But with that time-saver, came a great time-drainer: You now spend even more trying to work around the restraints of the proprietary CMS. Want to rearrange the front page? Ha! Add a blog? Double ha-ha! Out of this problem grew the disjointed WP install, a theme that looks nothing like the Web site it came from. This can be a jarring and disorientating experience for the user. A look that isn’t cohesive mars your brand and its impact. The public doesn’t go through your Web site with a checklist, but a client might, even if it’s just a mental one.
3. “Admin” — Change your default user name! Many WP security exploits are based on the widespread use of “admin” as the default login name. Besides security, using “admin” as your name makes your blog less personal.
4. “I have a blog … ?” — Remember that blog or new feature your company started a few months ago? When’s the last time you updated it? You cannot grow a community or audience if you don’t nurture it. Just as your body sometimes gets needs eight hours of sleep, a good diet and amphetamines exercise, so does your Web presence. Help it flourish by giving it regular updates. (Looking for help? See these seven good blogging tips.)
5. Coming soon — Promotion means building excitement, and no anticipation is built with a “coming soon” or “under construction” sign. Promote that new feature or section properly, or just drop the notice. If it’s any consolation, this gives you an out when things don’t roll out on time. The Web 2.0 version is “beta” — aka most services on Google.