But I’m not a convert from ink and paper.

No, the switcheroo is from the iPad, much touted by Apple as giving the ultimate ereading experience. For about a year, nearly all my personal book consumption had been on the iPad, either in Apple’s own iBooks app or the free Kindle app which can be added to the iPad.

My Kindle Touch. This is Amazon's top of the line e-ink Kindle. There is a starter model (with the same screen) called the Kindle 4, and the seven inch Kindle Fire which has an LCD screen.

But since last November, I haven’t read a single book on the iPad. I’m in no hurry to read any more, for two main reasons: one, the Kindle’s reflective ‘e-ink’ screen is easier on my eyes, and two, it’s summer and I like to read in our bright back porch where reflections on the iPad’s glossy glass screen make reading very difficult.

(Most of my comments here about the Kindle would apply to any ereaders that use e-ink – e.g. the Kobo, Sony and (not available in New Zealand) the Nook. They all essentially have the same screens. Note, however, that the new Kindle Fire model doesn’t use e-ink, but has similar screen technology to an iPad.)

At first sight, iPad ereaders have an aesthetic edge. The iPad screen is closer in size to a real book, at 9.7 inches (diagonal) compared with the Kindle’s six inches. Superficially, ebooks on the iPad look more like the real thing. They have more elegant fonts, pages that turn realistically and book design niceties like running headers. Navigating around an ebook collection and administering it is much faster and slicker on an iPad.

iPad ereaders go beyond both real books and Kindle books, in letting you change background ‘paper’ colour – even letting you put the display into inverse with white text on a black background – useful if you don’t want to disturb your partner in bed. And of course iPad ereading will always shine (pun intended) where the ambient light level is low. The display is a backlit computer screen whereas the Kindle has a reflective screen that needs external light, just like a paper book.

It was the iPad’s's backlit display that mainly turned me toward the Kindle. The iPad is…sort of…OK, but the Kindle is just nicer to read for extended periods. Kindle fonts are clunky compared with the iPad, but they are more readable. They just sit nicely like real printed type, on a non-reflective background that is more paper-like. The Kindle screen seems small at first, particularly if you’ve made the font fairly big. But I get sucked into that little screen…sucked into the book itself…more than reading a real paper book. It’s a new and compelling reading experience. For me it’s just a better way of reading any book that is essentially all text, like novels and many non-fiction titles.

There is still an honoured place for printed books that are heavy on illustration and good design. I like handling them and I like reading them. I far prefer browsing through them. And I earn my living producing them so yes, there has to be an honoured place for them!

But for most other reading, give me an ebook any day. I know, I know…electronics and plastic can never replace the feel and smell of real paper, real binding and the general ‘handle’ of an ancient and loved cultural icon. Well crap. I don’t care how beautifully put together the paper version of the latest Booker Prize winner is – I’ll read it on my Kindle, thanks.

I know I’m not alone in my ebook enthusiasm. Over the past year I’ve met or read about many Kindle converts among serious booklovers who might once have said ‘never’. Though not technology nerds in any shape or form, they are now devoted to the Kindle their husband or wife bought for them. My wife Liz is among them. She got her Kindle the Christmas before last, took to it like a duck to water and gave me a Kindle a year later. Thanks, Liz.

The Kindle is lighter and much easier to handle in bed. Its pages are evenly lit, which they sure ‘aint in a ‘real’ book with opposing pages at different angles. Even worse is wrestling with stiff binding and putting up with curvy pages and distorted lines of text.

One area where the iPad is much better than a Kindle, is the ability to shoot off at a tangent via the web and find out more about some aspect of the book you’re reading. For instance, I read Bill Bryson’s marvellous book At Home on my iPad and frequently looked up photos and other details of things he was writing about, at Wikipedia and elsewhere. Yes, you can do that on a Kindle too, but it’s glacially cumbersome, with no colour.

Online dictionary access to look up the meaning of words you’re reading in the book is good on both platforms.

Traditional books give no encyclopaedic or etymological help whatsoever.

Shooting readily off at tangents is all very well, but it can also be a great distraction, particularly on the iPad. Sometimes I’d get so involved with the extras I was finding out about, that it would take me quite a while to get back to the book I was reading. But this is a general problem with the iPad. Its cornucopia of all manner of delights is a huge distraction from things you really should be doing, and reading books is only one of them. For distraction-free reading, use a Kindle.

