Tag: electronic

Russian Roulette Sunday: Blimey! It’s The Future. Now.
Last week, 7 Reasons took a step backward. We went back in time to the antediluvian age of print when our words – if not our names – appeared in Esquire magazine. How can we top that, we wondered. The present will just seem humdrum now. So we decided to ignore the present and plan for the future.

In historical envisaging of the future, it’s all hoverboards, cars that fly and spangly jumpsuits. But it’s fast becoming clear that the true instrument of the future will be the Kindle. That’s how things will be read in years to come. We determined that the way forward for 7 Reasons was to embrace the Kindle and prepare for it. Well, Jon thought that we should wear spangly jumpsuits and LED watches, but fortunately he lost the coin-toss.

So we’ve got together with the people at Amazon and we’ve made it happen. From today, we have a new thing:

That’s right Kindlers, 7 Reasons is now available on your Kindles. So when you’re out there Kindling in your futuristic world of the future, you need never miss a single 7 Reasons post. They’ll just appear on your Kindle via the combined mediums of witchcraft, space-age jiggery-pokery and the wireless internet. You can subscribe to 7 Reasons : Kindle Edition here; you can even have a free 14 day trial. For the rest of us backward peasants there’ll still be the old-fashioned website but you, Kindlers, the beautiful people of the future, will be experiencing 7 Reasons in many amazing ways.

Things the beautiful-future-people will be able to do with their Kindles:
- Read 7 Reasons in direct sunlight.
- Read 7 Reasons for hours and hours without straining their eyes.
- Spot 7 Reasons spelling-mistakes with their built-in dictionary (but not as a drinking game, a post by Jon could prove fatal).
- Be better than the rest of us.
- Think of a witty and brilliant fifth thing.
Things that the rest of us will be able to do without Kindles:
- Stand in mud.
- Eat a raw turnip.
- Point at the beautiful-future-people.
- Lick a fetid dog.
- Wail with despair and cry until our souls hurt.
So, that’s the future: Available now. 7 Reasons will return tomorrow in many forms. Like the Devil.
January 16, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons I Don’t Want a Kindle

It’s Saturday, and the 7 Reasons team are taking a well-deserved day off, but fear not: In charge of the 7 Reasons sofa today is Roger Williams; a Manchester-based writer, lyricist and owner of a full and luxuriant ginger beard. Here are seven reasons that he doesn’t want a Kindle.

1. Fahrenheit 451. The primary definition of Kindle in my whopping great Collins English Dictionary (a tome so weighty and downright bookish that while it would be impossible to swallow, it would be entirely feasible to use it to, say, smash a Kindle to smithereens) is ‘to set alight or start to burn.’ Mmm. You don’t need the Enigma machine to decode the sub-conscious desires of the Satanic device’s inventors here. They clearly want us to burn books. That’s right 7 Reasons readers. Biblioclasm! Libricide! Buying a Kindle is tantamount to supporting the book incinerating activities of the Spanish conquistadors, the worst McCarthyite zealots, the Nazis and the Dove World Outreach Centre church in Florida.

2. If it ain’t broke don’t e-fix it. Books are the perfect marriage of function and form. They have a quality of soul which an electronic device could never match. The volumes you gather as you travel through life are a story in themselves. The spine creases of the well-thumbed volume; the stain left by the coffee you spilt when you first saw her; the enthusiastic underlinings of well-loved sections and the page corner-foldings of inspiration; the sheer sentimental, colourful, characterful accumulation of books. You can’t furnish a room with a Kindle. Unless it’s a room for a hamster. That hates books.

3. Books smell good (musty second hand bookshops in Holmfirth don’t count.) I’ve never smelt a Kindle but I imagine it would smell of evil.

4. Books have done the job perfectly well for hundreds of years. The more complicated you make something the more likely it is that something will go wrong. At no point in the annals of history (beautifully preserved because they’ve been written down, on paper) has anyone ever complained “This book has crashed” or “I wish this book would go faster.” No one has ever advised you to turn a malfunctioning novel off and on again.

You can still read a book that’s hundreds of years old. You can’t watch videos from the early 1990s. The written word is timeless, but technology moves so fast that by the time you’re two thirds of the way through A Suitable Boy your Kindle will be in museum for obsolete things. Being bullied by a Sinclair C5.

5. There’s a physicality to books, a reassuring heft, a presence, whereas Kindles by comparison are…spineless. Books are transferable. How many times do you read something you love then lend it to a friend you know is going to share your enthusiasm? There’s no room for that in Kindleland. You either have to loan out your Kindle, and all that it contains, or they have to buy the f-ing e-book themselves.

6. Bathing. I admit this isn’t really an issue for me because I’m male and therefore genetically unable to multitask, but word is you can’t read a Kindle in the bath. I plagiarised this point from a letter written to The Guardian by a woman. I wasn’t doing anything else at the time. She was probably cooking a three-course meal and reading the paper when she wrote it.

7. And alright, I admit it, I woke up one morning and realised I was a Luddite.

Now…I’ve heard a rumour they’ve just installed one of those new weaving machines at a mill along the turnpike road in Bolton. Anyone want to come and help me smash it up before the idea catches on?

November 13, 2010
7 Reasons The Cassette Is Better Than The CD

1. CD Case Design Flaw: Part A. Whichever genius designed the CD case was/is not a genius. A genius would not have made the breadth of the case so bloody tiny that the name of the artist/album is impossible to see unless you have your nose pressed up against it. The breadth of the cassette case was ideal. Perfectly readable from a sensible distance and far less risk of adding a plastic splinter to your face.

2. CD Case Design Flaw: Part B. One for the environmentalists among you. The CD case uses three parts. The cassette case uses two. It isn’t difficult to work out where Global Warming came from is it?

3. Double-sided. When you bought an album on tape, you were in fact getting two mini albums. And A-side and a B-side. Musicians actually took this into account when putting the track listing together. And it made a huge difference. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe and What’s The Story (Morning Glory?) were both released on tape. Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants was not. Coincidence?

4. Sturdiness. A cassette is to a hammer what a HobNob is a to a cup of tea. The CD is a rich tea finger. Pathetic.

5. Write Protection Override. In the good old days when cassettes appeared on every shelf in Our Price, you could go to bed on a Sunday night happy in the knowledge that you wouldn’t ever have to set foot in that store. That is because you’d just used a bit of masking tape on your father’s copy of Born In The USA and recorded that week’s Top 20 over it.

6. Manual Rewind. Sticking your little finger into a cassette and giving it a turn one way or the other made you feel in control of your music collection. Sticking your little finger through the middle of a CD and spinning it makes you look like a prick. And you’ll get a knuckle cut.

7. Labeling. It was so easy to write on a cassette. Usually it came with specially designed labels anyway. All you had to do was get out the biro. With a CD though, you need a special pen. Does a special pen come with a blank CD? Does it hell. You have to go and find a branch of bloody Hobby Craft. And of course that is miles away. On an industrial estate. Next to a Wickes and Charlies Car Wash and a burger van.

February 23, 2010