Tree Weasel Weekly

Wake up and smell the eBook

I am a hoarder. A collector. I used to collect books, but I ran out of space and had to curtail my purchasing. Then about 7 years ago I discovered eBooks! They are very easy to buy, and take up no space. I think you can imagine what has happened. Now ebooks are becoming mainstream and we start to see some tired old complaints trotted out – you can’t read them in the bath, they don’t smell nice etc. I don’t have a lot of time for these discussions really, but there are a couple of threads I would like to follow up on.

Virtual goods are not the same as their physical counterpart (obviously), and quite often are inferior in terms of an overall aesthetic package. Nobody who remembers LPs would compare the lavish artwork, sleeve notes and booklets many LPs contained with the anonymity of a MP3 “album”, which is often missing even the most basic accompanying material. eBooks are treated even worse, covers are often missing, they are formless, and of course they don’t smell right! But it doesn’t have to be like this.

What could we do to make ownership of digital material more tangible? The video game, Disgaea, has an interesting approach to in game items. Instead of a small list of generic stuff that you can buy or loot, every single item is unique. They even have creatures living in them (again unique) that you can quell or tame but that is getting even further off the track. Why am I even talking of this? Well, there is no reason that each eBook shouldn’t be unique as well. Of course the content of the eBook needs to be consistent, but what about a layer of meta-data that records unique information about the book? One of the nice things about most eBook formats is that the format itself already supports this type of information and the reading software can choose to ignore or act upon it as it sees fit.

What could be recorded in this meta-data? The user’s name and other simple items spring to mind as the most basic. Support for author signings/messages/personalised bookplates? This is not DRM by the way, just information to make the eBook more individual. Straightforward enough. But what about a meta-data layer defining decay? I used to be able to tell when my brother had read my books because the edges of the pages turned black! He worked in a machine shop and read during his breaks with oily fingers. Every time we read a paper book, it wears out slightly, pages fray, finger marks appear and so on. Completely pointless, but we could add similar aspects to eBooks so that they “suffer” some of the stresses of use, and this decay could be recorded in the ebook and displayed in the reader.

Of course all of these depend on the reading software to interpret and record the meta data in a meaningful way. And since eBooks don’t really have pages as such, perhaps not a workable idea. But many readers let users annotate and mark up books, so there is already support (of sorts) for making a book unique.

One other area that is ripe for exploitation is the library management on your reading device. I have an iPad, and it, and other tablets, are no slouches when it comes to pushing pixels around. So why do we have flat shelves with 2D “books” lined up in rigid lines? Lets go to town here. Have a 3D (or even 2.5D) representation of a book, so that it resembles its physical counterpart, with varying height and thickness. Why not a 3D library environment with shelves, ladders, dust, cobwebs, and orang-utans. OK, maybe not orang-utans. I am not suggesting we licence the Unreal engine and produce an amazing 3D library (though that would be kind of neat) but simply something that emphasised the differences each book has, and gave us different ways to arrange and manipulate our library. Total gloss and frippery perhaps, but as a virtual collection grows, it is nice to be able to visualise and interact with it in different ways. There are several apps that attempt to do this with music, including Planetary, which represents your music collection as a solar system. Daft? Yes, but shows a bit of thinking beyond the rigid lists and collections that make up the building blocks of a software developers normal toolkit. Another app, Albums, shows your music as CD covers and lets you pile them up on a virtual table and shuffle them around.

Anyway – enough of me. Just a bit of a rambling discourse on making ebooks decay, wear out, and look individual.  But not smell. You can’t do that with meta-data or the Unreal engine. Yet.

 

 

CIV V FTW

With a little bit of free time over the consecutive 4 day weekends I dug up Civ V for another look and found that its grip on my brain is as strong as ever. In fact as I thought about it, I think it transcends its predecessors in every way. Of course each iteration is an improvement, but usually there are some aspects of the new version that don't quite work as well, leading to hankering for the "old ways". But Civ V leaves Civ IV and III in the dust (and neither were that shabby).

So what are some of the improvements? The one I like best is the new structure of Social Policies which replace the Government & Religion from Civ IV. In place of Democracy, Republic etc. there is a set of ten policy "trees" that you can apply Culture points to, and that provide much finer grained control over the direction your civilisation takes. The trees are researched in a similar way to technology, but use Culture points (which are granted by a variety of City Improvements) and some trees are mutually exclusive. This is the single most important leap forward for me, each game will take you down a subtly different route.

Great People still appear, but the rules governing their appearance are more transparent and the range of things that you can do with them more varied. Another major change is to a Hex map, and this is a big plus for me as well. Movement, Zones of Control and City Placement get an extra layer of depth without complexity. In fact although there are some significant additions, the complexity is nicely layered into the game structures and doesn't overwhelm.

Another nice addition is the City State, autonomous cities that don't expand, but befriending (or conquering) them can be beneficial. The Diplomacy options are broadly familiar, but adding in the City States and their alliances is effective. You do have to be careful. Attacking a single City State could lead to a world war as cascading defence pacts and alliances drag in other nations.
Civ IV at times seemed to play itself, sure you could intervene, but on the whole that just led to a whole world of bewilderment, and worry that a whole lot was going on under the hood that was influencing the game, and that you should really try to figure it out, but all you really wanted to do was get on with things! In Civ V there is still a lot that happens under the hood, but it is somehow a bit more accessible.

I am sure that there are numerous resources on the web that describe the changes. As a Civ veteran since the original Civilisation on PC I am hugely impressed with the glorious progression that is Civ V. As I mentioned before, I haven't got the slightest inclination to revisit Civ IV. The fact that Civ V is available under Steam on the Mac helps a lot too.