Farewell, Blue & Gold - RTOTD #863

Day 863

Turns out my Blockbuster story from last week had great timing. The company announced yesterday that they were closing their remaining 300-ish stores around the country.

Man, this is just the next step as media stores all die.

First it was the record stores in the 90's and early 00's. Places that were dedicated record shops? They didn't last. The places that managed to transition from the record to the cassette to the cd didn't realize that the end-result of that evolution of music delivery was going to be the one that didn't include them. Digital. Big box stores like Best Buy that used media as loss-leaders to sell you a tv or a stereo were the first step. Napster and shit really put a beating on the record store even when 56k and DSL were the high-end of data delivery. The iPod and iTunes put another nail into them. Amazon and other non-traditional options for physical media really hurt them. And once we were all putting thousands of songs on our phones instead of needing to carry a 2nd device for music? That's when it was just a matter of shoveling the dirt back into the grave. It was dead.

And in a lot of ways? That's really quite sad. Obscure music becomes harder to find when you aren't thumbing through a row of import albums or checking out labels and release charts. Or in my case, checking the stuff out as I stocked the shelves in highschool. That kinda always made it easier. And as a consumer now? Finding "that guy" at the record store that knew every new album out and would recommend you this new thing that nobody else has heard about (like I spent most of late 99 and early 2000 doing with MUSE) and it would be killer? That guy doesn't exist anymore. You can't get that from iTunes. They don't have a "the record store guy" app or whatever to recommend shit. They just have their typical label shills that pay for ad space.

It was only a matter of time before it happened to movies. No, streaming hasn't yet reached the quality or market availability yet to truly be a viable alternative. There's far too many portions of the country that are missing the infrastructure and data speed yet to really replace dvds and blurays with streaming entirely. And while Redbox is great, it just doesn't replace a Blockbuster or whatever for old movies. A Redbox has no selection at all if the movie isn't under 2 months old. And adding games to them now just gives it less space for movies.

Good luck if you wanna watch Star Wars tonight and don't own it. Redbox doesn't have it. Netflix will give it to you in 3 days, but that's not tonight. None of the streaming services have it (amazon, Netflix, etc) and the only way you can buy it online is in the "all of the movies" bundle on iTunes and the like. At least before, if you wanted to watch Star Wars or Indiana Jones, you could head out the trusty Blockbuster and rent it.

So I guess those of you that want to rent it can pirate it and delete it. And those of you that live in the sticks and it'll take 4 days to download it from a torrent site? I guess you can make a trip to Walmart and buy it. But that kinda defeats the purpose of "renting it for $3 for 3 nights" thing. But that's about it for your choices.

So RIP Blockbuster. Your lack of a porn section and constant need to impulse sell candy and DirecTV will not be missed, but your ability allow us to watch some random 80's comedy or bad Wesley Snipes 90's action movie at our leisure will certainly be. Farewell, original blue & gold signage that BestBuy kinda stole. You will maybe sorta be missed. But you could always just make your not-Redbox machines at Sheetz like 3x the size and give us all of that selection again. We won't complain.

Yet another step down the road to a virtual-media only future where nothing is manufactured and all media is consumed and stored digitally. But if you people fuck with bookstores & comic book stores and make them disappear too, I'm going to start hunting people down. Books and comics are still infinitely better when consumed in physical format. I can sacrifice a tiny bit of audio or video quality to never have to wipe down another CD or DVD or get up to change discs. But if you think I'm going to live with not being able to file my comics in long boxes ore look at my bookshelf and hold and smell and see a real book with real pages and ink on them, well you've got another thing coming, fuckers!

A Boring Tech Review Blog - RTOTD #858

Day 858

 

I upgraded my MacBook to OS X Mavericks yesterday because it was free. And thus far, I love it... with one big caveat:

 

For the first time, iBooks run on the Mac. In previous iterations of OS X,  you could buy iBooks through the iBooks Store that was inside of the iTunes store. You could manage your library. You could add other ePub format books that you... *ahem* Downloaded... and modify the metadata and transfer the books to your iOS devices through the iTunes app. But you couldn't actually read a fucking iBook on your Mac without a 3rd party ePub reader app. If you were in iTunes and double-clicked on a book to open it like you would a movie or song, it did nothing. It might as well have been an iOS app that you could also manage/view your library of iPhone or iPad apps, but that was about it. It was just there. A throwback to the days where you had to connect your phone to your computer in order to manage what music and apps you had on your device.

 

That all changed with Mavericks. iBooks has its own dedicated app now and when you first open it, it asks you if you'd like to migrate your library to there from iTunes. A dedicated app for just reading that actually lets you read the books that you buy for your iPad on your laptop. A dedicated app for managing your eBook library that is designed for books instead of being square-peg-hammered into the round hole of an app originally designed as just a music library manager and media player. A media player and library manager that couldn't actually run/open/play a number of the types of files that it managed.

