Posts Tagged ‘kindle’

Highlights Buying In

[Buying In book cover]

I bought Rob Walker’s Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are after seeing him in Objectified, a documentary about product design. His attitude was on the verge of being cynical, but I think it was just his no-B.S. way of explaining things that I really liked.

Buying In is about consumerism. It tries to explain why people associate or disassociate themselves with certain brands and make the purchasing decisions that they make. I’m not sure if I’d want to buy any more books on this subject, but it was pretty interesting. The book goes through a lot of different examples of brands and sub-cultures and I think it depended on them a little too much. I expected more conclusions to be drawn and a lot of times he would say he would go into things later towards the end of the book, but I don’t really think he did.

It is pretty obvious that he’s obsessed about this topic, though, and knows his stuff. I especially liked how he talked about Etsy.com and American Apparel, two sort of anti-bad-consumer brands that fit into the bigger picture in interesting ways.

While highlighting this book on my Kindle, it was funny how I kept highlighting big chunks of information, compared to the book I read before, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, where a lot of meaning was packed into one or two sentences. Here are my highlights for Buying In:

Loc. 176-78, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:18 AM

But why, really, did I feel so strongly about a brand of sneaker—any brand of sneaker? I know why I rejected the swoosh. In Air Force 1’s, I’d feel like a brand zombie. But what I suddenly couldn’t reconcile was my belief that I could project my individuality through some other brand.

Loc. 195-97, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:21 AM

So we can talk all we want about being brandproof, but our behavior tells a different story. This is why I have come around to the view that there is nothing to be gained by simply believing we are immune to brands. But there might be something gained in understanding why we aren’t.

Loc. 262-64, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:28 AM

So when Consumer Reports, or whatever other authority is doing the testing, studies some group of products, the conclusion is invariably that most of the choices are, you know, pretty good. All that’s left is to sift among increasingly minor differences to decide which one is the very best value of all, by however absurdly narrow a margin.

Loc. 354-57, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:42 AM

Marc Milecofsky grew up in Lakewood, about an hour and a half south of Manhattan, and spent more time in malls than in the streets. His father was a pharmacist, his mother a real estate agent. He had two sisters, one of whom was his twin, Marci. (The name Ecko is derived from a family story: When his mother was pregnant with Marci, the doctor informed her of an “echo,” which turned out to be Marc.)

Loc. 373-75, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:23 PM

The first brand logo worn on the outside of a garment is believed to be the Lacoste crocodile: 1920s French tennis star René Lacoste, playing off a nickname given to him by the press, had one embroidered on a jacket he wore and then tennis shirts he designed and sold after retiring.

Loc. 376-77, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:23 PM

A logo can acquire its meaning from the product it is attached to or the people who use the product—in ads, in the real world, or in the gray area in between, such as pictures of celebrities in magazines.

Loc. 395-98, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:37 PM

A working-class Jewish kid from the Bronx defined WASP status in a way that was accessible on a mass scale. He made it the acceptable thing for the skeptical sixteen-year-old Jersey mall rat who would become Marc Ecko and who never gave a thought to whether the relationship between that Polo symbol and the man who created it was an “authentic” one or not.

Loc. 440-43, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:28 PM

Hello Kitty’s blank, “cryptic” simplicity, he argues, is among her great strengths; standing for nothing, she is “waiting to be interpreted,” and this is precisely how an “ambiguous”—and let’s be frank: meaningless—symbol comes to stand for nostalgia to one person, fashionability to another, camp to a third, vague subversiveness to a fourth.

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Don’t Need [Insert Name of Musician]’s Stuff

Now that I’ve made the leap from being someone who has to have my own physical copy of a book to someone who doesn’t have a physical copy at all, it’s making me rethink what else I really need to own. When I buy a book and read it once, it’s no longer going to be propped up on a shelf, taking up room, collecting dust, from apartment-to-apartment, never to be read again. This is a waste I’m glad to no longer have building up (with the exception of art/photography books), especially since there is nothing inherently special about the way most books are made. If you’re buying a paperback book, the text got sent to a factory, mass-produced on equal-sized sheets of paper, passed on from warehouse to warehouse until it ends up for a relatively short amount of time in your hands.

