virtualDavis

Apple iPad w/ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Wikipedia)

“I wish you wouldn’t take your iPad to bed.”

“My dear, we’ve been through this before…”

“It’s not good to watch a backlit screen before bed. You’re not going to be able to fall asleep.”

“Except it doesn’t seem to bother me. Remember?”

Unless waking up early the following morning is the symptom, I don’t suffer from “iPad insomnia”. I read on my iPad. I turn off the light. I go to sleep. And usually I sleep solidly for 4-6 hours and wake up, ready to start a new day. Except when I’m super tired. Or sick. In other words, empirical evidence would suggest that I’m not susceptible to iPad insomnia. Unless it accounts for a lower-than-average sleep appetite.

A year or two ago I wouldn’t have believed that my pre-sleep reading preference would ever be an electronic gadget. Today, I honestly prefer my iPad before bed to most anything else. I love books, I mean, really love books, but my tired eyes love the iPad. And I can dim the screen or reverse the text so that the screen is black. Life is good.

And yet, it looks like the good folks down at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute‘s Lighting Research Center agree with my bride that backlit screens can suppress melatonin.

RPI found that looking at a backlit screen, like those on iPads and other tablets, can lead to sleeplessness.

“Our study shows that a two-hour exposure to light from self-luminous electronic displays can suppress melatonin by about 22 percent,” said Mariana Figueiro, the lead researcher.  “Stimulating the human circadian system to this level may affect sleep in those using the devices prior to bedtime.”

In the study, 13 subjects read, watched videos and played games on tablets with backlit displays for two hours. The subjects were equipped with devices to measure the light their eyes were receiving, and some wore goggles that filtered the light they saw. (latimes.com)

Aside from the itsy bitsy teeny weeny test group, it’s worth noting that the study was not limited to reading. Videos and interactive video games strike me as a much more likely to interrupt natural circadian rhythms. But videos and video games are not my daily nightcap, so I’m not terribly concerned. As for my Kindle Fire, my experience with pre-bed reading is similar to the iPad and ink-and-paper books. No experience reading the old school Kindles before bed, but I suspect they’d fall into the same group.

In short, iPad insomnia be damned! My melatonin loves the backlit screen.

Related articles

• Having Trouble Sleeping? Your Tablet or Smartphone Could Be to Blame (mashable.com)
• Insomnia? Your iPad Could Be The Culprit (cultofmac.com)
• Is your iPad keeping you up at night? (computerworld.co.nz)
• Light from Screens Delays Sleep (cryptogon.com)

Sony WM-FX421 Walkman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Technology creates our needs faster than it satisfies them. (Kevin Kelly)

My Monday morning muse for your ruminating pleasure is actually not mine at all. It’s a quotation from Kevin Kelly’s 1998  New Rules for the New Economy. No longer new, of course, but if you missed out before you’ll find that it’s still relevant and eerily prescient. And did I mention that the blog version lives on his website? And that it’s free?

According to Kelly, we’re hurtling forward, inventing technologies to satisfy our desires and — in the process —  discovering new desires.

Our wants are compounding exponentially… technology creates ever new opportunities for those desires to find outlets and form. (Kevin Kelly

Although the illustrative example, a $50 Sony Walkman (remember cassette tapes?), seems practically ancient, I can’t help but transpose an iPad or even a Kindle Fire.

When a merchant sells a consumer a new Sony Walkman for $50, he is in fact creating far more demand than he is satisfying–in this case a continuing and potentially unlimited need for tape cassettes and batteries. (Paul Pilzer)

Transposed for the digital age:

When a merchant sells a consumer an iPad, he is in fact creating far more demand than he is satisfying–in this case a continuing and potentially unlimited need for digital products (ebooks, videos, games, apps, etc.), physical accessories (from practical screen protectors and card readers to fashion carrying cases), non-physical accessories (warranty extensions, maintenance contracts, customer support, etc.), software updates/upgrades, and–let’s be totally honest–hardware upgrades because sexy new models with more memory, faster processors, longer lasting batteries and retina displays are the MSG that keeps consumers coming back for more!

With writers, publishers, editors, agents and booksellers wandering the Wild West known as the Post-Gutenberg Paradigm, it’s more evident than ever that technology creates more demand than it satisfies. Increasingly tech-centric publishing and storytelling is catalyzing an avalanche of new non-book formats to satisfy consumer demands. New options are invented daily, and yet we’re only beginning to glimpse the world of storytelling possibilities around the corner. Technology is simultaneously sating and creating new demand, seeding storytelling innovation and inventing new consumer desires… Suppose I’m bullish on storytelling in the digital age?!?!

