I BOUGHT A KOBO E-READER – HERE'S WHY

Saw a really interesting documentary film the other night called "OUT OF PRINT", a wide-ranging PBS Frontline-style newsburst about the decline of print and the rise of electronic media. If I get my act together, I'll try and find the time to review it and "discuss" the many questions and issues it provoked. In the meantime, one of them's been a-brewing in my own cranium for a while, and that's the potential if not inevitable disappearance of the physical bookstore, and the effect that will have on literary discovery, and on literacy in general. I've personally re-committed myself to "book learning" over the past year, trying as much as I'm able to steer myself away from the siren song of online media and even from short-form magazine pieces as my primary informational input. This book learning is taking many forms – audio, traditional and e-reading – and it's within the realm of the latter where I made a possibly principled (?) decision yesterday, the sort of feel-good, empty gesture I normally scoff at.

I bought an e-reader from KOBO, a Canadian company who've emerged as the last standing pure e-reading alternative to the Kindle, unless you believe the "Nook" still has some skin in the game (I don't). Now let me make it clear I've got no real beef against Amazon.com, and until yesterday, when I passed it on to my son, I too owned a Kindle, the old-school kind with no backlight and that only allows for the consumption of books. I'm a semi-frequent Amazon customer across all sorts of products, and it's my belief they've done much more good than harm in terms of enabling easy, friction-free, time- and money-saving commerce across a variety of spheres – not to mention been a very real contributor to a very real "book boom" in self-publishing; to the a dispersion of niche titles; and a strong enabler of reading in general.

That said, I hate monopolies, and I love physical bookstores. Independent bookstores are where me and my family spend an inordinate amount of time, and I want them to be around for my son and his family as well. Typically, when we walk in, which is often, we walk out with 1-3 items, which is why the three of us have way more books than we can read. Amazon and its locked-in Kindle ecosystem has the potential to be the final nail in the coffin for the physical bookstore, who've seen their ranks dramatically thinned anyway over the past 15 years thanks to Amazon's other innovations in online book selling. If the second revolutionary wave of e-reading passes them by, they're absolutely gone for good. Enter Kobo.

Kobo's e-readers have been for sale at some of my favorite independent bookstores the past year, like San Francisco's Green Apple Books; Seattle's Queen Anne Book Company and Santa Cruz's Bookshop Santa Cruz. The deal works like this: when you buy an e-book from Kobo (whether you ultimately read it on Kobo's hardware or not), your favorite indie bookstore gets a generous kickback on the sale, whether or not they actually had anything to do with it. (Why would they, right? It's virtual). This means that if you're in your favorite indie store and you see something you like, but aren't ready to commit $26 to the hardcover but could see yourself kicking down $15 for the e-book version – well, now you don't have to dial up Amazon's app on your smartphone there in the store, and embarrass yourself and all freedom-loving people. You dial up Kobo's instead, hold it up so that the people at the counter know you're not buying for your Kindle, announce in a very loud, sanctimonious voice that you're "shopping locally", and then slink out of the store.

Of course, I didn't only buy the Kobo Glo because I'm a self-righteous liberal concerned about saving the independent bookstore. It has a rad backlight, and I totally needed one of those so I can read in bed. But I'm actually hoping that this helps keep the Green Apples and Bookshop Santa Cruzes and the Booksmiths of the world in business a little longer, and actually pads their bottom lines a bit to make up for previous losses to Amazon. I don't have to do anything different, just read on a newer, better, e-reader, and maybe pay an extra 50 cents or so per book than I would otherwise via Amazon's cutthroat pricing. I'd love to see this particular e-reader catch on and serve as a viable alternative to the Kindle, and succeed where the Nook has most likely failed (the Nook, too, was its own locked-in ecosystem anyway). If you're thinking about the same sorts of issues from time to time and have a local bookstore you'd like to support (there's a great list here), I submit that you please consider the Kobo.

HERE'S WHAT TO DO WITHOUT GOOGLE READER

Those of us with old-school, multiple-paragraph blogs are starting to feel like fax machine salesmen in an age of short-form social media, Tumblrs, robust content-filtering smartphone apps and the like. The fact that you're reading this, however, means you're still "keeping the faith" in some small way. Me, I've been an active blogger since 2003, and one of the best presents we bloggers ever got during the past ten years was the free RSS aggregation service that Google launched in 2005 called Google Reader.

