It seems only weeks ago that I was reviewing a BeBook Mini ebook reader here; so what on earth possessed me to buy an Amazon Kindle? And what do I think of it so far?

Well, first – the justification.

I’ve used my little BeBook mini a lot. An awful lot. Every trip into London has been spent with my nose in a book – whether Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (just excellent, by the way), the usual Sherlock Holmes mysteries, or Stieg Larsson trilogy (downloaded illegally, but I own the printed books). I’ve purchased one book – an Android programming book. I’ve used it to hold my notes when speaking at conferences. It lasts forever. It’s a marvellous device.

The downsides are relatively few: but all surround the availability and price of content. The likes of Waterstones and Foyles do sell eBooks, but at prices that are the same – and sometimes more expensive – than the print versions. To download these requires the PC open, with the myriad of distractions it offers. And the 5-inch screen – not quite large enough – was just too small to comfortably read freely-available Google books in PDF format.

The new Kindle offers respite from these downsides. The prices are very cheap. That new Tony Blair book, A Journey? It’s £12.50 (down from £25) on Amazon.co.uk in hardback right now; but just £6.99 on the Kindle. And a look at the Kindle store seems to show that this kind of discount isn’t too unusual.

Something else I wasn’t too aware of – Amazon.co.uk offer samples. The first chapter is free to read – they’re hoping that it hooks you in and that you buy the rest of the book. This is a wonderful idea, and I suspect will be very costly to my wallet; it certainly worked in the case of the Blair book, which I found fascinating (never having read a politician’s autobiography before).

There will always be the curmudgeons who want a proper paper book; but, for me, the above two points outweigh the undeniable niceness of a paper product in your hand. Cheap books that you can start reading before you buy them? Count me in. And there’s nothing to stop you buying the proper paper books if you want to.

So: to the device.

I’m sure you’ve read the other reviews, so I’ll not bore you with details you could read on the product info page anyway.

My initial reaction was that it’s very well built. It charges using a micro-USB: the same as my mobile phone (hurray!). The power button is an annoying slidey one of the type loved by Sony for some inexplicable reason and loathed and hated by anyone with common sense; but even this feels expensive, not cheap – even though all indications are that this is a unit that’s been built for volume, not luxury. The unit is all nicely rounded, and sits well in the hand. (The plastic is a bit too easy to scratch though. Buy a case.)

I’ve been awed by ePaper (or whatever we’re supposed to call the screen) already; but the Kindle’s contrast is excellent when compared to the BeBook: black is nicely dark, and the screen is nicely light. It’s very easy to read – and really comes into its own outside.

The inbuilt wifi (I just went for the wifi version – couldn’t see the point in the £50 for 3G) is dangerous. One click of the clicky thing, and you can buy a book – no passwords, no credit card information, nothing; it comes preset to your Amazon account, y’see. (Incidentally, you can cancel a purchase just as easily, so don’t panic). The inbuilt (experimental) browser seems to do a moderately good job should I wish to log into a free wifi hotspot like The Cloud in the pub; and it connected quickly and flawlessly to the wifi networks I have access to.

Ah, yes, the browser. This was another justification for buying the device. I reckoned that it might be a perfect Google Reader client for sitting outside and catching up on the world. It uses Webkit, so renders quite well; and the standard Google Reader website works acceptably on it (keyboard shortcuts and everything). As a browser, it’s adequate, though. Yes, it works – the BBC News website (bookmarked on the device at the now-defunct news.bbc.co.uk URL) renders decently enough once zoomed in; but it’s fairly slow. An iPad this isn’t. Mind you, at £109, you’re probably not expecting it to be.

So, to the book reading experience.

A genuine Kindle edition book works well: you have a surprising amount of control over the text density, line height, and so on. A neat trick is moving the cursor down to a word you don’t understand (“toper”, in my case) and a dictionary definition pops up and helpfully tells you that it’s a person who drinks a lot. Highlight a sentence or two, and you can save a quote in your own Amazon account – or hit ‘share’ to publish it to Twitter, like this. Page turns are snappy – far faster than the BeBook, though the speed didn’t worry me. The page-turn buttons confused me at first (I thought the left-hand one went backwards), but turning the pages is now second-nature. It’s an enjoyable experience.

The font geek in me is disappointed at the lack of embedded fonts for books. Everything is rendered in a standard Amazon Kindle font (which looks like it’s Caecilia). I can change this to a slightly condensed version (which is what you see above), or a variant of Helvetica, but that’s it. The choice of typeface in a book is part of the book’s charm; and it’s disappointing that Amazon deem it unimportant.

However, all this changes when you try to read a PDF on the device – for example, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Follow that link and you’ll see a wonderful old book, owned by someone called Russell Gray in February 1884, and now the property of Harvard. Download the PDF, and stick it onto the Kindle, and you still get this old feel. Unlike the BeBook, however, the Kindle copes admirably with this format: pages load in less than a second (unlike the BeBook, which took four seconds or so). And – more importantly for me – the extra inch of screen makes the facsimile much clearer to read. If only I could get rid of the progress bar at the bottom it would be clearer still. Please, Amazon?

