"White Fang" by Jack London

Recently finished "White Fang" by Jack London and found it to be a good read.



Having previously used the "Classics" app on my iPhone to read "Call of the Wild" by London (which I reviewed here), I used the Amazon Kindle Reader app on my phone to read this one. Really didn't see much difference at all in the user interface or experience with the Kindle Reader app as opposed to Classics... both solid.

To "White Fang" itself... I definitely enjoyed "Call of the Wild" more as it simply seemed to have more action packed into a tighter space, but still did like this book. Particularly the ending I enjoyed in that it showed how multiple events over a long period of time can all come together to influence a moment. Also, London as a writer definitely is one of those people that I read and wonder how the heck they can write so well...

Fast Company Magazine - Jul/Aug 2009 Issue

Couple of interesting articles from the most recent Fast Company Magazine.



First and foremost is an investigative report titled "Beyond the Grid" by Anya Kamenetz. It looks in great detail at the concept of small-scale household or business power generation and it's potential. Not surprisingly, this idea of a "micro-grid" is being fought by large power utilities looking to prevent this competition by either installing and controlling it themselves or by simply making it go away. What's also very interesting in the piece is the mention of clean-energy advocates such as Al Gore trumpeting the idea of an "electric super-highway"... which is much less efficient and more costly than the micro-grid. Fascinating piece.

Also from this issue is the cover story "Amazon Taps It's Inner Apple" about the company's dominance of the online book market and impact on the larger brick and mortar based publishing industry. Closely tied into that is the speculation of how Apple might get into the fray with a larger version of it's iTouch / iPhone that could compete with the Amazon Kindle.

Another interesting piece is "Why Walgreens Is Building Its Own Universal Health-Care System" about the clinics that Walgreens operates in both it's retail stores as well as onsite at various companies. The retail-based side is interesting from it's ability to offer quick and easy (read: affordable) health care to the uninsured, but the corporate located side even more interesting in it's goal of keeping a company's employees healthy and productive.

Last story to note is titled "Why America Is Addicted to Olive Garden". As someone who doesn't find appetizing the idea of eating at Olive Garden, I was interested in this story not so much from being about the food, but rather about the corporation and how it's run.

Amazon & the Kindle

Couple of interesting articles I've seen lately about Amazon. From the June 22 issue of Time Magazine comes "Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business?" by the very solid Time writers Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs. It's just a fascinating look at a company that's remade themselves over the years and is dominating and now guiding an industry through their share of the online book sale market and introduction of the Kindle reader (and it's new iterations).

Not quite as wide ranging, but still an interesting product review is "Amazon's New Kindle DX Means Business" by Stephen Wildstrom in the June 22 BusinessWeek.

I wrote previously about written content online and the wireless reader market that Amazon practically created in this blog post... interesting topic.

Written Content Pricing & Delivery - from Time Magazine

Couple of interesting articles in the Feb 16 issue of Time around online news content... focusing both on the financial viability of the companies that publish it (online and in print) and on the delivery mechanism of that content.

The first piece is by Walter Isaacson, formerly a managing editor of Time Magazine, and details his views on how to make this whole financially viable thing work. The cover story titled "How to Save Your Newspaper" espouses an idea that Apple has made ubiquitous through it's iTunes Music Store... micro-payments.

It's an interesting idea in that it drills down further from the idea of online subscriptions (which are usually on a monthly basis) and questions why content couldn't be received on a micro-basis (with costs that could be anywhere upwards from a penny). This would enable the organizations that create that content to remain open for business and in essence, keep the industry alive. Isaacson's assertion is that even though it would be different than the current mostly-free model around web news content, the idea of paying Apple $.99 per song on iTunes likely seemed revolutionary to those getting content free on Napster.

The second piece around written content from this issue of Time focuses not on the type of content itself, but rather on the delivery mechanism. Whether it be a newspaper, magazine, book or other printed material, there's efforts from multiple companies to figure out the best type of mobile electronic reader for that content, and to deliver that. This is the topic covered in the story "The Race for a Better Read" which looks at both current handheld offerings and what the future may hold.

The best known option out there is the "Kindle" handheld reader from Amazon, but competition will be likely coming in the future. Some companies to keep an eye on would be the Silicon Valley startup Plastic Logic (which is being led by a former HP manager I've met) or Apple if they (as rumored) get into the market with a larger version of the iTouch. Also mentioned in the article is the Adobe AIR software program that serves as a platform for material to to be written onto.

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Not necessarily related to this topic, but two other things of interest I recently found from Time...

The book "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer is about the psychology of how consumers make purchase decisions and reviewed in the same Feb 16 Time issue.

From http://www.time.com/ is a listing with detailed descriptions on Time's 50 Best Websites of 2008. Interesting stuff.