Still Not as Good...

A reader named Tomas commented on my last post about ebook readers. Firstly he admonished me for not doing enough research and then listed some reasons why ebook readers are a good thing.

Here are his reasons, followed by my responses:

1) Because of ‘e-ink technology’ it doesn’t strain your eyes.

Paper books don’t strain your eyes either, and paper books are also far less fragile and cost a hell of a lot less.

2) Because of the same technology you can read thousands of pages (sony portable reader - 7500 pages, not sure about kindle) with just one full charge.

7500 pages on a single charge? Impressive! Oh, but wait, paper books never need to be charged ever…and they don’t cost three hundred and fifty dollars and won’t break if you drop them.

3) You can get electronic versions of books for free (you can download pdfs from various bittorrent trackers) also mobileread.com members share ebooks they buy.

You can also get paper books for free from a library, with the added bonus of knowing that getting them from the library is 100% legal. Getting copyrighted works of fiction off the internet for free is called ‘piracy’ and is highly illegal.

4) You can read long articles which only come in electronic form (blogs, cnn.com, bbc.com and so on) without straining your eyes

Ok, that’s kinda nice, except for two things. Eye strain only really becomes a factor if you’re reading the same thing, without a break, for around 45 minutes or more. It shouldn’t take you even close to that long to read a blog post or news article. Secondly, is saving that little bit of eye-strain really worth spending over 300 dollars on? Not to mention and all the time and hassle to get that content from your computer to your ebook reader.

5) Most of the other ebook devices (compared to kindle) support many more ebook formats without drm crap.

Again, paper books have no ‘format issues’ whatsoever and DRM only becomes an issue if you’re stealing the content you want to put on your reader.

Long story short, Paper Books: 5, Ebook Readers: O.

Here’s the thing, Tomas, please don’t get me wrong I think things like the ‘Kindle’ and Sony’s ‘portable reader’ are quite nifty little devices.

My point is that even if you get an ebook reader that gives you zero eyestrain, never needs to be charged up ever, can survive a fall from the top of the Empire State Building and can work with every single ebook format there is going…all you’ve done is matched the performance of a paper book, in every area but the price.

Sure, you can point out the great ‘online’ features that come with a lot of ebook readers, but for fifty to a hundred dollars more than an ebook reader, I can buy a low-end laptop that can do everything the ebook reader can do and a whole lot more.

In simplest terms, in order for a technology to be successful, they have to improve on the thing they’re trying to replace.

Look at MP3 players. They’re better than other players because they’re much smaller, have much greater storage space than portable CD players and you can go for a run wearing one without having to worry about making the CD skip.

Ebook readers get absolutely no benefit from massive storage space because you’re never going to find yourself in a situation where you need six months reading material with you. One song keeps you entertained for about 4 minutes, so you need a lot of them…but even a short novella like ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ is going to keep you entertained for a couple of hours/

Also, you can’t go much smaller than a paperback book with an ebook reader because they need to be big enough to read off.

Even if you find yourself in a situation where it would be awesome to have 10,000 books with you (such as finding yourself stranded on a desert island), the batteries are still going to run out before you get through a fraction of them…and if you have to go home to charge the thing up, you might as well just go home, put the paperback you’ve read up on the shelf and grab another one.

In the end, even if I’m going on vacation and want reading material with me for the plane and for when I get there, I have a choice. I can spend $300 on an ebook reader and hope it doesn’t break, get stolen, run out of power or get damaged by sand when I’m reading on the beach…or I can stuff a couple of paperbacks into my carry-on luggage.

Expensive eye-strain

I read today that Amazon is marketing a new ebook reader called the ‘Kindle’.

At first it doesn’t sound half bad. It comes with free ‘anywhere’ wireless access to the Amazon ebook store, as well as free wireless access to Wikipedia, and various newspapers and blogs.

The downside? A whopping $350 price tag. On top of that, the actual books cost ten dollars a pop.

The sad truth is that ebook readers, as a concept, just don’t work very well. Technology is supposed to make things better and easier, right? Well, ebook readers are just technology for technology’s sake…and they have massive drawbacks over their paper counterparts.

Here’s the thing:

I can go and buy a paperback for about six dollars. For that six dollars I get a book that I can take anywhere…and I don’t have to worry about batteries, eye-strain from reading off a screen and can stuff that paperback into a backpack or pocket and not have to worry about breaking it.