Finally, I haven’t had it long enough to fully comment on the battery – only to say that it looks significantly worse than the BeBook; but then, that wifi doesn’t come cheap. You can turn the wifi off in the menu – and I have – but it looks as if it’ll still outlast the longest flight possible.

Oh, and if you’ve got a Kindle 3 already? Go to the home page, and hold down Shift + Alt + M for a little easter egg… (grin)

So far, then: most impressed.

As per my disclosure, links to Amazon in this article are affiliate links. Products won’t cost you any more as a result, and I might earn enough to buy a small pint of very cheap beer.

I was told that if I took part in the Earshot Creative Review, I might get a glass of beer for my time.

This was enough for me.

If you fancy thirty minutes of discussion about radio creative, during which I’m really rather rude about LBC, polite about Absolute, and am amazed at a rather brilliant ad featuring Brack Obama, you’re welcome to take a listen. (You’ll also find it on your PURE connected radio; just search for ‘Earshot’ in the podcast section).

PS: I didn’t get the beer above; that’s a Montréal craft beer, and is unavailable in London, I’m afraid.

Fifteen years ago, I was working in Sheffield when “PhoneDay” happened – the big switch from 0742 to 0114.

Note how I didn’t say 01142. No. That would be wrong. Sheffield phone numbers are all 0114 xxx xxxx, but when they changed, all of the local bits – the xxx xxxx – started with a ’2′. They don’t any more.

Formatting UK phone numbers is a nuisance; but Media UK’s been doing it moderately right over the past fifteen years. Now we’re doing it perfectly, thanks to this page where, towards the bottom, you’ll find the complete “programmer’s pattern” for formatting UK telephone numbers.

I’ve published the PHP code I use to format UK telephone numbers correctly on this website: it’s a bit nastily formatted, but it’s the actual code that Media UK uses (hence the rather odd function name). You’re welcome to use this code however you want.

If you’re a PHP programmer and can make it prettier and better, please do shout.

You’ve probably spotted that my subtitle for this blog is “where new platforms and radio collide”. It seems to me that if you put together software developers and radio practitioners, you could significantly reboot radio for the connected generation.

We went some way towards managing this with Radio at the Edge, the (now sadly defunct) Radio Academy conference. But, in spite of it being “on the list” for a couple of years, we failed to quite manage to get hackers next to radio people.

It’s with quite a lot of excitement, therefore, that I read the following press release about “ON2: Test Signals”, an event in Berlin in October, which I copy/paste below.

Will you be there?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 25th 2010, BERLIN. Dates for “ON2: Test Signals”, which will bring together software developers and radio practitioners to demonstrate, discuss and develop new ways of applying software to radio, have been announced. ON2 will take place from Friday 22 October – Sun 24 October in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany.

“Far from killing radio, the internet is actually behind a remarkable resurgence,” says festival producer Adam Thomas from Sourcefabric, the not-for-profit organisation responsible for the leading open source radio software Campcaster. “We’re seeing an increasing number of community and non-commercial stations use software and the internet in hugely innovative ways to boost listener figures across all platforms.”

Two such stations, reboot.fm, Berlin’s free cultural radio station and user-generated radio pioneers Open Broadcast from Switzerland, are official partners of the festival.

Also appearing at the festival will be radio futurologist James Cridland, Mozilla Drumbeat’s Henrik Moltke, and representatives from Creative Commons, Unikom, Global Radio, RadioDNS, newthinking, Mekong ICT and Radio Aporee. Alongside many other radio and software organisations, they will provide three days of expert keynotes, open presentations, hands-on workshops, one-on-one mentoring and social events.

ON2 are currently considering applications to hold a workshop or presentation in the fields of software and radio. To apply, please write to contact@sourcefabric.org with a summary of your idea and project.

Public events will be free to attend, but sign up is required. The festival will be of particular interest to radio station managers, open source developers, web entrepreneurs, hardware hackers and journalists.

The festival is an official satellite event of transmediale, festival for art and digital culture and is the first in a series of open-source workshop events supported by the Free Culture Incubator. The festival is also partnered by Mute, a magazine dedicated to exploring culture and politics after the net. This is the second version of the festival following one held in June 2010 in Basel, Switzerland.

More information:

Festival wiki: http://wiki.sourcefabric.org/display/ON2
Sourcefabric: http://www.sourcefabric.org
reboot.fm: http://reboot.fm
Open Broadcast: http://www.openbroadcast.ch
transmediale: http://transmediale.de
Mute magazine: http://metamute.org/
Free Culture Incubator: http://www.transmediale.de/en/fci
Haus der Kulturen der Welt: http://www.hkw.de/

or write to Adam at contact@sourcefabric.org

In the US, the Infinite Dial reports a rather fancy pause and rewind radio is now being promoted – in a new Buick car. (And you can do it with analogue FM). Watch the TV ad – that’s very cool.