While books are mostly why I have a Kindle, in recent weeks I’ve sussed out how to send feature articles to it from sources on the web. A plug-in to my computer’s Firefox browser called Kindle it lets me transfer such articles to the Kindle. Two clicks send them first to Amazon’s servers, where they are formatted nicely – sans ads and extraneous links – then pushed wirelessly to my Kindle. I’m an addict of the Arts & Letters website which has links to many great articles. These read well on the Kindle – much nicer than on my real computer or in the iPad’s Instapaper app, which I would previously send them to.

Rise and rise
The last 15 months or so have seen a huge rise in the popularity of ebook reading, and from what I read, Amazon’s Kindle and Amazon’s Kindle bookshop have been the main beneficiaries.

I blogged about this a year ago, in eBooks on a huge roll. Then I wrote: “Amazon says it is now selling more ebooks than paperbacks – 115 ebooks for every 100 paperbacks, in the last three months of 2010. Not long ago, Amazon was crowing about selling more ebooks than hardbacks. For ebooks to have moved ahead and eclipsed paperbacks so quickly is phenomenal, considering that paperbacks outsell hardbacks by a wide margin.”

Things have accelerated since then. My own extended family is an example. Liz was our first Kindle owner, a little over a year ago. Now I have one. A daughter and son have them. A brother, sister and their respective spouses each have one. My sister is so in love with her Kindle that she puts it in a snaplock plastic bag and reads it in the bath.

Here are some publishing industry predictions for 2012, reported by Autormedia.com:

“eBook sales will double in 2012 from their 2011 numbers.” – Thomas Umstattd, Author Media CEO

“E-books will exceed 50% market share in US fiction.” – Randy Ingermanson, Founder of Advanced Fiction Writing.

“I anticipate that we’ll see the percentage of ebook sales climb from 20-30% of the business to almost 50%.” – Julie Gwinn, Editor B&H Publishing Group

It’s possible to gift ebooks to people through Amazon and that company said in a recent press release that in the last month of 2011, such gifting was up by 175 percent compared to the same period in 2010. During December they sold a million Kindles per week.

Buying a Kindle
Kindles are now very cheap in the USA, and if you know anyone who will ship one to you, they can still be pretty cheap when they arrive here. The entry-level wireless-only Kindle 4 is US$109. Amazon will now ship to New Zealand and as of today, the total cost would NZ$156. Or you can buy the same thing at Dick Smith Electronics for $NZ189. The Electronic Dick also sells the older model Kindle 3 for $NZ289, which frankly is a rip-off.

What you can’t buy in New Zealand or have Amazon send to New Zealand, is the ad-supported version, which costs US$30 less. It is identical except that when you switch the power off, a special offer advert appears on the screen. A small version of the advert also appears at the bottom of the Kindle home screen, but never within a book you are reading.

The ad subsidy deal also applies to the US$139 Kindle Touch, which becomes US$99. Unfortunately Amazon will not ship any version of the Touch (or the Kindle Fire) to New Zealand, and Dick Smith doesn’t sell them either. But you can buy online at Amazon and get them to ship to a friend or relation who lives in the USA, who can then post the unit to New Zealand. That’s how I got my Touch. I have the cheaper ad-supported version. I can’t take advantage of the offers – and some are very attractive – but so far the ads aren’t bothering me. If they get aggravating I can make them go away by letting Amazon bill US$40 to my credit card.

You’ll probably want to buy a case for your Kindle. Don’t buy it at Amazon or Dick Smiths. It will be a fraction of the price at Hong Kong seller Deal Extreme, where we bought our high quality leather cases for US$9.90 post free.

I can photograph them.

Then I can have my way with them.

It is an assignment after my own heart, given my own musical background and the fact that I’ve written a book of my own about New Zealand musical history, Piano in the Parlour.

This afternoon I’ve been preparing illustrations for the book, and as I worked on a photo showing Begg’s Dunedin phonograph department in 1911, it occurred to me that there was some heavy irony going down. While peering at what was almost the dawn of recorded music (wax cylinders and boxes with blowsy flower horns), I was listening to music on my computer that was streaming through the Internet from the Grooveshark website.

