Tagged: technology

Goat Saga

TLDR: I’ve lost my faith in ebooks.

I was very happy. I was. And without thinking I bought another ebook from BN. It was Goat Song, by Brad Kessler, and I was really enjoying it. Until I got to page 95.

Then it just crashed. It went back to the “home” screen. I could not skip to page 96. I could only skip to the next Part, which was around page 112.

BN recommended Archiving and Unarchiving the book. This “deletes” and the re-downloads the book. I did that. Repeatedly. It did not help. BN recommended Unregistering the nook and Reregistering it. Which is bizarre because one file is corrupt and you want me to break my entire device? But eventually I did that. And it didn’t work either.

I tried to find an ereader for my computer. I thought I could read the rest of the Part on my computer and pick back up on the nook. BN’s “Nook for Mac” app only works for Mac 10.6+ and I have 10.5. None of the other ereader applications I found would work on 10.5 and open BN’s DRM files. (Hooray for DRM. Your ebook is so secure, people who paid for it cannot read it.) I tried a bunch of other things. Nothing worked.

In a hilarious bit, I logged in to BN’s website and downloaded the file from there. That file is actually a completely different version and does not work with my device at all. So, yeah, winning all around, I am.

All of this has been going on for about a week. I expect things to just work and when they don’t I don’t really have the patience to mess around with them. I used to. Now, well now I guess I just expect more from the Technology Gods.

BN’s final effort was to recommend connecting the nook to the computer and delete the file from the device. I did that, and then the device downloaded a new copy. That didn’t work either. So BN refunded my purchase and now I don’t have the ebook at all.

So I’m going to take my $11 and go to The Book House at Stuyvesant Plaza and buy a “dead tree” version of the book. Call me old fashioned. It’s going to take a while before I don’t feel so burned.

The Gross Vulgarity of Rocket Power

From Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, emphasis mine:

It was a truism that as a scientific society progressed, its ships gradually ceased to be strictly utilitarian designs in which almost every part was in some way vital to the running of the craft. Normally they went through an intermediate stage where the overall conception was still limited by the necessities imposed by the environment in which the vessels travelled but within which there was considerable opportunity for the designers, crew and passengers/inhabitants to fashion them pretty much as they please, before – usually some centuries after the gross vulgarity of rocket power – simple space travel became so mature a technology it was almost trivial. At this point, practically anything not messily joined to lots of other important stuff could be quite easily turned into a space-capable craft able to transport humans – or any other species spectacularly maladapted to hard vacuum and the somewhat industrial radiation environment generally associated with it – to (at the very least) different parts of the same stellar system.

Now I want you to think about how almost everyone (in the US) has a so-called smartphone, how even teenagers take this technology for granted, how that technology has become “almost trivial.” And then think about our inability to travel to different parts of the same stellar system.