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Stardate: 20190228.17h53
Location: Lounge @ Work
Input Device: Gemini PDA + USB folding keyboard
Software: nano
Audio: Vending refridgerator, HVAC
Visual: Employee lounge with IKEA-esque furniture
Energy: 50%
Mental: 50%
Emotional state: Nothing special
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Prompts:
What happened today? (Daily journal)
Earlier today, I was reading on the Kindle app on my work
mobile (iPhone) and I noticed a notification icon that I did
not notice before. It was marked with a red dot and
basically showed that I had 11 unread notifications. I
checked the notification and it had a list of book
notifications that I missed out on. There was one with the
subject line of, "Revisit your reading journey." I checked
this one and it took me to a Reading Streaks section of the
app. It basically listed the Kindle books I read in 2018,
along with other stats like how many days/weeks I read in a
row, book suggestions, etc. It also looks like it is doing
some kind of gameification thingy with my reading data,
trying to coerce me to read more than last month or whatever.
Not too much wrong there...some people might actually benefit
from it by reading more or finding other related books that
they might not have encountered without the suggestions...but
for me, it bothered me.
I like the data and how easy they display it...I work with
data quite a bit and actually enjoy slicing and dicing data
into different perspectives...I just don't like that someone
else is harvesting my data, slicing and dicing, and making
interpretations of me and what I do based on that data. Then
aggregate my data bought from some other data source and make
further interpretations. And then sell their findings to
someone else ad infinitum.
Having this computer hobby since I was little and working in
the technology field as an adult, I have been typically a
step ahead of the average consumer in regards to concerns
like this. The Kindle incident today brought up some red
flags and made me look a little further at my personal
computing habits...and it looks like I can do better and
should read up some more on the state of things.
I have known that Amazon keeps track of the stuff I buy since
I created my account way back when. I used to be a lot more
paranoid about stuff like that back then and would be very
selective of my purchases. These days, with raising a family
and dealing with life stuff, I have grown lax with those
concerns and they seem to have fallen by the wayside.
Back in the Palm PDA days, I used to read on my PDA all of
the time. Even on the monochrome ones. That is probably
where I picked up the habit of reading books on a handheld
device. I would download the ebook as a file on my computer
and sync it to my device. If the book was purchased from
an ebook store, I would buy the book, download the file,
and sync with my PDA. End of transaction...the store didn't
know if I read the book, bookmarked a page, highlighted a
paragraph, took notes, nothing.
Back then, there were a selection of ebook stores that I used
to frequent, like Fictionwise or that one that Palm had with
their Palm Reader. When PDA usage started to go South, all of
the ebook stores started to close or get bought out by other
companies. They let you download your library before they
closed shop. Fortunately, I was able to do that.
One of my concerns after having gone through that exercise
was the portability of my books. Would I be able to read my
books on a future platform? It wasn't too big of an issue
since I still had hardware to read them on...and even when I
had a Nokia N900 it wasn't really a concern since it had
GarnetVM (PalmOS virtual machine)... It was around that time
that I found Calibre and was able to convert my books into
different formats. So at that point, I found fbreader, which
read the epub format, converted my books in Calibre and ran
that on the N900 natively. With the devices I have used
since the N900, fbreader compatibility was one of the things
I looked out for. Eventually, I even learned how to convert
Kindle books.
Fast forward to now, I have the Kindle app installed on my
work mobile. I don't have to read books there, I just do
sometimes. I don't usually install personal apps on my work
mobile, but Kindle is there...mostly out of convenience.
Today's Kindle incident showed me how lax and mindless I have become
in regards to how I read ebooks. I used to convert all of my
books and read in a pretty much standalone application. Now,
Amazon tracks my reading...I don't highlight or keep notes in
the Kindle app, but I don't need to let them interpret why I
keep referring to certain pages or books in my library, or if
those pages or books have any correlation with the aggregated
data they bought from Walmart regarding the fertilizer I
bought last October or the bleach I bought at the grocery
last week with my rewards card.</tinfoil hat>
I think it would probably be best for me to stop using the
Kindle app and go back to converting my ebooks and reading
like I did before. Hopefully, I can still convert my Kindle
books.
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