Refresh Rate: A State of the Scroll

If you're new here, hello. If you're not new here... I'm sorry. Anyway, for those new here, my blog gets its name from one of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories, In the Walls of Eryx. It's not an especially well-liked story by Lovecraft fans, partly for being one of his few full-blooded sci-fi stories (broadly speaking, he was a horror writer), but also for its own premise creating a plot hole big enough for a spaceship to barrel through while twirling a cane. Without getting into a full synopsis of the story, it's about a guy trapped in an invisible maze. He makes several good attempts at trying to map his way through, but the maze is in a muddy swamp, making footprints impossible to follow as they get filled in almost immediately. He even tries using the mud to mark the walls of the maze only for it to slide down and leave the surface completely immaculate. 

If you've already spotted the plot hole, give yourself 3 points. If you're having a little trouble, don't feel bad; I didn't spot it until someone pointed it out to me, long after I'd written fan fiction for it. Here's a hint, at one point our hero tries digging under the walls to no avail. So, the wall goes down into the mud. Isn't it going to leave an impression? It's invisible, not incorporeal. At any point, our hero can literally see the entirety of the maze's outline in the mud. 

Ironically, making the floor mud instead of something solid like stone was probably meant to cover up a potential plot hole of our protagonist being able to properly mark his path on the floor. The mud, however, only really kicks a can down the road. That said, this doesn't seem to spoil anyone's fun. It certainly doesn't spoil mine. 

The story is told in a first-person narrative, the events being recorded on what is called a Decay-Proof Record Scroll. 

Said scroll is never described in any great detail beyond it being metallic and also "revolving" implying it might be cylindrical. It is called a "scroll" after all. On that note, isn't the idea of Amazon calling an electronic book a "kindle" a little weird? Granted, they don't mean "kindle" in the literal sense of starting a fire, more in the sense of inspiring awe and wonder. Nonetheless, I can't help but think of an episode of Red Dwarf wherein the leads contemplate the ethics of burning books in order to keep warm while marooned on a frozen celestial body. 

I've had my Mobiscribes for about two weeks now, and my impression of them remains positive. As of this writing, I have two of the black and white models, one to keep at home, the other for work (brought home on the weekends to charge, if necessary), and I actually have a third one on the way. It's the color model, and I'm curious to see how it looks. I should point out that the reason I've gone on this little shopping spree is that the tablets are steeply discounted on the Mobiscribe website for the holiday season. Even at their full prices, they're still the most affordable e-note option compared to the ReMarkable or the anything from Onyx Boox. 

Much like In the Walls of Eryx, the Mobiscribe isn't a particularly well-liked e-note offering, with tech blog Good E Reader calling the color version the worst eReader of 2023. To be completely fair to them, they are exceptionally thorough in their reviews and, as much of a cliche as it sounds, truly have their finger on the pulse of the electronic paper space. Onyx Boox's offerings in particular are no slouches when it comes to specifications and performance. They're essentially Android tablets that just so happen to have an electronic paper display instead of LCD or OLED. Of course, just because you can run YouTube on it, doesn't make it watchable. The refresh rate of an e-paper display is glacially slow compared to the 60 or 120 hertz of an iPad screen. As for the Mobiscribe, while its specs are definitely not on the level of an Onyx Boox, they don't need to be. 

When it comes to e-paper devices, the guiding philosophy behind them is digital minimalism. They're not as full-featured as an iPad, but that's the whole point. All you're supposed to do on an Amazon Kindle is read books. Even the ability to stream audiobooks through them is practically an afterthought. I can run Android apps on my Mobiscribe, but the results have been borderline laughable. Even something low key like Google Keep (a sticky note app) is unusable beyond reading the notes I've already posted there. Of course, why would I need Google Keep when the Mobiscribe has a note taking experience baked in that's optimized for the hardware? Sure, having my notes immediately available in the Google ecosystem is great, but is it always necessary? Even getting Google's Play Store up and running on the Mobiscribe is an obstacle course. It even comes pre-loaded with an instructional PDF on how to do it, complete with a "cheat code" for speeding it up. The best way I can describe the process is: when you think you've messed up, that means you did it right. 

It's certainly been refreshing, and made me realize how absolutely spoiled I am on Apple and even Amazon products that simply work right out of the box with little to no input on my part. 

Early E-Paper Exposure, OR: Adoption Atrocities

We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books. -- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

I can't find my copy of Salmon of Doubt, so I paid a penny shy of two dollars for the electronic version on Apple Books. I didn't bother looking up the Kindle version because buying books through Kindle on an iPad is a pain. Besides, I've read Salmon of Doubt cover to cover and at this point I'm only referencing it more than reading it. This highlights an advantage of ebooks over their paper predecessors: the ability to search the text with keywords. 

Sadly, another resource of Douglas Adams' wisdom and insight appears to have become lost media. His BBC Radio 4 series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future, which has an episode devoted to eBooks, cannot be listened to because it uses RealPlayer and nothing uses that anymore. At least, nothing I have uses RealPlayer anymore; according to their site, they've gone Windows only. 