The phonograph department at Charles Begg & Co, Dunedin, in 1911. The sign above the counter reads "Caruso is singing here today." (Click to enlarge)

Back in 1911, I might have owned, after much scrimping and saving, just a few horrid sounding (but still thrilling) cylinders or disks. Today I have an endless supply of Internet music, through streaming radio services, online music stores such as iTunes and Google Music, music clips on YouTube and, (nudge, wink) … I’m told you can download ‘free’ music via filesharing services. I can choose from thousands of CDs in shops and the public library. I can ‘rip’ them on my computer and store the albums on my phone and MP3 player. Then I can listen to them anywhere I like.

There is absolutely no shortage of music today at nil or negligible cost – particularly as I no longer care about keeping up with current hits. Short of an apocalypse, I won’t run out of recorded music.

But though I still love them, I don’t treasure recordings as I did when I only owned half a dozen LPs and a few singles and played them on a crappy old portable record player. My grandmother may have treasured her cylinders from Charles Begg & Co even more.

One of these apps, called SketchMee, uses filters to turn photos into sketches, with controls that let you try many variations. It works better on some photos than others and when it doesn’t work it can look cheesily amateur. But it can be a lifesaver. Below is a book cover I designed earlier this year. The original photo was in poor, nondescript condition, but it perked up considerably with the SketchMee treatment. The book’s author was delighted with it. (Click on the image to enlarge it and get a better idea of the effect.)

I had my first play with Snapseed this morning. Produced by the Nik company that has been selling Photoshop plugin filters for years, Snapseed is capable of extensive photo manipulation at a fraction of the cost of Photoshop filters. I’ve used Nik Color Efex Pro appreciatively in Photoshop for years.

This hyperbole from the Snapseed website is not far off the mark: “Enhance your photos with one tap. Tweak photos to perfection with Tune Image or selectively adjust only a part of your photo with revolutionary Control Points. Add incredible effects with innovative filters like Drama, Vintage, and Grunge.”

For best results you’d be advised to use more than one tap!

Needless to say they’ve also built in a fair amount of social networking bullshit, but that can be ignored.

Further down are before and afters I did for a few of my photos this morning in a quick first session with Snapseed. In most cases I’ve shown the most extreme effects of the various filters, but it is possible to apply more subtlety.

These iPad apps are as cheap as dirt – around $5. They’d be hundreds of dollars as Photoshop plugins. Both of the apps also work on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Lindis Pass, February 2011

This used Snapseed's 'drama' filter, which certainly made the clouds more dramatic. I guess a bit more dramatic than they actually were, but then the first photo didn't quite capture the original drama. Unfortunately the fragments of blue sky on the left no longer look like blue sky. The foreground initially lost some punch and I restored some of it in Photoshop. Too much restoration and blue sky becomes even more unnatural. (But this is all on a quick-fix level – with more work it could be done properly.)

Undulatus Asperatus cloud formation, Pahiatua Track, January 2010. (Described further in an earlier Martinborough Musings post.)

Again using the Drama filter. Interesting but too much! Again the foreground has been considerably lightened.

Black and white filter applied after the drama filter

Ayers Rock (Uluru), 1982, scanned from Kodachrome slide. The sky had already been darkened by a polarising filter on the camera.

Drama, then black and white filters applied

Aboriginal guide at Kings Canyon, Central Australia, 1982. Polarising filter used.

Drama, then black and white filters applied.

An old cart at Mesopotamia Station in the upper Rangitata Valley

Grunge filter applied

An old house I took somewhere in New South Wales in about 1981.

Grunge filter applied. Also Snapseed's frame.

Intersection of Featherston and Brandon Streets, Wellington. We're hoping the hail didn't also fall in Martinborough, across the Rimutakas. For the sake of both our garden and the local vineyards.

Another view of the Featherston/Brandon Streets intersection. At top right is the former Wool House where I used to work, now renamed Deloittes House.

This was an interesting lunchtime diversion and it provided plenty of pictures for national TV news. But let’s put it in perspective: it was absolutely nothing compared with the 1947 and 1999 hailstorms in Sydney. In 1947, hailstones 8cm (3.1 inches) in diameter lashed beaches on New Year’s Day. Because of the holiday, beaches were crowded and as most people had arrived by public transport, they couldn’t shelter in their cars. There was only limited shelter at the beaches themselves, which ran with blood. Many people were taken to hospital. The 1999 hailstorm caused less personal injury but overall damage was worse: the A$1.7 billion in insured damage set a new record as Australia’s costliest natural disaster.

