1984

George Orwell's classic tale of a futuristic society (futuristic in terms of 1940's when the novel was written) in which the population is strictly controlled by the dictatorship called Big Brother. Orwell paints a picture of a hellish existence where your thoughts are policed by the Thought Police, every member of the ruling "party" are monitored by a screen that is placed in every home and place of work and no one is permitted to enjoy themselves, build loving relationships or relax.

The main protagonist is Winston Smith, a low ranking party member who works in a government department that is responsible for changing history to suite the whims of Big Brother. If an estimate for manufacturing is published one week, when the actual output is published and differs from the estimate, the estimate is changed so that word of Big Brother is always seen to be right.

The story is based in a futuristic London in 1984. London is part of a new country called Oceana and is constantly at war with one of the other two global societies: Eurasia or Eastasia. The opposition and allies change frequently and on each occasion the history books have to be changed so that the current enemy has always been that enemy.

Despite the aim of this society being to create an equal society there is still a clear class system in place with the inner circle of the Party acting as the upper classes, the rest of of the party acting as the Middle classes and the "proles" the working classes that are largely left to their own devises unless they display problematic differences with the Party.

Opposition to the party is clamped down on immediately with the guilty arrested, tortured and executed. Their existence is always wiped out as if they never were.

The atmosphere is very oppressive throughout the novel as Winston struggles with his dreams, his vague memories of his childhood in which his parents and sister disappeared, his issues with the party and a relationship with a fellow Party member called Julia.

The end of the novel is predictable and painful to read but I found I was able to read the novel in a couple of days. A definite recommendation.

Dune

I'm not usually a huge fan of sci-fi novels but this one was OK. It took me a long time to finish it due to the fictional place names and people but once you got through that the story was quite entertaining but it's a little complicated.

It revolves around a aristocratic family and their community who move from their home planet to a sandy planet at the behest of the Emporer. This planet is the soul home of the spice Melange and the people that control the planet control the spice production.

The son of this noble family is some prophicised saviour of the native inhabitants of the planet and the final half of the story tells the tale of how he passes a number of tests to claim his place as the head of the population.

I can image that George Lucas used this story as inspiration for the Star Wars movies with it's stories of the "chosen one", trade rights and intergalactic wars. There's a series of these novels but I think I will leave them unread. Too many other literary classics to get through.

iPad and eBooks

I'm not sure I get the point of the new iPad from Apple. Someone at work bought one as soon as they were released and brought it into the office. Yes, they look cool and the fact you have one could be considered by those that know no better as cool, but what are they actually for?

Our two kids have recently bought an iPod Touch each; an iPod with a big touch screen that allows you to listen to music, watch movies, play games, download lots of meaningful and meaningless apps and a host of other tools. My iPod Classic allows me to take a large percentage of my music collection in the car and when I am travelling and play one game; solitaire. If I want to play games, look on the internet, watch movies and all that other electronic business, I have my laptop. A laptop can perform so many more tasks than an iPod/iPad so why is the iPad attracting so much attention?

My attraction to my iPod is that I can take over 1000 albums with me in the car in a wee box. I don't have over a thousand albums on it yet but I'm getting there (600 or so at the last count) and that's it. The new iPod Touch or the Ipad don't have the memory to hold that many albums so they are less about the music now and more about the other tools and , in particular, the games. The iPad is just a larger version of that but with the same limited memory and a limited memory that forces the music to compete for memory space with the apps and photos and movies that you can download for it.

So the iPod is no longer about the music but a myriad of other applications...and games.

There is one application, however, that would attract me to the iPad, but I'd still need my iPod for the music. The attractive feature is the ability to download and read books. I suspect you can already do that on a laptop but mine seems to take an age to boot up these days and it's for work anyway. The iPad is smaller than the typical laptop and starts a lot faster than one too, so you can turn it on and off as fast as you open and close a book.

What does this all mean about the future publication of printed books? From a number of articles that I have read recently it would appear that the sale of ebooks has exploded recently with the release of the Amazon's Kindle and other ebook readers but still runs short of the sale of traditional printed books. Unless you are Amazon where they recently announced that the sale of ebooks had overtaken the sale of printed books. For every 100 printed books they sold, they sold 180 ebooks. It sounds like a lot of this has to do with the price of the ebooks incomparison to their printed cousins and the convenience.

One interesting point I read this morning is that 54% of printed books that are sold are romance novels. Who is buying that stuff? Perhaps th same people that put Mariah Carey in the top 10 biggest selling artists of all time. I digress.

And think about the environmental improvements with ebooks. There is no paper manufacturing involved so no trees are killed and you don't have to drive into town to visit the book shop, you simply make your search on the web.

It's also an improvement, in some ways, for the writers. Many ebooks are self published and sold at under $10, making them more accessable to the public. Traditional books stores that have limited space to store their books often carry only the best sellers so it's more difficult to get into the published world if you are a first time writer.

I have to admit that I am somewhat attracted to the idea of ebooks, their portablility and their lower costs. It doesn't really matter to me how I read the words. There's no difference to me whether it's on a screen or a piece of paper. On the other hand I love visiting books shops and wandering through their many titles, whether I am planning to buy them or not. In fact next week, Tracey and I are visiting Portland where they claim to have the world's largest book store, Powells. That experience would be lost if ebooks took over.

One article I read talked about the traditions of books being lost on the next generations in the same way that music has with iPods. With music, kids no longer pour over album covers and invest time and effort in purchasing their records or CDs, they simply download one song at a time, losing the experience of listening to an entire album from song one to the last, but that's the topic of another blog.

I don't have the same issue with books because you can't download and read the odd chapter from one book and another chapter from a different book because you miss the whole point.

So if I was going to buy an iPad then it would be for the books...but then I'd have all those other apps and games to distract me. Perhaps not.