Flotsam & Jetsam

Recently read: The Family Trade, The Hidden Family, and The Clan Corporate, by Charles Stross

Though I’m a big Stross fan, I’ve been avoiding his Merchant Princes series, primarily because it is labeled and marketed as fantasy. However, his post mortem on the series got me interested, especially this explanation of the underlying theme:

[I]t’s implicitly about sociology and economics, and more specifically, about the development trap … how it is that the ruling elite of a very poor country can live an imported developed-world lifestyle, but fail to spark economic development in their general population.

The other motivating factor was that I got one of these recently and wanted to try out the Kindle and iBooks apps. I’m not willing to spend $15 or $20 on DRMed ebooks in place of hardcovers, but when it comes to ebooks vs. mass-market paperbacks, I’m on board with this (except for the intraword capitalization): “eBook rule of thumb for book lovers: if you’d be ok buying the paperback, buy the eBook.”

Based on having read the first two of the above in the Kindle app and the third in iBooks, I think I prefer the Kindle experience. Strange as it feels to say, given that the opposite holds for the two companies’ hardware offerings, the Kindle app is clean, simple, and elegant, whereas iBooks is more visually complex and imposes more of a cognitive load.

Kindle

No faux-realistic visual metaphors, no controls, no distractions.

iBooks

The cell/WiFi reception indicators, clock, and battery meter are distractions, as is the page number (the Kindle app gets this exactly right: you can tap to see the page number, but it’s not always there, reminding you how far you still have to go). Also, the physical book metaphor is overdone—especially the overly-elaborate page-turning animation, which is cool the first time you see it but gets old fast.