After a week of furious formatting and a weekend of final checks, I’m pleased to announce that the first, finished edition of My Phone Book is ready for download. Not at Amazon, Chapters, Barnes & Noble or any app store, but at these links:
- ePub version
- Scribd version
The ePub version has been tested on two Android readers, the excellent and free FB Reader and the powerful premium version of Mantano Reader. If you prefer a PDF (or other document format) use the Scribd link. And if you have any problems with either, please let me know. I’m not currently planning a .mobi (Kindle) version, but if there’s enough demand for it I can probably whip one up.
You might see a listing on Amazon someday, but for the immediate future I want this humble tome shared as far and wide as it can possibly go, with no restrictions whatsoever.
Can you help me out with that?
UPDATE: You can now read My Phone Book in Kindle format — just download this file and you’re done! Props to rockstar Ward Minnis for the conversion.
]]>If you want to know what you’re missing, each of the mobile phones chronicled has its own dedicated page here at MyPhoneBook.ca. There will also be some other links to carriers, manufacturers and the odd blog post.
I could have used footnotes instead but deliberately chose not to. Why trust me when you can click right through to the source?
]]>Left on my to-do list are the following items:
- Confirm or deny the forward written by my mobile celebrity;
- Procure the final artwork for the cover;
- Convert the damn thing to ePub.
I’ll hopefully get everything done over the next week or so. I promised you a release in time for Christmas and it looks like I’m on schedule. Barely.
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The more I learn about self-publishing the more I’m realizing how late to the game I am. There is already a thriving industry built by companies all too eager to take your money, promising a fast-track to self-publishing super-stardom in return.
Booktype is a little different than most. For starters, it’s free. It’s also a good idea. In the company’s own words:
Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. Build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences.
TL;DR Think of it as WordPress for books.
In addition to the server-side software there is also a hosted version of Booktype called Booktype Pro. It has a free version (one book) and a paid one (more than one book). The Booktype folks were nice enough to offer me a preview of the service.
Unfortunately I had some significant issues with Booktype…
1. Importation
The first thing I set out to do with the service was import my book.
As you already know, I’ve been writing the first draft in public on this blog, posting chapters as I go. I’ve also been saving my work as a LibreOffice text document. I figured that getting my book onto Booktype would be a trivial matter; turns out I was wrong.
From Booktype’s own support pages, the following file formats can be imported:
- EPUB
- Archive.org
- Booktype Book
Hmm… one of Booktype’s selling points is that it can create EPUBs — if I already had an EPUB why would I need the service in the first place? Also, why would any author want to import someone else’s Public Domain book? And if I’m a new Booktype user, how could I possibly already have something in Booktype format to import?
Sure, I can copy and paste chapters manually. But I don’t really see why I should have to.
2. Presentation
What’s that old saying… You never get a second chance to make a first impression? Here’s the first impression you get from my Booktype site:
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t exactly scream “user-friendly” to me.
My book’s info page looks slightly better, but I think Booktype needs to make things much more clear to someone visiting for the first time. Granted, there’s an invitation front and centre on the splash page for a visitor to sign up — just like Facebook, Twitter, etc. But very much unlike those other sites there is zero explanation of what Booktype actually is.
3. Collaboration
Honestly, I didn’t even get this far. I’m sure Booktype is a competent collaborative tool for a pre-existing team of writers and editors working on a specific project. But after watching the introductory video I was expecting something entirely different — a social network for wannabe authors. I think Sourcefabric has missed a big opportunity with Booktype, and I’m sorry to say that my trial of the service ends here.
Had I started writing with Booktype from the get-go things might have been different, but since I would still need a more traditional website to promote my book I see no reason to switch from the WordPress-based workflow I’ve used thus far. For output to EPUB and other formats there’s already an excellent client-side software solution called Calibre. And powerful as Booktype may be, it’s not at all user friendly in the way that other social networks are. Oftentimes it’s hard enough getting readers to comment on blogs — why would anyone create an account on my Booktype site if there’s no clear explanation of what’s going on?
The hosted version of Booktype has yet to see an official launch; though I don’t expect it to be rewritten from scratch based on my complaints here, I might humbly suggest that there’s an untapped market for a more user-friendly version of the product — “Booktype Social”, maybe?
If you wanted to try Booktype Pro for yourself you can sign up for this newsletter and keep track of its progress. Even if its current iteration doesn’t meet my needs it might well fit yours…
]]>Now comes the rather messy business of editing. To honour my own deadline for an end-of-year release I’ll be making at least one more pass through the 33 or so chapters that you’ll find on this site. If you wanted to help out with the proofing and such I’ve uploaded the book as a document to this site — you can read it online or download a copy at your leisure.
