We’ve lived in this small cottage during weekends for the last 13 years, but now we’re extending and rearranging it with the intention of moving there permanently, from later this year. At that point we’ll sell our Wellington house. Liz is retiring to what she hopes is a pleasant life of gardening and wool crafts, while I will try to keep Ngaio Press going from a new base.

It’s been an interesting year. After a good deal of discussion, much of it surrounding whether we could usefully extend the house without destroying our amazing but awkwardly situated tangelo tree, I started designing on an iPad app called Home 3D. It was a great help in that it allowed us to rough out rooms, changes and additions, and add properly scaled furniture to see what would work in the real world. Then Paulo, our architect son-in-law was out from London in January and kept the ball rolling by doing some sketch plans.

Left: Paulo and Bruce discussing the house sketches in the soon-to-be-bowled porch. Right: Paulo and Bruce discussing how to position a new roof that will cover the present lean-to section that is being retained, and continue past them on the right. Where they’re standing now will become a covered verandah, and a new back door will go where the window is on the left.

We wanted to work with Bruce Henderson, a venerable local builder (well he’s a year younger than me!) who did some major internal work when we first bought the run-down cottage in 1999. Bruce re-jibbed the place, put in new ceilings and added several recycled windows. He knocked out a wall and re-roofed the place. And he’s been an invaluable source of help and advice ever since.

Bruce was going to work from Paulo’s sketches and draw up plans for submission to the South Wairarapa District Council. That didn’t work out because he fell foul of new regulations that came into force in April. Bruce was no longer on the approved list and we had to engage a separate designer, Ken Raynes from Focus Projects. Ken had some good new ideas, and although he was a significant additional expense, we were happy with what he produced. He also had a good track record with the South Wairarapa District Council and the plans went smoothly through the approval process.

East elevation. The new part of the house is to the right past the two small windows. The existing lean-to ‘flat’ roof is being retained and extended, though lifted up so there will be a 2.4m stud at the furthest extension on the right. A new verandah is being added along the side. There is also a covered deck on the northern side. At last we’ll have a northern outlook (sun!) and good access to the garden through French doors.

We are only building one new room, but it will replace, and expand by four square metres, the area covered by three existing tumble-down rooms at the back of the house – a porch, toilet and laundry. We had always intended to bowl these one day. They will now become a 7m x 4m kitchen/dining room. We’re having a new back door that will open into the present kitchen, which will become an entertainment room with large TV and home theatre. Elsewhere, Liz will take over the old living room as her crafts room, while I till turn the present dining room into an office.

Turning the first sod

Dave, the digger driver.

Bruce was supposed to have started demolition three weeks ago, but was been held up by bad weather and existing jobs that took longer than expected. So the first real work done on the place was  digging a soakpit in the back lawn and making a start on drain digging. All very easy with modern machinery. It will be a lot harder for Liz and I to restore the rest of the lawn!

Wayne Roper, our plumber, protecting his ears as stones from the Tauherenikau River are tipped into a soakpit dug in the middle of the back lawn. Rainwater from the roof will end up in the soakpit.

Working on the soakpit.

My early LPs were treasured and played over and over on a portable record player that was very lo-fi by almost any of today’s standards.

Some of the early LPs I owned when I was a student. Most were bought from sale bins. I got to know these intimately. From top left: Pete Fountain’s French Quarter, Bud Shank’s Holiday in Brazil, Horace Silver's Finger Poppin', Miles Davis’s 'Kind of Blue', Gerry Mulligan’s Paris Concert, Mel Lewis's The Coolest Mikado.

When I finished university and added a daytime job salary to my nighttime music earnings, the records accumulated faster and no longer came mainly from sale bins. Then in 1970 I got a gig as a record reviewer. A university acquaintance, the late Dave Jordan, who had become a songwriter and folk performer with a national profile,  had wangled a record review column at the national Catholic magazine, NZ Tablet. He had a magnificent record collection, most of it gratis, courtesy of the record companies which then had offices in Wellington. The main ones I remember were RCA, Polygram, Festival and HMV.

In 1970 Dave headed overseas and bequeathed the record review column to me. I still remember the skip in my step as I headed back from record companies with the first haul of free records under my arm. I’d hit the jackpot and the most precious things in life were now free.