Three-inch hailstones slamming into Sydney's Rose Bay on New Year's Day 1947. (Wikipedia)

Later in the concert we added local musos on trumpet, trombone and banjo, and attempted to blow the roof off the local opera house. It was a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight and great fun.

Me as the invisible piano player in a scratch dixieland band at the 1966 New Zealand Universities Arts Festival.

The previous year we’d played student and city gigs as a full trad band. Well…as trad as you can be with a saxophone in place of a trombone.  We had a great time though, in what was pretty well the last gasp of purely instrumental bands playing for public functions. Back then, people were capable of having a roaring good time even when there was no singer. Just a few years later, singers became obligatory and even a lousy one would do.

Back in the early sixties, before rock ‘n roll took over completely, dixieland bands like Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball were part of pop culture – they even came to Palmie and played sellout concerts.

But that arts festival concert was the end of Dixieland for me. I was already listening to modern jazz – Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue was wearing itself out on my primitive record player. So were LPs by Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, Horace Silver, Wes Montgomery and Dave Brubeck. I wanted to play modern jazz. And I wanted to play rock ‘n roll. I moved to Wellington and did both.

Over the years since then, I’d hear traditional jazz very occasionally on record or on TV, but never live. Until last Saturday night, when Australian group Dixie Street played a concert in Martinborough.

Did I enjoy it? Yes – immensely. Any music is good when it’s played really well and those guys could really play. Yes, I was with them on the bandstand in spirit as they swung into those rambunctious final choruses. I know what that feels like.

The Dixie Street band in the Martinborough Town Hall. Personnel: Derek Dalton (trumpet, from Adelaide). Geoff Speed (clarinet, Bellingen, NSW), Gordon Coulson (trombone, Adelaide), Bruce Gourlay (piano, Tasmania), Kevin Findlay (sousaphone, Tasmania), Peter Milburn (banjo, Victoria), Rod Andrew (drums, Canberra).

Dixie Street played Martinborough as part of a 20-gig North Island  tour that included the Bay of Island Jazz and Blues Festival.

There’s talk of them coming back next year. I’ll be along. In the meantime, if I want to listen again there’s always a little video I shot at the concert. They’re playing Black Stump Stomp, written in 1990 by legendary Aussie trad jazz trumpeter Bob Barnard.

Arriving home from Martinborough on Sunday afternoon. No snow in Martinborough (then) and it was snowing, but not settling over the Rimutakas on the way home. Snowed almost all the way to Wellington, but still not settling. It was a different story when we turned ujp the Ngaio Gorge road. A short time later the Rimutaka road was closed and 100 people were trapped up there and had to be rescued.

Looking down our drive

Looking down Cockayne Road. Our driveway is just off-camera at bottom left.

Looking across Cockayne Road from our drive entrance.

The same house, next morning.

Looking across the Ngaio Valley from our house, the next morning. The previous time we saw snow on Crows Nest Hill in the background was 1983. On that occasion I think the hill was the only place that got any snow.

Liz sitting on our deck, feigning cheerfulness.

This video below shows snow outside my office window yesterday. This is almost unheard of in Wellington!

I said: “I wonder if it will work – I’ll soon find out.”

Google text: “I got some hoes in Iran.”

I followed up with: “I got some hoes in Iran.”

Google text: “Suck my dick would be useful to the right hands.”

Not quite ready for prime time!

Imagine the technology being used to transcribe Hansard. That would be interesting.

On a rocking chair in front of an open fire. What more could a cat ask for?

On the mantlepiece above the woodburner in the kitchen

Not very long ago Chino was soaking up warmth from the sun – chronicled here. How very catlike…

For years there have been chain emails full of photos of cute cats and kittens. In more recent times they’ve been supplanted by YouTube, which is awash with cat and kitten videos. Right now, YouTube has 134,000 cat videos and 44,000 kitten videos.

There’s a positive plethora of cats and kittens on personal blog postings. I plead guilty to some of them. Google’s blog search service finds 68 million cats and five million kittens.

