Playful Bookstore Video Goes Viral

I stumbled upon this happy little bookstore video on tumblr today. It's been out for only five days and already has over 1.5 million hits.

Now, I love spending time in bookstores. But the variety and immediacy of downloading books for the Kobo and Kindle apps on my iPad has been so seductive that I seldom hit the bricks and mortar buildings anymore.

When I do pull open the big heavy doors of  McNally Robinson or Chapters, the smells of the paper, ink and coffee slam the pleasure centres of my brain so hard that nothing short of my two impatient sons can nudge me toward the checkout.

I love technology. My next device will probably be a Kindle Fire. But there's something incredibly alluring about spending hours among thousands of hard copy books and other people who are just as crazy about them.

E-readers may have conquered my head in terms of selection, price and convenience. But seeing this playful little video reminds me that I have to get out to the bookstores more often. My heart tells me they're not going to be around much longer.

Kindle, Kobo, iBooks - A Tale of Three iPad Ebook Readers - Part 1, The Canadian Competitor

This is the first of a three-part review of the most popular ebook readers for the iPad. Rather than give an exhaustive blow-by-blow comparison of the Kindle, Kobo and iBooks apps, I've opted to describe the features I come in contact with daily.

Kobo Reader for iPad
If you've ever played with a Kobo ebook reader at a Chapters or Indigo store, you can appreciate the crisp, clear display and the fact that this Canadian competitor is trying its best to divert your gaze from the Amazon Kindle and other contenders for the e-reader throne.

It's hard, though, not to walk away from that experience without making a mental note of the Kobo's sluggish page changes and the big, dorky, navigation button.

But Kobo for the iPad is different.

Best Features

The Kobo app is colorful, functional - the most attractive of the three ebook readers. And it lets you control the look not only of your pages, but your bookmarks, and even your bookshelf.

The addition of a sepia wash like in the Kindle or iBooks app would be nice. But the rest of the esthetics are so good you can forgive the developers for the oversight.

The Kobo book store's presentation is much more eye-catching than Amazon's, even though the selection is naturally more limited. The app features the smartest table of contents presentation around. Unlike the Kindle app's postage stamp content and bookmarks list, the Kobo takes you to an entire contents page that incorporates all of your bookmarks and notes right beside each chapter heading. That feature alone means the Kobo trumps the Kindle for navigation.

Even though no one beats the Kindle for ebook selection, Kobo kills in terms of Canadian content. If you jump to Recommended Reading, you'll find over 50 lists including these:

• The Globe 100 for 2010
• Globe and Mail Bestsellers
• Quill & Quire's Books of the Year
• Heather's Picks
• Made in Canada
• Canada Reads
• Hockey Night in Canada
• You Can't Get These on Kindle
• Can't Get it From iBooks

Drawbacks
The biggest opportunity and liability with the Kobo lies with the debut of its new Reading Life social features. Content is always an opportunity to build community, and these new social features let you see the most popular bookmarks of other readers, tweet quotations and what you're reading to your Twitter followers and give similar updates to your Facebook friends.

It's collecting badges for things like starting and finishing books, bookmarking, making notes and even reading books during lunch hour or bed time that seems rather juvenile. Some of the badges are designed to get you to try new features. The shareable notifications for each of these seem a tad breathless, but can be turned off.

As with hard copy books, there is little point in reading them unless you mark them up. Kobo offers you one color of highlight, blue. Kindle for the iPad gives you only yellow. But iBooks offers a full five colors - handy when you're highlighting information for different purposes.

Kobo also doesn't have a search feature like the one on the Kindle app. This must be addressed in a future iteration.

The Bottom Line
Even with its drawbacks, the Kobo app makes the reading experience so pleasant and friendly that its shortcomings can easily be tolerated. The look and aesthetics are second to none - and who says you can't read on multiple platforms anyway?

The Kobo may not ever be at the top of the heap, but for ease of use, attractiveness, access to Canadian content, and delivering a really pleasant reading experience, it's definitely worth the download.

The Book that Opened a World to My Son

This past summer, my 14-year-old son blew me away by learning Spanish in about two months flat. Naturally, I'm not talking about complete fluency. But Ryan is now what I consider functionally bilingual.

Besides having a heck of a lot of determination, he owes a big part of his success to a book. Here's the story.

One day, suffering from a case of floppy summer boredom, Ryan asked me, "Dad, how did you learn Spanish?" I told him about taking Spanish lessons, striking up conversations with the Chileans there during breaks, listening to shortwave radio, frequenting a Latin-American store downtown, buying Condorito comics and other Spanish magazines, and generally hanging with a community that in some measure adopted this intrepid gringo.

Then I mentioned Spanish Made Simple.

It was a book I pored over every night, slogging my way through its 50 chapters, repeating the dialogues out loud, working through the half dozen intense exercises after each chapter. That nightly effort yielded me functionally bilingual status after about a half year.

He asked, "Can we still get a copy?"

"Gee, I don't even know if it's still in print," I said. But we called up McNally Robinson and were able to order it in.

I see that it's been given a graphic facelift for a new generation, but the dialogues and the exercises haven't changed a bit since I picked it up 30 years ago. It's the same book only prettier. And you can order it for your Kindle or Kobo reader, too.

So, Ryan starts to study seriously, often bugging my wife and me to practice with him, listening to Spanish pop songs on YouTube, and increasingly becoming smitten by all things Español.

In the evenings, he's working through the book - doing exactly what I did decades ago.

He starts Facebooking his cousins in Edmonton, then our relatives in Chile. Lo and behold, he understands them, and they him.

The kid is hooked.

My wife and I never taught our two boys Spanish but used it as code for talking to each other without the boys understanding us. Now, there's nothing we can say around Ryan in Spanish that he won't get. This is not convenient. But the upside is we have another Spanish speaker in the house.

My eldest, Mark, is good-natured about being out of the Latin-American loop. He graduated from French immersion and, parallels between romance languages being what they are, he can still sometimes figure out what we're up to.

Anyone who speaks a second language knows the world opens up so much wider. Not only do you learn the language itself, but you're enriched by another culture and - more importantly - other ways of thinking; including the realization that the North American way of viewing the world isn't the only way.

You get a foot in both worlds and that's a healthy thing.

Yesterday, my son hooked up with a Chilean relative he's never talked to before on Facebook. Today, he asked us to speak nothing but Spanish to him for an hour. Tonight, he was asking my wife what English sounded like to her when she came to Canada from Chile as a 12-year-old.

Ryan now has a language skill that can play a big role in his life. Of course, it was his own curiousity and drive that propelled him forward, and he still has lots to learn. But the book was a huge help in giving him a basic grounding in grammar and speech.

As much as I like admire change and keeping things fresh, I'm thrilled that the same words and exercises that inspired me when I was 19, have done the same for him much earlier.

Who knows, maybe one summer his son will ask, "Hey dad, how did you learn your Spanish?"

Also read, Who Really Taught Me Spanish - Was It My PLN?