Despite always being a bit clunky, and not particularly easy on the eyes, Google Reader became easier and easier to use and more of an essential tool for consuming content over the years. For many of us, writers and readers alike, it was a singular go-to place for the many blogs we'd want to read and follow, without having the click on sidebar links or home page bookmarks, the method I used to consume content in the pre-Reader era. Everything I'd want to read, every day, was aggregated in the same place. With Reader, there were some sites whose true www. home pages I never actually saw at all. I'd only get their content in Reader when they updated, and if they didn't update, they were dead to me. For those of us who write blogs, it meant a cadre of readers who'd stay with you and could easily see your blatherings every time they logged into Reader. The only way they'd "leave" you is if they actively unsubscribed. I'm pretty sure that well over half of the readers of this and my other blogs have actually been reading it on Google Reader, and not directly at www.hedonistjive.com or www.beersamizdat.net.

Now they're pulling the plug on July 1st, as you may have heard. They've got their reasons. It's in my own self-interest to help find you an alternative, and I've done that. Well, there are many alternatives, so let me tell you the most "Reader-like" one out there, and my preferred choice for the content I myself consume, is FEEDLY. You'll need to use it through the Chrome browser on desktop computers, but that's OK, because Chrome's the best, right? (Note: looks like it's available for Firefox too). There's also an Android and an iOS app for FEEDLY, and it's a great one. I'll wait here while you go set those up.

Done? OK. There are two other places to find The Hedonist Jive content without having to come to the blog itself. I've got this new Flipboard magazine called, you got it, The Hedonist Jive. I'm "flipping" all the articles/posts I write, as well as those of many more talented and interesting people, into this mobile- and tablet-only magazine. If you haven't used Flipboard yet, you gotta do it. It's extremely well-designed, and its success actually helped lead to the demise of Google Reader. So like the true rebellious nonconformist I am, "join 'em", I say. Oh, and have you heard of Twitter? I maintain a presence over there as well, and you can follow the Hedonist Jive "Twitter stream" if you'd like. 

Apologies for the vainglorious post, but I'd like to keep you reading my navel-gazing narcissism for another few months if I can.

THE HEDONIST JIVE GUIDE TO MUSIC APPS

Don't know about you, but I've fully succumbed to a 100% digital lifestyle when it comes to the consumption of music (recent LP purchases notwithstanding). This really doesn't even involve compact discs any longer. Everything I listen to, it's on my phone. Yeah, my phone. Who would have thunk it, even a couple of years ago? I listen to upwards of an hour or two of music every day, and usually more. Much of this is done in the car, as I'm one of the unfortunate many who commutes a great distance to work. I've outfitted my chariot with an auxiliary hook-up that lets me plop the iPhone into a cradle and then run whatever comes out of it through my car's speakers. Perhaps you've seen, or yourself experience, such a get-up. It's life-changing, and totally has opened me up to entirely new ways of getting clued in about radical new sounds.

So I thought I'd pull together the music apps that I whole- or at least halfheartedly recommend for you. You'll probably heard of most of 'em. Granted, this is an iPhone conversation, so I apologize in advance to the Android or other OS users out there – though I'm pretty sure most of these are available for you, too.(If you're still rocking a StarTac or a Razr, I'm sorry, but you can click through my archives instead).

SPOTIFY – Perhaps no application or service has so upended the way music is consumed and delivered as Spotify has, and in the US at least they're just getting started. I happily pay them ten bucks a month to listen to the app, ad-free, on mobile – in fact, I have never actually experienced Spotify as a "free" customer since I rarely use a PC to listen to music. The catalogs they pull from run incredibly deep, and often include brand-new independent 45s and LPs the week they're released. Not everyone's on there, but seems like 9 out of 10 things I hear about and want to try are easily found. The mobile app lets you store stuff for offline listening, kinda like you "own" it – which makes it easy to listen to in poor coverage or when you're off the wireless network entirely. And despite some grumblings from a few artists about meager paychecks, I'm glad to know that every song I stream deposits at least a couple of cents in the musicians' bank accounts. Totally essential app, and getting better every update.

FLICKTUNES (now called CARTUNES) – This iTunes alternative could better be classified as a "public safety" app, as it's probably kept me from plowing my vehicle into those in front of and on the sides of me on numerous occasions. You know how when you're playing a song or even a downloaded podcast or radio show in iTunes, you're only able to "scroll" though a song – but not advance it 30 seconds forward or backward? I know – lame, right? That doesn't work when you're driving, even when your phone or iPod is mounted right in front of you there on the air vents. FlickTunes lets me use a "two-finger swipe" to easily advance 30 seconds in any song, which works especially well when I'm listening to a radio show and I don't wanna hear a particular song or songs. There are other cool features as well, but that one in particular is a lifeline both for me and the people who drive around me.