I was planning to use a brand-new online collaborative book editing service to get this done, but after playing around with it over the weekend I don’t think it’s for me. More on that later this week…
]]>I hated my first mobile with a passion because I saw no value in having one. Once I got hooked on the non-voice features, however — text messaging first, data later — it was a different story. At the dawn of the new millennium I had no idea of how powerful the lowly cell phone would one day become; my personal device wish-list had but two items:
- An address book that could be synchronized between phone and computer;
- A phone that could travel with me anywhere in the world.
My first wish was granted in the year 2000 courtesy of a plug-in module for a PDA . The next year I trialled my first “world” phone in Hong Kong, and bought another while I was there. But it wasn’t until 2007 and my first 3G handset that I was able to access Japan’s advanced mobile networks with my own device.
Then there was the third thing, a feature I didn’t even know I wanted until I saw it coming. By the summer of 2009 I could foresee a smartphone future that paralleled the present state of desktop computers and Linux — that the hardware would one day become a commodity, freeing its owner to use the operating system of his or her choice. Not two years later I had CyanogenMod on my first Android phone, and an entire universe of other custom ROMs just a download and install away.
The story of mobile phones doesn’t end here, of course. The hardware continues to evolve, not so much by leaps and bounds anymore as the touch-screen “fondleslab” has become the de facto standard. Internal components are faithfully following Moore’s law, getting ever smaller, better and cheaper. There has been a much more disruptive change in the manufacturers who bring the devices to market; the once-mighty Nokia and RIM have had their market share almost entirely usurped — first by Apple and now, it seems, by Samsung.
On the software side Android is widely acknowledged as the world’s dominant mobile phone OS; that the code is freely available to all ensures a healthy and diverse ecosystem of the aforementioned custom ROMs. But there are new players on the horizon: Firefox is set to release its own mobile OS in the very near future, and some ex-engineers from Nokia have vowed to continue the legacy of the Linux-based Maemo and MeeGo with a new startup called Jolla.
At some point down the road history might allow for a second edition of this book. For now, I can only marvel at the progress I’ve seen. Perhaps the most cherished sign of how far we’ve come is that people in public spaces are generally spending less time shouting into their mobiles and more time quietly interacting with them.
I’ll leave you with a final memory: At South by Southwest in 2011 I attended a movie première at Austin’s historic twelve hundred-seat Paramount Theatre, so packed that I could only get a seat in the last row of the balcony. The film was entirely forgettable, but I’ll always remember what I saw as the end credits began to roll. The huge auditorium in front of me was suddenly lit with the sparkle of a thousand tiny screens, silently reaching out to each other and the world beyond.
For this unabashed mobile phone geek it was a little bit like heaven.
]]>You’ll recall that the word “Nexus” means three things when it comes to phones:
- “Pure Android” — an operating system free of carrier bloat;
- Factory unlocked — usable on any network (frequencies notwithstanding);
- Unlockable bootloader — and the widest available selection of custom kernels, ROMs, etc.
It’s this recipe for success that has kept me faithful to the Nexus line for three devices and counting — four if you include the Nexus 7 tablet charging in the other room as I write this. To be honest I’m not so much a fan of plasticky Samsung phones; that I’ve bought two of them says something about my unfaltering loyalty to Nexus.
The first time I saw the Nexus S was in the hands of a Mr. Dave Dobbin. At that time he was the CEO of Mobilicity, and in January of 2011 he had the T-Mobile version with him at a promotional event I attended. Yours truly go to hold it for a precious few seconds. Though otherwise an unremarkable slab, the screen on this Samsung was a wonder to behold. The colours were incredibly vivid and rich; the blacks so deep as to be an abyss. And the glass was impossibly curved, fitting perfectly against your cheek when on the phone.
I came very close to purchasing one at a Best Buy during South by Southwest later that spring, and when Mobilicity started selling it in April I could no longer resist.
The first beneficiary of this purchase was actually my Nexus One. Relieved of its day-to-day duties I was able to figure out this whole rooting and ROM-ing business with drastically reduced consequences. It wouldn’t be until December, 2011 that I’d load the legendary CyanogenMod ROM onto my Nexus S; when I did I was pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of a fully-functioning Google Wallet app. I used it with the S’s on-board NFC chip to make my first contactless mobile phone payment, a fancy tea at a posh supermarket café. I’d like to believe it was the first such event in Canada; it probably wasn’t but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
At the end of that month my girlfriend and I visited Hong Kong (my 6th trip there!) to ring in 2013. While Samsung’s wide-bodied Galaxy Note was all the rage there, I was on the hunt for the “it” phone of the moment back in the Americas, the Galaxy Nexus. I felt confident buying it overseas because this third Nexus had a pentaband radio, meaning that I could enjoy 3G data speeds on any carrier anywhere in the world. It was also free of any carrier locks. Unfortunately it cost more in Hong Kong than on the Bell network back in Canada.