 

iTunes, while still bloated and unnecessarily processor intensive, is a good media library manager for movies and music and tv shows. It's a player. It plays entertainment that you passively enjoy. The integration of iBooks management, while it makes sense in a "keep your whole media library in 1 app" sense, always seemed too somehow... not... quite... fit. In the same way that iOS app management doesn't seem to fit. Books and movies/music/tv shows are different in 1 very specific way. Books require active engagement with the material in order to enjoy. Movies, music and tv shows are passive. Reading requires thinking. Watching and listening don't. And that's before I even point out the uselessness of a library that simply lets you LOOK at apps that you can't even open.

 

But I'm getting off track here.

 

Artist names. Album names. Series names. Disc numbers. Track numbers. Compilations, durations and all of that stuff is great for metadata for music and movies. But for books? It doesn't work as well. It's that square-peg-round-hole thing again.

 

That's what's nice about iBooks. The problem is, you can't actually edit the metadata in iBooks. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I'm fucking weird about id3 tags and metadata in movies and music and tv shows. I want them to be as accurate as possible. Granted, I don't give a fuck about "composers" or some of the weird fields. But artist, album, track number, release year, etc... I want that shit to be right. And I can't do that in iBooks for some reason. There's no way to edit the stuff. So when it comes to a book genre, I've got some weird genres in there right now. For instance, there's a Vince Flynn book in my library that has a genre of "cookie429" because apparently that's a real genre and I can't change it. I can't drag & drop it into the right genre and it make the changes. I can't 2-finger click on it and get a thing to open and edit it manually. I can't do anything. It's stuck with a genre of "cookie429" until magic happens. And that does NOT make for easy library maintenance of over 1,500 eBooks.

 

The other problem that I see with it is one major thing that made the iTunes integration make sense. If you buy a book from the iBooks store, it's right there with the little iCloud logo every time you open the iBooks app on  your iPad or phone. Just click the iCloud logo and you can magic your book down onto your device. No problem. But if you have a book that you didn't buy from the iBooks store, and you have it in your library and want to throw it onto your iPad, you just clicked it, dragged it over to your devices and dropped it into the iPad option. Except that... oh would you look at that? There's no fucking devices that show up! There's no option on the 2-finger click. There's not even an option anywhere in the damn program that I can find. WTF?

 

So I'm back to managing books to my iPad by having to check and uncheck them through the sync options in iTunes when I click on the device that I want to stick a book onto.

 

Needless to say, this sucks. Granted, it's been out for all of about 20 hours now, and I'm pretty sure that's one of the things that'll get fixed pretty quickly. But still... in the meantime? It sucks.

The Importance Of A Physical Thing - 810

Day 810

So I've realized something: I read a lot more when I have physical books than when I just have stuff thrown onto my iPad. And while it's a lot less convenient to carry around, physical books still have a draw for me that ebooks don't.

Now, that's not to say I have an issue with ebooks by any stretch. I love that I can take hundreds or more books with me anywhere I go with just a thing that I can (kinda tightly) fit into my back pocket. I love that there's a lot more options for interactingness, which is a word I think I just made up, in ebooks over physical books. I can only imagine how fucking badass a Choose Your Own Adventure book could be in ebook format. It' could be truly limitless. I love how  an author can update a book after it's published and, as long as they're just editing the same item on the Kindle store or iBooks store or whatever, you just gotta update the version you have and all of a sudden, major edits just pop up on your device without having to go and buy a new copy.

Not to mention how you can integrate media of all sorts into an ebook that is just not possible with a physical book. It's great. Want a certain song playing in the background or to set a mood with media instead of words? You can do that with an ebook when it's not really an option for a physical book.

But there's still something about holding  a book in your hands. Smelling the pages. Feeling the texture. Feeling how much or how little you have left to read. Flipping from page to page. That's something that you can't do with an ebook.

Or setting them up on a shelf or in a box with dozens of other books. With an ebook, it's just another file in a whole folder filled with them.

Having it staring you in the face when you put it down on the end table and it tempting or demanding you to pick it back up and finish it. There's none of that constant reminder when you've got an ebook on your tablet or phone or kindle. There's no taunting of a book cover that says "fucking read me, asshole! You're not done yet!" the way there is with the physical book.

And that's not to mention that sometimes you don't WANT a different version of a book that's been updated. Sometimes there's something refreshing or quaint about the little mistakes or incompleteness of the original version. Like a first edition. The oldness of the pages or for truly antique books, the idiosyncrasies of the original printer that make it unique.

I don't know... it's why I'm always torn and why I often wish that Amazon or Barnes & Noble or whoever would do something like Hollywood has done with their system. Where you get a download code for a digital copy when you buy a new dvd, but for books. So when you order a book from Amazon or something, it automatically shows up on your kindle account so you can start it now while you wait for the physical copy to arrive from the retailer. That way, when you're at home, you can read the physical copy but when you've got to go somewhere but want to carry the book with you, you just throw your kindle in your pocket or bag or car and you don't have to carry a bunch of books around with you.

It's weird that the Comic book industry is the only one to have even kinda figured this out yet. And even their system is imperfect. But it's getting there. And maybe one day in the future, we won't have to balance our desire to carry our things with our desire to actually own physical things.