8TRACKS – I wrote about 8Tracks a couple of years ago here, and my enthusiasm hasn't diminished in the slightest. This is user-programmed and -curated mix tapes, effectively. It has attracted some incredibly knowledgeable experts across all sorts of sub-genres: 60s french pop; KBD-style punk; pre-WWII Latin music; C86 pop; female-created electronic music of the 60s; and loads of indie bands of every stripe. Even yours truly has a page full of mixes over there – and it works just as well, if not better, on your laptop.

SOUNDCLOUD – At first it seemed like this site was all about people uploading field recordings of bird sounds & such, but music fiends being music fiends, it morphed into a hosting site for mp3 files. The difference between mp3 blogs of 2013 and those of, say, 2008, is that the latter truly gave away mp3s as downloads – I did it myself. Today, almost everyone posts them on Soundcloud, which makes artists happy and makes it more difficult for you to "acquire" a track without paying for it. It also means that, if you still follow music blogs, you need to click the little heart icon on the song that's been put onto Soundcloud, which then saves that song for you to listen to later. I'm always creating these playlists of songs I read about & listening later on SoundCloud. The app still needs to evolve a bit, but it's very useful & seems to be the place that mp3 uploads of all kinds have settled this past year. I'm even streaming my podcast over there.

BANDCAMPER – Bandcamp became the platform of choice for independent artists to store their recorded music over the past 24 months, displacing MySpace entirely. It's 1,000 times better than MySpace ever was, which obviously isn't saying much. Bandcamper, an app that applies a "presentation layer" over the broader Bandcamp universe, has some gaping holes – searching for an artist whom you know is on Bandcamp can be incredibly frustrating if they're not found immediately. That said, once you find and "star" that artist or album or song, it's saved for you to stream anytime, anywhere. You're not able to pay for and download songs on this mobile app, but for try-before-you-buy, it's right up there with Spotify for overall utility.

iCRATES – This really isn't a car app so is a bit of an outlier to the broader article, but it's a terrific app I just discovered a couple of months ago. iCrates is for those of us/you who still buy records and CDs, and who would like an aggregated peek into where you can find a particular piece on vinyl or a given disc. It looks into the Discogs and eBay databases and presents you with who's selling what, where. Far be it for me to do anything to hurt traditional record stores, which I love, but this is their worst nightmare. Now their used vinyl prices can be easily undercut with a quick search on iCrates for that same vinyl at a better price. Besides that, it's totally fun to mess around with, as it has the amazing Discogs.com database, with photos, right there at your proverbial fingertips.

WFMU, WMUA, KFJC, RADIO VALENCIA etc. - Finally, there are the many college/pirate radio station apps. I recognize that there are aggregators like Tune-In out there that work really well, but I personally prefer an easy-to-see icon on my device that I can punch whilst driving. The best station apps start playing immediately upon launch, and provide song identification in big letters on the screen. WFMU's goes those one better, and not only streams all of their podcasts and show archives, but even lets you "favorite" individual songs so you can check up on 'em later (or buy them on iTunes if they're available there right now). I personally also enjoy the quasi-legit pirate station RADIO VALENCIA, along with college stations KFJC, WMUA (Erika Elizabeth's "Expressway To Your Skull"!), KUSF IN EXILE, KEXP and KDVS. If there are others that you recommend, please let us know in the comments section and I'll check them out.

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE OF RADIO, AND IT IS CALLED 8TRACKS

There’s this blog I follow called THE INFINITE DIAL that periodically takes the radio industry to task for their inability to keep up with the sweeping changes wrought by technology. A former radio exec himself, the blog’s main writer sees the death of traditional radio of something to be mourned, but even worse than nostalgia is radio’s failure to evolve, and become a part of the conversation of how music is listened to in the 21st century. We are of course totally spoiled by choice in 2011, and there are dozens of options for music discovery that supersede the need to plop yourself near a car or home radio for hours at a time. Here are a few that I use to find music that negates the need to listen to college radio or any DJ chatter whatsoever:

• Music blogs, delivering curated choices to my Google Reader feed
• The Hype Machine – search for a band’s songs posted on various blogs
• Slacker
• Pandora
•  iTunes previews – read about a song/band, preview their music on an iPhone
• Soulseek (technically not legal, but theoretically a great way to “try” something you’ve read about)

When the big KUSF flap was going on a couple of months ago – this low-wattage, San Francisco-based old school college radio station was abruptly taken back by its university parent, USF, to become a student broadcasting training center – I had a hard time getting as worked up about it as some of my peers did. That sort of terrestrial, gotta-be-available from 3-6pm or-you-can’t-hear-it-radio, was relevant to me personally around 1987, when I was a college radio DJ myself. Or in other words – 24 years ago. Also known as the “pre-fax machine era”. Granted, some examples of regular radio have morphed with the times as well, none more so than WFMU, who’ve done just about everything they can to stay relevant in the face of new technologies, and who’ve developed a killer iPhone application to that end.