The Galaxy Nexus eventually got a wider release here, and I got mine on a subsidy from WIND Mobile in the spring. WIND is another upstart Canadian carrier, offering unlimited calls, texts and data at prices much lower than the incumbents. I had switched to them from Mobilicity before Christmas, when they ran a holiday promotion. WIND has proven to be much better in terms of coverage for me — for the first time since I was with Fido I could actually make phone calls from inside my home… What an age we live in!
This third Nexus was both new and familiar at the same time. There was the curved glass, plus a new version of Android — another hallmark of the Nexus line. I wasn’t really sold on the HD screen and dual-core processor at first; both seemed unnecessary, frivolous even. But over the ensuing months I came to appreciate my Galaxy Nexus as a mobile gaming powerhouse — maybe not the most noble use of bleeding edge technology, but a lot of fun nonetheless.
My trio of Nexus phones accompanied my girlfriend and I to Barcelona in the spring of 2012 — the Nexus One in her back pocket, the Nexus S in mine and the Galaxy Nexus tucked away in the hotel safe. We received lots of advance warnings about pickpockets and such but I needn’t have worried — the Nexus S was (and is) a perfectly usable phone, anyway. I finally convinced my girlfriend to accept it as her next hand-me-down this past September. I took back my Nexus One, which I’m currently using to explore free/libre software from the F-Droid repository. The Galaxy Nexus is to this day my side arm of choice, and will likely remain so until the next Nexus is announced.
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A family portrait of Nexus devices, or at least their boxes.
I’ve pretty much resigned myself to be a Nexus user — not only are they sold unlocked, but they’re easy to root and have the widest available selection of custom ROMs.
The Nexus S (purchased in April, 2011) was my first device with NFC on board. I used it in December of that year to make the first documented mobile payment in Canada — unless someone can prove otherwise?
Later that month I took it with me to Hong Kong, and the next spring on to Barcelona. It took until the summer of 2012 to wean my girlfriend off of my her Nexus One, and accept the Nexus S as her next hand-me-down.
My next phone (current as of this writing) was another Nexus product from Samsung, the Galaxy Nexus. I got it this past spring from my new carrier WIND Mobile. It’s cursed with MTP but blessed with a dual-core processor and a 720 by 1280 pixel “HD” display — perfect for my gaming addiction of the moment.
The Galaxy Nexus was also the first pentaband Android device — that is, the same model worked on all 3G and AWS frequencies. Note that the US carrier Verizon got a separate CDMA-based variant. Sucks to be them.
]]>If I was second-guessing my switch to Android I had no such regrets about my new carrier, Mobilicity. Yes, there was the small issue of having no signal at home, but the cheap and unlimited service that worked great everywhere else more than made up for that. And their selection of handsets couldn’t be beat — they were the only carrier in English-speaking Canada to sell the Nexus One, and the only one in North America to offer the MotoSpice. Then they trumped both, releasing a device that was both new and familiar at the same time, right when I needed it most. At a hundred and fifty bucks the Nokia E73 was a no-brainer for me.
It was all very comforting, at first. I still had the installer files for my favourite Symbian apps, plus licenses for the paid ones. I spent an evening getting everything on the phone organized into folders and shortcuts, as I had done with Nokias of days gone by. I even gained a modicum of respect for the infamous Nokia Messaging. It seemed to work a bit better on my E73 than on my N86 — the secret was to respect the low memory on the handset by loading only the last few emails from each of my two accounts of the day. Not optimal by any means, but functional at least.
I took my E73 with me to a WOM World event held on a ranch in Western Canada that summer. The journey there and back reminded me of just how dated Nokia’s PDA phone OS was. With Symbian the handset was offline by default; specific steps were required by the user to take it online. Android devices were very different; they assumed a persistent connection to not just the network, but to the Internet as well. With unlimited data available in major Canadian cities, guess which one was more useful?
It had become all too clear that there would be no future for Nokia and I. Their new CEO — Stephen Elop, a Canadian of all things (!) — had announced earlier in the year that future high-end devices would run Windows. I had stopped using Windows long ago; for me it was Linux or nothing. Nokia did have Maemo, a Linux-based tablet OS that eventually made its way onto phones. I had trialled the Maemo-powered N900 the previous spring and quite liked it. But its successor, the MeeGo-powered N9, was never widely available and pretty much doomed from the get-go.
I brought both my E73 and N86 along with me on a Kenyan safari that autumn, where granular control over network charges and a local SIM card served me well. When I got home I retired both and moved on to Android full time.
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