Less cool is the NAB’s odd bullying behaviour to insist on FM chips into mobile phones. RadioInsights doesn’t think it’s doing radio any favours, while the Infinite Dial points out that there’s probably no need to bully the manufacturers anyway. The internet comic Penny Arcade has a predictable view which the NAB has reversed the radio industry into, in my opinion. Shame.

To to the UK, and the BBC’s Salford move turned to high farce this week, as the HR director of BBC Salford refuses to actually, er, move to Salford. That news comes on the heels of news that the man in charge of BBC Salford, Peter Salmon, is also refusing to make the leap. And the radio network that’s going there? 5 Live’s controller, Adrian van Klaveren, is also not going. Meanwhile, mandatory relocations are being forced on BBC staff: some with just 6 months notice. While all this is going on, people proudly proclaim on Twitter that they “love the BBC”, and according to Mark Thompson, some of those “I love the BBC” Twitter feeds trended in the top five in the whole world. Mark: first, it’s not a twitter feed, it’s a tweet (or a twitter message); and secondly, they’re saying they’re proud of the programmes. This is not, necessarily, an endorsement of BBC management.

Mark ‘Thommo’ Thompson’s speech at the Edinburgh International TV Festival also contained an astonishing claim: as he described that dry and lifeless view of public broadcasting which is prevalent in America and elsewhere and which holds that it must never ever include programmes which significant numbers of people might actually want to watch or listen to. He’s not seen the schedules of PBS (the ‘Public Broadcasting System’) – containing the dry and lifeless Antiques Roadshow, Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure, or BBC World News – and since he said ‘broadcasting’ and not ‘television’, one assumes that he’s similarly ignored NPR – a radio network that reaches around 12% of the US adult population each week (Radio 4 reaches 20%) with some rather marvellous programmes. Slagging off the competition is an odd thing to do.

Mind you, when The Guardian prints this kind of tosh, perhaps he deserves our support. And the BBC isn’t all bad, by any means: this week they released their MHEG+ toolkit for other broadcasters to use: exactly the type of “agree on technology, compete on content” behaviour which the BBC should be famous for; and the (government-funded) BBC World Service is recognised world over as a ‘remarkable bargain’.

Elsewhere, Jeff Jarvis points out the German hatred for Google Streetview might be rather irrational; and I spent a lovely day in Zurich on Thursday – above – speaking at the SwissRadioDay. I got a number of nice reviews – thank you.

Typically, digital radio offers traditional radio broadcasters the chance of earning additional revenue from increased coverage and the benefits of name-based tuning allowing better name-retention in diary-based radio research. But, by thinking differently, digital radio offers many other ways of earning additional revenue.

…from a front-page article of mine in Eureka magazine from WorldDMB. Read the article in full at the WorldDMB website – click the Eureka link on the right-hand side.

(The money, above, is North Korean, and was worth 63p when it was legal tender. You can probably earn more than this.)

An important part of trying new things is just that – trying new things.

Some things work excellently from the get-go. Some things need time to get completely right. Sometimes you don’t have that time.

dabbl was one of those things. As I said when it launched, it was an experiment. It’s relatively cheap to try out a new radio format on new digital platforms; yet few UK radio companies do it. Any business needs to innovate to succeed; and an important part of innovation is not to only do those things that are a ‘dead cert’.

I wrote a paper about a user-generated radio station during my time at Virgin Radio, and some of those ideas, I gather, went into dabbl. The more interesting bits didn’t make it to the initial launch, however, and fundamentally the product didn’t evolve or iterate beyond a jukebox service. My suspicion is that dabbl was a “10% time” plaything, but one that management recognised would have taken more than 10% of time to turn into a proper product.

Some will see this as a failure of dabbl – or digital radio in general – to earn revenue. But that’s not the case. Dabbl never carried any advertising or sponsorship, as far as I’m aware, and wasn’t part of Absolute’s network sell. The fact that Absolute carefully never branded the station with their master brand shows that it was always designed to be a test and a learning experience. I’ve no doubt that the lessons learnt from dabbl will feed back into the company’s other radio programming.

Absolute’s other experiments, Absolute 80s and sister-station Absolute Radio 90s, are doing excellently well, contributing to great overall figures for the Absolute brand. In fact, Absolute Radio 90s started an ‘experiment’ of its own today, becoming the company’s third station to go nationwide on DAB Digital Radio for a limited time. You ought to listen while you can.

I admire the management team at Absolute for having the guts to try new things, and not being afraid to review these experiments. It’s notable that pop-up services like these are an established part of Australia’s digital radio landscape. We need more of the UK radio industry to experiment like this, too.

(Disclaimer: I’m doing a small piece of consulting work for Absolute at the moment, but I’d have said all this stuff anyway, and I’ve been less than effusive about some things Absolute have done recently anyway)