My point is this: Why am I going to pay $350 (plus ten dollars for the actual book) to read that same story?

Sure I can carry a my whole book collection with me at all times…but considering that even a short novella equals at least a couple of hours of reading time, I just don’t need to carry more than one book with me. Also, I might be able to carry a whole library in my ebook reader, but the batteries are probably going to die halfway through one book, never mind ten.

Basically, an ebook reader is a device that costs more than a real book, is far less comfortable to read and about a million times more fragile. Not to mention that there’s no agreed upon standard for ebooks…meaning you could spend all that money on the reader, pay even more for the book…only to find it won’t actually work anyway.

As for the ‘Kindle’ from Amazon, the free wireless access to Wikipedia is great, but it’s not $350 great. For an extra 50 bucks I can get a cheap laptop that does everything the Kindle does and more. I might not be able to access wikipedia from anywhere…but I can honestly say I’ve never found myself in a situation where I’ve needed access to wikipedia that badly.

Ok, Amazon, the truth is that ebook readers are a pointless technology. Until you can make an ebook reader that is as cheap and rugged as a paperback, with real ‘digital paper’ technology that has zero eye-strain…they’re always going to fail.

As of right now there’s only one business model that I can actually see working. If you want to make ebook readers popular, here’s what you do:

Give them away for free with a subscription to a ‘netflix’ type of service. I sign up, pay you around 15 bucks a month and get unlimited book ‘rentals’ that I can download to my ebook reader from anywhere.

This has more chance of working because you’re not marketing the reader in its own right, it’s just a delivery system. I’d be willing to put up with the eye-strain, and worrying about my book running out of batteries just as I get to the good bit, because that’s the trade off for being able to access and read new books from anywhere.

I sign up for that service, pay my 15 bucks a month and can read the latest best-sellers whenever I want.

Long story short, I’ll put up with the shortcomings of an ebook reader because it’s like having a local library with me at all times. On the other hand, I’m just not willing to spend nearly four hundred bucks for the privilege of spending another ten bucks on content and having to read off a screen.

Stoopid Left Brain.

Ok, here’s a fun little ‘brain trick’ that I learned today:

Lift your right foot off the floor and start moving it in a clockwise circle. Now try to ‘draw’ a number 6 in the air with your right hand.

Can’t do it, right? If you can you’re pretty talented and you’re part of a tiny percentage of the human race that can. Most of us will find our leg spontaneously change direction.

Now do the same, but trace that number 6 with your left hand. Much easier, right? In fact, it doesn’t give you any trouble at all.

Well, here’s what’s going on (and this whole thing does have a point).

The left side of your brain controls the right hand side of your body and vice-versa. When you’re using your right leg and right hand at the same time, your brain is trying to send conflicting signals. You’re left-brain is trying to tell your leg to move clockwise while also telling your hand to move in a counter-clockwise motion (the circle at the bottom of the ‘6’) at the same time.

Unless you’re doing an ‘unconscious’ movement (like walking or breathing) it’s really, really hard to do two conflicting movements at the same time.

When you move your right leg and left hand, it’s easy because a different side of your brain controls each movement.

This also explains why it’s so hard to do things like play the piano. You’re not just doing two conflicting motions, you can be doing twenty at once.

I was interested to learn this because (at least to me) it explains the concept of ‘talent’ and, in particular, why it can be so hard to learn to draw.

Just like people can be left or right handed, people also favor a particular side of their brain. The left brain deals with things like logic and pattern recognition, while the right brain deals with things like creativity and intuition.

In other words, when you’re doing your math homework, you’re using the left side of your brain. When you get bored and start daydreaming, you’re using the right side.

The bad part comes in when you’re doing an activity that requires both sides. For example, writing involves the left side of the brain that deals with words and language, but also requires the right side which deals with creativity. Ever come up with that awesome story in your head, only to find it’s almost impossible to actually get down on paper? When you’re thinking the story up, it’s right brain all the way, which conjures up whose images and events easily. When you try to write it, the left brain takes over.

This is why genius level writers and artists are so rare, because that ‘genius level’ is the equivalent of being completely ambidextrous. Most of us favor one side of the brain over the other just like we favor one hand over the other.