Overall, he had a fairly complicated opinion about ePublishing. Many possibilities, but all depend on the execution. Adams left us in May of 2001, long before Amazon became the powerhouse we know it as today. At that time, eReaders were very niche devices only made by a handful of companies, the biggest of which was Sony. Strangely, though, none of the other electronics giants seemed at all interested in competing with Sony on this front. For all intents and purposes, it was them and Rocketbook. 

Sometime between 1997 and 2002, when I was working at a local Target's electronics counter, someone asked if we had any eReaders. His had packed up and, the way he made it sound, left his library completely inaccessible. I felt really bad for him. There was nothing we could do; I don't even think we had our PDA's stocked at that point, and no one was using any of those to read eBooks. I think about that guy every now and again, especially when Amazon releases a new Kindle or I see a review of some other eReader on YouTube. He was an early adopter, and unfortunately paid the worst possible price for it. Looking back, I would have assumed he could at least read the files on his desktop or laptop. Otherwise, how would he have gotten the books onto the reader? Nonetheless, it had to be frustrating. I hope the frustration is long behind him and he's happy with whatever eReader he's gotten for himself now. 

09 JUL 25 WED UPDATE: While writing a newer entry about Audible, I happened upon The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future there, presented in full and with an addendum from 2015 entitled Did Douglas Get It Right?. 

A Prime Example

In the interest of full disclosure, I am an Amazon slave. I've been a Prime Member for years, I have several Alexa smart speakers, I use Subscribe & Save, I use Kindle and Audible, and I even watch Prime Video (mostly for the Grand Tour or anything the old Top Gear crew is attached to). I know the company is evil, they treat their workers (especially their drivers) like garbage, their returns are a joke, and Jeff Bezos is dumping tons of methane into the atmosphere with his phallus rockets, to say nothing of that stupid yacht he tried to have a bridge disassembled over. 

Yet... I'm still paying. I can only offer so much in my defense. There's still plenty of small and local businesses I support, and there's certain items that I simply will not buy from Amazon if I can avoid it. If I can get it straight from the manufacturer, I'll go that route (especially if they let me check out with PayPal because that's just as convenient as Amazon). To me, Amazon offers a way to eliminate tedium. I don't have to haul bags of cat food, kitty litter, and sparkling water around in a cart, into my car, out of my car, and into my house. Now, all but that last step has been eliminated. It's one less thing I have to deal with. It's cruise control, not fully autonomous driving, if you follow. The point is if it all went away tomorrow, I'd be only a little bit bummed... for about five minutes, and then I'd move on to something else. 

Is it really an addiction if you're in control of it? 

Anyway, there's still the dilemma of supporting a terrible company, but the awful truth to that matter is that voting with your wallet is kind of a hollow promise. After all, there's no "vote against" just voting for something, and not voting at all. Moreover, if you know anything about how the company is structured, their main money maker is not their retail branch. It's all their web hosting. That's where this gets really scary. I heard once that all of Netflix's servers are owned by Amazon. That may seem like a massive conflict of interest, but it's actually good business. There's a similar sort of relationship between Apple and Samsung. Yes, they're rivals in the smartphone space, but if you were to open up your iPhone, you'd find Samsung's name on more than a few components. In fact, the iPhone camera is actually a Sony component. I find that funny because the camera on my old Xperia phone wasn't all that great, but the little iPhone 5c I got to replace it took damn fine pictures right out of the box. 

I decided to write this entry after receiving an email from Amazon that some of you may have read yourselves or at least heard about on social media. Ads are coming to Prime Video. Although they insist there will be overall fewer ads than television, it's more than a little disheartening that this is what they resorted to in terms of expanding their market share in the streaming space. 

Rather than create a new, lower-priced, ad-supported tier and bring in new customers, they'd rather punish loyal customers who have been paying for Prime for years (seriously, whatever happened to grandfathering?). Instead, they now offer an ad-free version of Prime for an additional fee. Obviously, this is about Amazon making more money. They chose this strategy because simply raising the rates would have deterred many from renewing, so they decide to raise the proverbial temperature of the pot of water instead of dunking us in straight away. As I said, I think they could have done more to draw in new customers than try to tiptoe around existing ones. 

As for what I'm going to do about it... very little. Ironically, most of what I've been watching on Prime Video of late has been through their subsidiary FreeVee, which is ad-supported anyway. There's also that practice of advertising their other shows before the ones I'm already watching. It's frustrating that this is happening, but I'm more mad at myself for not being more bothered. I feel like I should be cancelling my Prime membership as a statement, but I know it's not going to change anything and despite what I said about what I'd do if this all went away, I don't want to be the one to pull the plug. Given the scale, it would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. Then again, we're also living in a time when a comedy about Wile E. Coyote suing Acme was brought back from a fate worse than death for media. 

Maybe we're reaching a point where it's more than just the bottom line that a business can pay attention to. Yes, Coyote Vs. Acme got a big boost from a number of meetings being canceled, as well as the potential threat of Capitol Hill getting involved (one congressman compared the move to committing arson and insurance fraud), but it's still notable how much of a public outcry got heard. Hell, remember when the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie got delayed because of backlash against the early trailer? No calls for boycotts there, just plain, "Dear God, what is that thing!?" from a few thousand voices on Twitter. Yes, there was still a bottom line ultimately being threatened, but we didn't have to wait until opening weekend for the change to occur.