Just why the record companies thought the Tablet was worth their while has always been beyond me. The publication was bigger and more influential back in the seventies, but it still couldn’t have been an effective promotional vehicle. Certainly for much of the music Dave and I reviewed. I wasn’t going to question it. And I wasn’t I going to let on to the Tablet that I was  neither a Catholic nor a believer.

For the next seven years I got weekly new release promo mailings from the record companies. I could wander into their warehouses and say I’ll have this one. And that one. Thanks very much. To keep things reasonable, I reviewed a certain amount of middle of the road music, but my columns had a strong element of jazz and rock that would have been of little interest to most of the Tablet’s readers. Much of it would have been anathema – particularly a certain Frank Zappa record. I concentrated on its (excellent) musical strengths but did not discuss the extremely sexually explicit cover artwork  and lyric content. Zappa was also a lapsed Catholic and virulent atheist. I would have been excommunicated in an instant.

The (would-have-been) offending Frank Zappa record, Overnote Sensation, I reviewed for the NZ Tablet. Note the bottom right (pun intended). The lyrics matched the visual decadence.

As time went on I extended my musical writings to the NZ Listener and the giveaway music industry paper, Rip it Up. Then in 1977 I retired from record reviewing. Partly it was because I was moving from Wellington and would lose direct contact with the record companies. But I was also getting tired of having to approach every new recording wearing a critic’s hat. It was time to enjoy music for music’s sake again.

In those reviewing years I amassed plenty of records – well over 500. Many I got rid of, but I kept 400 or so. For a few years I listened to them and even bought new ones. The rate of new acquisitions declined in the ’80s when we all started copying stuff onto new-fangled cassette tapesfrom friends’ collections and libraries. Then came the CD revolution. Now I was buying plenty of new recordings again. My LPs mostly stayed unplayed. CDs were so much more convenient – I didn’t have to leap up and down every 20 minutes to turn them over, for a start. And although I had a good stereo system, damned if I could hear the alleged superior sound that LPs were still supposed to provide. What I heard from the  CDs was great sound – mercifully sans pops and clicks – that lasted up to an hour. It was even time to get seriously into classical music and listen to all of a symphony at a time.

For decades my LPs languished with only very occasional outings. To make matters worse, a few years ago my stereo amplifier packed it in and since then nothing – not even even CDs and cassette tapes – has been played through the living room sound system. By now there are so many alternatives – I can play CDs on my computers, which have pretty good speaker systems. I can play MP3 recordings through my computers and through my MP3 player whose quality earbuds give a fantastic sound. I can bluetoothly send MP3s from my phone and iPad, to an excellent portable Creative brand speaker. I can stream ‘cloud’ music to my computers, phone and iPad.

The LPs still took up a lot of space in our wall units, and when we move full-time to our weekender cottage in Martinborough later this year, space will be at a premium. It was time to quit them. We catalogued the LP collection on Excel and I sent the file to a couple of second-hand record dealers. Both were interested, and last week I sold the lot to Petone shop Moonhop Records for $600. I was happy. Presumably the Moonhop guy expects to make a good profit on them. Good luck to him. For my part I now have most of the price of a decent home theatre system for Martinborough.

Over the years I had collected digital CD and MP3 versions of many of my LPs. Two particular favourites had proved elusive, though. One was that great record, Sassy Swings the Tivoli. I bought it as MP3s today from Amazon. In the early ’sixties I belonged to the World Record Club, in which you nominated genres and they would send you a letter advising the record of the month. It arrived automatically unless you wrote back and said no. I forgot to nix this record and was annoyed when it arrived. At that stage of my life I’d barely been exposed to jazz singers. But what an introduction! I played the hell out of that record. Then I hadn’t heard it for years until yesterday. It’s still great – I’m getting a real buzz out of playing it and I am surprised at how much of the musical detail I remember, as though I last played it only yesterday. Sassy’s singing is great and she’s superbly backed by pianist Kirk Stuart and his trio. I remember shamelessly copying ideas from Kirk at the time.