Just a little anecdote to back up this theory, DaVinci was capable of writing and drawing at the same time. He could also write one thing in one language with his left hand, while simultaneously writing something different in another language with his right. In other words, neither side of his brain was ‘dominant’ and he had perfect control over both.

This is why most of us have such a hard time with creating art.

Here’s a little exercise to try:

Find a picture of someone’s face and try to draw it. Then, take another piece of paper and copy the picture again, only this time copy the picture while it’s upside-down. You’ll find that the upside down picture will be much closer to the original.

Here’s why this is happening:

Our left brains love to categorize and pigeon-hole things. It recognizes patterns and matches it up to something from our memory. Think of it this way: All trees are essentially unique. You’ll never find two that are absolutely identical, but we don’t have any problems recognizing them. That’s because our left brain gets the info from our eyes and says “Big brownish trunk, branches and leaves…that’s a tree”.

So, when you copy the picture the first time, your left brain is jumping in with information all the time you’re drawing. It says “Right, you’re drawing the eye, and eyes are ovals with a circle in the middle, and eyelashes are little hairs that grow all around it.”

The problem is that if you look at an eye you’ll see they’re not ovals, the lid of the eye always covers part of the iris and unless you’re looking at an extreme close-up, you never see individual eyelashes. However, most people when asked to draw an eye will draw just that…an oval with a circle in the middle and individual eyelashes.

This is a powerful instinct and it’s extremely difficult to shake off. In a previous post I talked about how Sunny copied a picture of a woman’s face and drew nostrils even though it was a picture taken from above… meaning the nostrils weren’t visible. Even though they weren’t in the picture she was copying from, her left brain ‘tricked’ her into drawing them anyway. Noses have nostrils, so they must be there.

This is also the reason why kids will draw a tree as a brown stick with a green circle on top. In reality this bears almost no resemblance to a real tree, but that’s the pattern the left brain developed to recognize it. ‘Tree = Trunk + Leaves’

Basically we try to draw something and instead of drawing what it really looks like, our left brain overrules us and we draw what we think it should look like.

So, going back to the experiment, how does turning the picture upside down help?

What you’re doing is taking an image that the left brain recognizes and making it ‘alien’ to yourself. Rather than drawing a named object that has a shape you already ‘know’, you’re just drawing abstract forms. The chin stops being a chin and instead just becomes a curve. Your left brain isn’t screaming at you that noses have nostrils or that eyes should be ovals, because flipping the picture makes it look strange. Your left brain isn’t recognizing any patterns because it’s not used to seeing faces upside down…which leaves your right brain clear to actually see what’s there.

For example, our left brains will tell us that an arm is limb attached to the side of the body that’s two tubes with a hand on the end. However, when you really look at an arm, you’ll see that there are no less than 14 separate curves on the outside alone.

The other big one is the placement of the eyes. When you look at someone, you don’t really ‘see’ their entire head, you only really see their face. This is why most people will draw a human face and place the eyes about ¼ of the way down from the top of the head, when it fact, the eyes are in the exact middle of the head.

Basically, it’s this left-brain, right-brain ‘battle’ that makes creative activities so difficult for most of us. The right brain is being creative while the left is constantly over-ruling it.

To close, here’s one last experiment that helps prove this theory.

Next time you’re watching TV pick a celebrity you know well and really look at their face. I mean study it. Look at the shape of their eyes, their brow-line, the way their mouth curves, etc, etc.

After a while you’ll notice all kinds of details you’d never noticed before. In fact, they’ll even start to look ‘weird’, almost as if you’ve never really seen their face before.

This is because our left brains have just taken a ‘snapshot’ of that person that allows you to recognize them. Basically, our left-brains don’t remember a whole face…they just catalogue the features that distinguish them from everyone else.

It's All About Context....

Ever have some really irrational fears?

Like, what if you’re researching a psychology paper about the criminally insane? In context no one would think you’re weird, but out of context, if someone browses your search history they might think you’re a little unbalanced.

It’s not a gigantic mental leap to see ‘psychology research’ and think ‘murder manual’.

I found myself in a similar situation today.

I was hunched over my desk, drawing my comic, when I just couldn’t get a panel right. Basically the main character is on the phone and gets some really good news. I couldn’t get the hand right, the facial expression or anything.

So I do what I usually do. I turn on my webcam in photoshop, make the facial expression or assume the pose I need and snap a picture. Then I have some basic reference so I can say “Ah! So that’s what a hand looks like when it’s holding a phone!”