Yet, as mentioned on Friday, I think the future of radio will rely on a curated solution, and I think the curators of choice will more likely than not be other human beings, rather than the algorithms and machines that run Pandora and Slacker. That brings us to 8TRACKS, my current music discovery application/website of choice. I really think they’re onto something. By making it incredibly easy to create a mix, name a mix, and upload it – and then to have users “follow”, a la Twitter, those mixologists they most admire – they’ve hit upon something so easy and simple that I can’t see it not blowing up this year. Once you’ve chosen 5-10 people whose mixes and tastes you “trust” (easy to find them, too, because you can search mixes by artist name or by genre tags), you’ve got enough listening to last you for a good month or two.

8TRACKS reminds me nothing so much as it does ANTENNA RADIO, which I was an “online DJ” for around 2000-2001. That, alas, was on 2000-2001 technology, so prepping my DJ-less, voiceless show (a weekly 50s-60s garage punk and R&B barnstormer I did called “No Count Dance Party”) involved recording LPs and 45s onto cassette, then feeding the resulting mix into the computer, then chopping it up into Real Audio files. This process took about 3 hours per week, including the “liner notes” I’d write using Adobe Page Mill. A similar mix on 8TRACKS is a drag-and-drop affair, ten minutes at most to create a killer multi-song radio station that users can play repeatedly and forever.

There are still many gaps in the 8TRACKS product, and the fact that it’s only on iPhone and the web will limit its appeal in the near term. Adding an Android app, which they say is on the way, and some good roadmap features will help. Premium or roadmap features I’d vote for are:

- Ability for curators to write extensive “mix notes”

- Unlimited skips through mixes – rather than just a handful before you’re locked from doing more
- More elegant ways to follow curators from the iPhone app, and learn more about them
- Less reliance on the web, more catering to mobile

And so on. It’s coming. And when it does, your car radio might as well be a Smithsonian showpiece from the analog age.

LISTEN TO MY CRAZY MUSIC MIXTAPES

I have another post I’ll try to finish next week about a fantastic new curated music app called 8TRACKS and how it rings the death knell for radio as we know it…..but that’s for another time. I discovered this thing on my iPhone, but there is a web version as well, with an Android app in the works. Essentially, the user creates a mix of songs from their libraries, gives it a name and – boom. Done. Then the world at large can stream it on their phones or PCs whenever they want, wherever they need to. It’s integrated well with social media, and it’s easy to tag favorite mixes or curators and follow them, a la a Twitter feed.

In any event – I’ve made 3 mixes so far that you might enjoy shaking your proverbial rump to:

LE CRÈME DE LE CRÈME DE 60s FRENCH POP – twenty loud, brassy female-sung 1960s French Pop songs

ZIPPERHEADS – the first mix I made in about 5 minutes, comprised of random genius from the 2x4s, Electric Eels, Urinals, Hampton Grease Band & more

EAT HAPPY – fourteen recent noisy but melodic bursts of low-fidelity sound from today’s young hitmakers like Thee Oh Sees, Liminanas, Sic Alps, Proper Ornaments and more

BOW TO THE iPHONE, YOUR NEW MASTER

I have worked in the US wireless industry consistently since 1995, back when clunky cell phones like the Motorola StarTac or the Nokia “candy bar” phones were a big, big deal and no one had even heard of text messaging. Back then we would banter about something called “wireless data” – the ability to do something beyond phone calls – like it was a magical, far-off dream. For many years, it actually was. In 2001 I was in Ireland, and someone from a Japanese company played me and a bunch of others our first polyphonic ringtone – you know, a ringtone that was more than a bleeping, one-dimensional touch-tone sound – and people almost fell out of their chairs in amazement. Now those are considered anachronisms from another, less enlightened era, as are ringtones in general. I could go on and on with wow-isn’t-the-speed-of-technology-amazing stories, but that would be pretty boring.