This got me thinking about what it means to be a fan of someone like Bjork. She is constantly releasing special edition CDs and box sets and DVDs and various combination of them of all her music. Her last studio album, Volta, was released on May 7, 2007, and it had a CD, special edition CD, double vinyl, and four singles. Next month she is releasing more stuff based on the tour and music videos from this album, something with its own brand and unique artwork called Voltaic, coming in five different physical configurations of two CDs and two DVDs.

One could say that the ultimate Bjork fan would own EVERYTHING that Bjork releases, including stuff only released in other countries (sometimes the Japanese editions have songs not found in the U.S. or European editions). At Amazon.com’s “Artist Store” for Bjork, there are 161 items in the U.S. alone!

It’s true that a lot of thought and creativity went into the design of the booklets and packages that accompany them, and I appreciate the artistic value of those things on their own, but they again end up being something that I hold in my hands for a very limited amount of time and then put away. I would rather see it once or twice at an art gallery that many people can visit, and see some interesting features on her site. I did actually go to an art gallery in Queens where she made sculptures and drawings for Volta, and screened the first video from the album in 3D, and that experience meant more to me than owning anything.

Ultimately I like Bjork for her music, not her stuff, which is perfectly enjoyable in digital form inside my iPhone and computer.

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Kindle DX

People have been asking me if I’m annoyed that the Kindle DX came out after I got the Kindle 2, but I’m actually relieved that the DX is what it is. It’s not a slimmer, lighter, faster version of what I have; it’s almost exactly the same thing in a larger form factor (more suitable for documents than books) and it looks like Amazon is going to keep improving both as separate products in the same family.

One of the reasons I got a Kindle is because I love reading books and I wanted to be able to read more often. I usually read on the subway, but I also like to travel lightly (before the iPhone I was an iPod mini/nano person) so I’d end up leaving heavier books at home half the time. With the Kindle, the size and weight issue is completely gone.

No matter what I’m reading, no matter what books (plural!) I have with me, it’s always 10.2 ounces and 8″ x 5.3″. If I’m squished between two people, or standing up and holding onto a pole, I can still hold it comfortably with one hand and easily go to the next page (a tricky maneuver if you have to turn physical pages with one hand).

Plus I like that when I’m looking at the text of a Kindle 2, it’s still the same size as a real book. It doesn’t feel like the device is altering my experience and pacing of a real novel. Having the text re-flowed to double that size would feel more like reading a Word document on a computer screen.

I would love it when I was in college, especially since college books are way heavier (and all the great features like searching text, seeing definitions of words right on the spot, exporting highlights/notes/bookmarks would be even more useful), but if I’m using it mostly for books the Kindle 2 is a better fit for me.

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Highlights Smilla’s Sense of Snow

[Smilla book cover]

Every time I finish a book on my Kindle, I’ll post the phrases that I highlighted (it saves them to a text file), as my personal summary of what I read. I’ll note spoilers if there are any. Sometimes I might highlight things to look up later (like other books or music that were mentioned). “Loc.” is the location of that phrase in the e-book (since you can change the font size, what ends up on a “page” varies so e-books have locations instead).

This one’s for Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg.

Loc. 1275-76:

“There was snow on the roof that he fell from. I saw his footprints. I have a sense of snow.”

Loc. 1277-78:

“Snow is the symbol of inconstancy,” she says. “As in the book of Job.”

Loc. 2257-58:

He boils milk with fresh ginger, a quarter of a vanilla bean, and tea that is so dark and fine-leaved that it looks like black dust. He strains it and puts cane sugar in both our cups.

Loc. 2565-66:

“I just wonder how you can conclude so much from so little.” “Language is a hologram.”

Loc. 3187-88:

in a nanosecond she’s reduced from the great, proud, sovereign, invulnerable mama to a spiritual gnome.

Loc. 3194-95:

Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease. I refuse to listen to it. I refuse to be saddled with these orgies of emotional pettiness.

Loc. 3205-7:

Modesty is part of the fundamental nature of human beings. It makes me sick to think of the European idea that they can solve all their own self-induced sexual neuroses by laying the meat on the table and putting it under a microscope.

Loc. 4030-31:

I hate being scared. There is only one path to fearlessness. It’s the one that leads into the mysterious center of the terror.

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