Well, I’d always assumed that capturing an image from my webcam in photoshop is just like scanning a picture in photoshop. If you don’t save the image before closing the window, it just goes away…it turns out I was wrong.

I discovered a freaking library of pictures of myself pulling some of the most stupid faces ever in some pretty weird poses.

Take today’s picture for example. Like I said, I wanted to see what a hand looked like holding a phone from a particular angle…nothing strange about that, right?

But out of context, if you just found this picture on my computer, here’s what you’d see:

A picture of me, shirtless, with a gigantic goofy grin on my face, holding a pack of cigarettes to my ear while wearing big over-the-ear headphones.

You wouldn’t think “Well, here’s a guy who’s listening to a podcast while he draws, shirtless because his air-conditioner just froze up, holding an object to his ear as a stand in for the phone that he’s drawing.”

No, what you would think is: “Who is this insane naked man, and what is that packet of cigarettes telling him that’s so damn amusing?”

I’ll be deleting them from now on.

Another Artistic Dilemma

I hit another dilemma today.

I know this probably won’t interest many people, so feel free to go do something else…but for the rest of you it’s an insight into my ‘creative process’.

Today, my dilemma was this “Digital Inking Vs. Traditional”.

Right now, here’s how I make a comic strip.

Obviously, the first thing I do is write it, then I come up with a rough idea of the layout.

I work on 9x12” paper and use two pages with each page split into two panels to make up the four panel strip. The reason for this is simple. If I work too small (fit all four panels onto a single sheet), it’s impossible to get any sort of detail. I’d be drawing in panels less than 3” wide.

So I start with a very hard 2H lead and ‘rough out’ the panels, putting the characters in place, getting everything set out. At this point everything is nice and faint and kept as ‘loose’ as possible.

Once everything is in place I switch to a nice soft HB pencil and put down my ‘real’ lines. When I’m done with that I essentially have the ‘finished’ panel that looks almost exactly like what you’ll see in the strip.

Then it’s into Photoshop.

I use a graphics tablet (if you’re interested it’s a Medion Tablet, a re-badged Trust 1200-V2…not quite as good as a Wacom, but they cost $50 rather than $200, and they match up quite well).

I take my pencils, lower the opacity in Photoshop to make them fairly faint and create a new layer on top where I’ll put my inks. Then it’s just a matter of ‘tracing’ the strip using the default Photoshop brushes with the sensitivity turned up nice and high. (All this means is that the harder I press with my stylus, the thicker the line will be…it’s a lot like painting with a very stiff brush).

Once the line art is in place, I use a thicker brush and use 30% grey to add some simple shading. This is on a layer below my inks.

My dilemma hit because digital inking has a ton of advantages, but one or two real disadvantages.

For example, inking digitally has that awesome undo feature. If I mess up a line, alt-Z gets rid of it. It’s the same with the shading. If my hand slips and something messes up, away it goes. Then, of course, I can resize, cut and paste background elements that stay the same.

The other thing is I can zoom in on my pencils until they’re massive on the screen, so when it’s inked and then re-sized to normal viewing size, all those little hand-shakes vanish.

Unfortunately, drawing on a tablet isn’t very easy. It’s much easier than a mouse, but you’re still drawing on one surface and having your lines appear on a screen. Basically, my actual line-art suffers a little.

Now traditional inking is a lot easier in a lot of ways. It’s just drawing. You can see exactly where your nib is in relation to the pencils and inking over the top makes things much easier.

In other words, when everything goes right, the finished art looks significantly better.

The problem is that every stroke is set in stone. You’re inking over your pencils, so if you mess up, you have to start again from scratch. If you scan your pencils and print a copy and ink over that…then you can’t erase your pencils when you’re done which takes a lot of cleaning up in photoshop.

The other big problem with traditional inking is that sketch pad paper doesn’t take ink very well. The paper actually gets damp with each stroke and the ink has a tendency to ‘bleed’ if you need a particularly dark thick line. Basically, you need Bristol-Board to take ink properly…and that’s pretty damn expensive…and I can’t afford to spend 20 bucks a week on paper.

I figure I’ll stick with traditional inking…at least until I find a huge stockpile of Bristol Board, Micron Pens and India Ink…or I somehow find a Wacom Cintiq lying in the street.