Related articles

• SONY and Apple Instructive Example for Publishing Industry (digitalbookworld.com)
• Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (virtualdavis.com)

I ordered my Kindle Fire late Thursday morning and it arrived Friday, charged, linked to my Amazon account and brandishing a batch of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies.

Okay, so I made up the last… But my Kindle initiation was almost that perfect.

Of course, honeymoons don’t last forever, and three days of drive-my-bride-crazy-intensive-Kindle-Fire-field-testing later I’m ready to share my first impressions of the Kindle Fire. This post follows up on “Kindle Fire Pros & Cons, Part I” and “Kindle Fire Pros & Cons, Part II”, but my review doesn’t depend on first reading those posts, so if you’re heart is racing because you’re a mouse click away from investing two hundred clams in a K-Fire, skip the back story and scan, read, consider the following. Read the rest of this entry »

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Time to swap Amazon.com $199 for a Kindle Fire. I’ve to discover firsthand what makes it sexy and/or clunky. I have cast around for reviews, but now it’s time to understand what this increasingly ubiquitous device is all about. While I wait for the brown truck, you can catch up on my journey so far… Read the rest of this entry »

Image by Brian Sawyer via Flickr

I’ve decided that I need to understand the Kindle Fire. I’ve borrowed, dabbled and delayed. So far it hasn’t been love at first sight. Not like my bride’s iPad, for example. I love it. Crave it. Waiting for next gen to own my own. Happy fortieth birthday, virtualDavis! Perhaps…

But the K-Fire is here to stay. For a while. Until its sexy progeny dethrone it. K-Fire’s adoption rate alone has been staggering, so I need to test drive this chunky Technicolor gizmo posthaste. I’m placing my order tonight, and I’ll dish up pick-nits and plaudits aplenty soon. Stay tuned.

Until then, consider these Kindle Fire pros and cons posted by O’Reilly Media’s Joe Wikert (@jwikert).

Kindle Fire Pros

• Form factor “It’s nice being able to wrap your hand around the entire device and the lighter weight is a big plus for the Fire.”
• Meets the needs of typical consumer “Consumers who want a cheap tablet are OK without all the bells and whistles of the iPad…”
• Connection to Amazon content “Connectivity to Amazon’s ebooks, video and audio content is second to none with the Fire.”

Kindle Fire Cons

• Connection to Amazon content “As easy as it is for Fire users to access Amazon content it’s just that difficult to access anyone else’s… my next tablet will not be locked in to one provider’s content.”
• Awful for the early adopter/tinkerer “.if you’re buying it to root and open it up you’ll be disappointed… [For example] some of the apps in the Android Market simply won’t run on it…”
• Auto-updates “How in the world can Amazon think that forcing OS updates on every Fire owner is the right thing to do? … Really stupid.”
• “Silk” browser “It turns out the browser isn’t that fast… in my totally unscientific side-by-side testing, the Fire almost always loaded pages slower than both my iPad and my RIM Playbook.”
• Missing a “killer” app “Amazon should have invested some money with the developers of apps like Zite and Flipboard to make sure they were available when the Fire launched.”

(Kindle Fire pros and cons list via Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog.)

Everything Wikert has listed makes sense to me, but the most likely complaint likely to endure is the Amazon-centric content bias. I imagine the browser will get supercharged, and app developers are already following the consumer flood. But Amazon intends to exploit and nurture the content bias. No surprise there. And with millions of satisfied, well-trained consumers eager to gobble up Amazon distributed content, it’s no surprise that Bezos & Company aren’t eager to give away their monopoly.

Are you pleased or disappointed with your Kindle Fire? Share your experience in the comments below or Twitter, Facebook, Google+. And as soon as I’ve gotten my greedy paws (and eyes) on a Kindle Fire I’ll dish up my own Kindle Fire Pros & Cons. Now, let’s see how lickety-split Amazon Prime can hook me up…

Related articles

• Analyst: Amazon moved 6 million Kindle Fires over the holidays (digitaltrends.com)
• Amazon Revenue $17.43 Billion in Fourth Quarter, Income Down in 2011 (digitalbookworld.com)
• Hands On the New Kindle Fire (epicagear.com)
• Amazon says Kindle sales tripled during holidays (digitaltrends.com)
• Kindle Fire: Three pros, five cons (radar.oreilly.com)
• Amazon Sells 6 Million Kindle Fires in Q4 Alone According to Analysts (geeky-gadgets.com)
• Netflix Tells Amazon: ‘Been There, Done That’ (dailyfinance.com)