‘Cute’ is the byword. Thirty-six thousand of YouTube’s cats and 27,000 of their kittens are specified as cute. Google blog searches find five million cute cats and half a million cute kittens.

The i are cute kitten

Cute can also be the yuckword, when combined with the infantile English that the cat genre seems to attract. (Go to SpeakLOLSpeak and cringe. Well I do, anyway. Also cringeworthy is is icanhazcheeseburger.com.) One SpeakLOLSpeak recommendation is the very popular YouTube video, i are cute kitten. Cloyingly naff, it’s been viewed 26 million times. Beating it handily though, are Surprised Kitty (Original) (46 million views) and Very Angry Cat – FUNNY (51 million views).

From the Kittens in Bowls video.

A better, though less popular, YouTube video is An engineers’s guide to cats. It’s scored five million views. A recent up and comer from Japan is the terminally cute Kittens in Bowls. Coming up much faster though, is the charming Cat and Owl Playing, which has been up for only ten days and already has over a million viewers. Deservedly.

Fum the cat attempting to compete in aerial ballet with his barn owl friend Gebra – a frame from the Cat and Owl Playing video.

The authors of these videos could make serious money if they became YouTube Partners. Under the scheme, YouTube places paid adverts on the same page as the video and shares revenue with the author. YouTube is coy about the amount they pay out, but one article I read about the scheme said that really popular videos paid well. I don’t remember the details, but 51 million viewings would generate many thousands of dollars of income.

The Cat’s Meow is one of several blogsites that track YouTube cuteness. Steeling myself to go there, I found it featuring “Hands Up” Kitten as its Cat of the Week. It turned out the video had been nicked from a blogsite called Your Daily Cute, which suggests, “If you liked this Hands Up Kitten video, why not subscribe to Your Daily Cute by email? Don’t miss a Cute!”

Yes, we like our cats. But we also like our dogs. The blogosphere has 64 million dogs – almost as many as cats. But puppies rule: they’re twice as popular as kittens. Dogs beat cats paws-down on YouTube videos: 326,000 dogs vs 134,000 cats. Puppies beat kittens by a similar proportion.

Friends of Felines Rescue Center. YouTube isn’t the only place for cat videos and last week I came across a strangely addictive website that gives 24/7 live ‘Kitty Cam’ video coverage of the Friends of Felines Rescue Center in the small town of Defiance, Ohio, USA. It is a non-profit, all volunteer facility with a a no-kill policy that houses between 80 and 110 cats and kittens. It receives no state or federal funding and relies on private donors. It has many tree houses, climbing poles, cat nap areas, over 75 metres of cat walks, many different kinds of play/sleep areas at various heights and a large outdoor enclosure. As well as accomodating cats, the facility includes a low-cost spay/neuter clinic. It also has its own blog, and Facebook page.

Inside the Friends of Felines Rescue Center, taken from the live video stream. Mornings are kitten playtime and on this day they were crashing around the large piece of paper on the floor. On another occasion someone was moving a laser pointer light around the room and the kittens were going ballistic. This room is only a small part of the facility. (Click the photos to enlarge them)

A variety of people appear in the video, doing chores, playing with the cats and opening courier cartons of donated food and cats' toys.

On this occasion it appeared that my own wife and cat had been teleported to the feline centre. The woman looks like Liz and the cat she's nuzzling looks like our chocolate Burmese, Chino.

The Friends of Felines Rescue Center in Defiance, Ohio, found with Google Streetview.

I sent the Friends of Felines address to my sister in law, who emailed back saying, “Damn you. Damn you. Damn you.” A friend in Florida wondered if he should pass it on to his partner because it would probably get her fired at work. I showed it to a coolly professional book publisher in our office and discovered later in the week that she bookmarked it on her computer and keeps sneaking a look.

The Friends of Felines webcam is hosted by the Ustream website which has a number of other interesting animal live webcam views, for instance the Decorah Eagles. The camera is trained on a nest atop a tree in Decorah, Iowa, occupied by a magnificent bald eagle and her eaglets. [Update: they seem to have flown the nest now.] The Shiba Inu Puppy Cam is worth a look, though mostly the puppies (yes, they’re cute!) are sleeping. Closer to home is Backyard Galah Cam.