Continuing what has emerged as the blog topic for this weekend, the digital life (first post, iTunes U post, second post), I have some thoughts on content itself.

Starting with a startling omission from my content list: comic books. I haven’t bought any comic books (paper or electronic) in more than a year (and before this app, in more than two decades), but I had to re-download them when Marvel updated the iPad app.

I think the Civil War series is worth rereading, as is the Iron Man Vol 3 (complete, which I don’t own but will probably buy later). For reasons that I explained in one of my first long posts for this blog, Iron Man is a good role model for a kid.

But here’s a problem: all this content is moated inside an app. (Forget walled gardens, this app has a moat with alligators in it.) And if I had upgraded the app and then got onto a plane without opening it first, I wouldn’t have any of the purchased content available to me, since it had to be re-downloaded (I didn’t download all the purchased comic books). This also happens with the Kindle apps for MacOS, which is unbelievably annoying.

Speaking of which:

Those John E Stith books are a testament to the power of blogging, digital delivery, free samples, and low prices: someone whose blog I follow made a point about the good physics in Redshift Rendezvous, I downloaded the sample from Amazon, got hooked, bought the book, read it in one afternoon, then bought another, etc.*

Talk about long tails — these were old books and yet, I ended up buying them all. (This was during the 2010 summer teaching trip, coincidentally. That trip as also when I bought most of the comic books, to demonstrate the iPad to my brother-in-law, a comic book aficionado. But I like them, nevertheless, and may still complete that Iron Man Vol. 3 collection.)

The Kindle app does need a better way to organize itself; those were some books I haven’t read in a long time, but would like to sort  into a “science fiction” category (except the non-fiction More money than God). Like I did easily on iBooks:

(Yep, those were all free. I have yet to buy my first iBook.) Staying with free content, I downloaded the iTunes U app and subscribed to a few courses, starting (not surprisingly) with the Stanford one on Machine Learning:

(iTunes U also took some old content from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco from the iTunes app for itself. Well caught.)

Given the travel focus of the first post, the Netflix app was not relevant. Interestingly enough, though, this is one app I use a lot, to watch movies on the iPad while my computers are busy running R code.

What I need now is a way to download all posts from my RSS feeds into the iPad so that I can browse them offline. I’m sure there’s an app for that (I have NetNewsWire, but it doesn’t do a good job of offlining all content — certainly not the multimedia pages).

— — — —

Why, yes, I’m a geek. How could you tell?

My post below on the advantages of a digital life concentrated on how content simplifies some physical aspects of travel. But here are two other advantages:

1. Many researchers put preprint versions of their books online for free, so even impecunious students and interested researchers without NSF grants can have them.

2. As one ages, one’s eyes become less forgiving of small type. That’s what zooming is for:

Images are from Johan van Benthem’s Modal logic for open minds, which costs $30 on Amazon but is freely available online in preprint form.

(All the administrative detritus on the screenshots above is to illustrate navigation; iBooks — and other content consumption apps — is pretty good at keeping all this detritus as unobtrusive as possible and out of the screen in general.)