The other treasured LP I’ve recently resurrected as MP3s is Dizzy Gillespie’s Dizzy on the French Riviera. This dates back to my early years in Wellington when I played with drummer Barry Young, who later went on to greater things. Barry told me about the Dizzy disk and said I simply had to own it. To emphasise the point, he turned up at the next band gig with the album, gave it to me, then asked for the purchase price. I didn’t regret it.

I emailed the rules to Bob Barcham, Wellington’s elder statesman of jazz/dance band/cabaret etc. His comments were interesting. You think of extreme reactions to rock ’n roll, punk, rap and so on, and tend to forget that in its day, jazz provoked equally visceral reactions. Bob’s comment:

“The instructions re jazz were just marginally more draconian than those we suffered when first playing at the Majestic [Cabaret] in 1950 – very nostalgic.”

Here is Bob with a bunch of jazz-inclined Wellington musos, playing at Caroline Bay in 1955. What a dangerous bunch to inflict on Timaru!

Back: Vern Clare, Graeme Saker. Front: Mike Gibbs, Don Richardson, Johnny Williams. At the piano: Bob Barcham.  (Photo supplied by Bob.)

The rules:
1. Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;
2. In this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
3. As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;
4. So-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);
5. Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);
6. Also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);
7. The double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;
8. Plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;
9. Musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);
10. All light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.

These rules were apparently binding on all Czechoslovakian dance orchestras during the Nazi occupation. They were reproduced in Josef Skvorecky’s book, The Bass Saxophone.

*Some unkind people used to say lamentable…

Tomorrow there’s an in-store ‘Meet Jo Nesbo’ at Whitcoulls, where attendees can pick up his latest book, Phantom, for $30. That’s a fairly typical price for airport thrillers. But I can buy Phantom for my Kindle ebook reader for half that price, even allowing for the NZ$/US$ exchange rate.

There, I just did it…

Why would I pay twice the price at Whitcoulls for a paper product that is actually less pleasant to read?* There’s only one possible reason, and that’s to support the local book trade. All well and good, but twice the price is a very stern test of altruism.

No wonder ereaders are going gangbusters in New Zealand. Bookshop owners should be – and no doubt are – very afraid.

*See my earlier comments on relative readability in this post.

I can export the file from Dropbox to Apple’s top-line (and top $) Numbers spreadsheet program, where I can modify it. But  can I then save it back to Dropbox and thus make it available to all my computers? No way to do it. Well I could in a kludge, because I could email the file to myself, open it up an another computer then start working on it again. But that’s almost third world in computing terms.

And Numbers won’t let me go to my Dropbox and open up the file.

This is STUPID, Apple.

On my Android phone I can use Kingsoft Office to open the file from the phone’s version of Dropbox. I can modify it and save it back so it becomes accessible by my Windows computers.  Which I bloody well should be able to do on the iPad.

If the MS Office version for iPad is more than a rumour, hopefully it will be able to open stuff from Dropbox and save it back without clunky sending things by email. In other words behave like a normal ‘office’ program.

I’m mystified by the tablet advocates who claim the iPad  is going to replace desktop computing. Sorry – it’s a great complement to my computers, but it can’t replace them for most serious work while iOS has almost non-existent file manipulation capability and other inexplicable Apple-mandated restrictions. It’s time Apple stopped being so arrogant and took lessons from Android.

And don’t get me started on the mess Apple has made with music storage and filing with the ghastly iTunes system it makes you use when communicating with desktop computers. Give us drag ‘n drop, for heaven’s sake.

Drag ’n drop “just works” – to quote Apple’s mantra that unfortunately doesn’t always apply to its own products.

However, I admit that for casual home computing of an evening, the iPad is now my first choice. Indeed if I could work with that spreadsheet file on the iPad, my Acer netbook might head for TradeMe.

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

No, I converted 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.

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.

An iPad with the iBooks app.

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 finally 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.

Kindle also better for reading than most printed books
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 e-ink 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 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 curved 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 cousin and her three children each have one. My sister and cousin are so in love with their Kindles that they put them in snaplock plastic bags and read them in the bath.

Here are some American 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.

The American Consumer Electronics Association says that ereader sales rose from 147,000 in 2007 to an estimated 18.7 million in 2011 and a projected 23 million this year.

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 excellent quality leather cases for US$9.90 post free.

I can photograph them.

Then I can have my way with them.