No, I’m here today to marvel at a device that has sucked up more media air that just about anything ever created. Perhaps deservedly so – at least I think so. I’m not telling any iPhone user anything they don’t already know. It’s just that I’ve seen a hell of a lot of change, growth, triumphant companies, dying companies, dot-com bombs and whatnot firsthand over these past 15 years, yet I’ve never seen a single device nor “business vision” that’s so upended my industry as this one. This thing is so heads & shoulders above any other phone out there it’s not even close, and yeah, those Android devices are neat and all, and BlackBerries just keep getting better, but until Apple totally stumbles (and oh, they will, someday), the iPhone will become so ubiquitous and transformative that there’ll be those people who have the iPhone, and then those people who have everything else, looking longingly at the other group while they wait for their 2-year contracts to expire. It’s already that way, just not everyone knows it yet.

And I’m saying this not as Jay Hinman from MobiTV, by the way – the company I work for works happily and very closely with BlackBerry, Google, Samsung, HTC, all the wireless carriers and everyone else, in addition to Apple – I’m saying it as Jay Hinman, the consumer who sneeringly rejected the iPhone for two years (“I’ll never own a touchscreen device”) before getting one late last year, and who can’t believe how it has taken over dozens of things I used to do in other ways.

Here’s what this thing is to me:

1. My telephone. Duh. We don’t own a landline phone anymore, and since we also have Wi-Fi inside the house, it’s also my personal computer much of the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

2. My camera. As soon as the iPhone camera catches up to the other phone-based 5-8 megapixel cameras out there and adds a flashbulb, it’s game over. Then the final excuse for not getting one (outside of AT&T’s network) will have been vanquished.

3. My video camera. I wish it weren’t so, but this 3GS version is always with me and is “good enough”, so in the rare instances I want to film something – why would I carry a Flip Video or something more clunky?

4. My transistor radio. I can listen to pretty much anything I want, whenever I want, with a few app downloads. I listen to my San Francisco Giants games live on KNBR via the MLB At Bat app. I listen to WFMU shows live and via podcast. There’s Slacker, Pandora, Last.fm and a bazillion other radio apps, some of them actually good, and most of them free.

5. My stereo. There’s a ton of room for my music and podcasts – keep in mind, this is an “iPod” (remember those?) too.

6. My television. No, it’s not just MobiTV – though that’s pretty cool – but I can rent movies in iTunes for $1.99 or even buy whole episodes of shows for the same price, and sprawl out on the bed or watch these on an airplane. Some people even hook them up to full-screen TVs and have reported excellent picture quality if you use the right cables. Wow. The kids these days don’t care about screen size, they just want to watch when it’s convenient for them – something Apple presciently anticipated and/or helped to make so. Oh, and the YouTube app that comes included has just about everything you’d ever want to watch, even keyboard cat and old Nixon speeches.

7. My notebook. It’s actually pretty easy to peck reminders, beer reviews or whatever into this thing. I’ve found the keyboard much easier than I’d feared it would be, and now I can power through an email or a detailed beer review nearly as fast as I could on the old BlackBerry I had.

8. My means of male bonding with my son. I don’t like and have never really liked video games, but I have to admit that thanks to easy & fun 99-cent games like Doodle Jump and Fruit Ninja, we can kill even more time together, hangin’ out like dudes, than we did previously.

9. My reading device. Thanks to free or super-cheap apps from Mobile RSS, the NY Times, Facebook, Twitter, ESPN, The Atlantic and many others, I’ve turned into one of those cliché morons who whips out his iPhone and ignores everyone around him while something very interesting is going on deep, deep inside his phone. You know what? I’m almost definitely reading your blog or something fascinating that you tweeted about.

10. A bunch of other things. My bank (so easy to transfer $ or check balances with a couple clicks); my impulse-purchase storefront (eBay and Amazon apps are great for buying books and CDs); my mapping tool (who needs to print out MapQuest directions beforehand the way we did just a few years ago, when you can quickly get a driving or walking route on the phone that’s always with you?); my photo album; my pedometer (great app called RunKeeper for you runners out there); my restaurant or bar finder (even in real time - Yelp with “Monocle” is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen); and a bunch of other things beyond those.

I didn’t set out to become a corporate cheerleader but I’ve watched even the hippest punk rock soldiers fall around me to sing the glories of the iPhone. Everyone seems to have this $200 super-machine in their pockets, and everyone else standing around them are just counting the days until their Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile contracts expire.