So my friend Cristina and I took a break for brunch and then got right back to chatting about the pros and cons of having an Amazon Kindle. The more we talked, the more intrigued I was by the implications of the Kindle for publishing, authors, and readers. So, without further ado, here is the rest of my fascinating interview with Cristina.

Ilaria: So, what are some of the other benefits of owning a Kindle that come to mind?


Cristina: Well, in addition to the benefit of being able to read fiction again, I have noticed something else in my behavior. I read a lot of non-fiction, both for personal interest and for professional reasons, but there are many books that, while I find them interesting and intriguing, I don’t necessarily want to own in my bookcase forever. And I don’t feel like spending $24.99 for them, either. Let’s take Outliers, the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell. I was curious about it and had enjoyed his previous books, but I didn’t necessarily want to spend the money. Besides, I just don’t have room to keep every book I buy on my shelves, my apartment is too small. So, for $9.99 I downloaded it to my Kindle and now I’m reading it on the train and at other odd moments here and there.

In my other house in North Carolina my partner and I have two walls full of books, I just can’t afford to keep buying them. What is ever going to happen to all these books. So I also give lots of books away using BookCrossing. Kindle helps me be more efficient in my consumption of books.

Then there is another great advantage that I just thought of. The Kindle allows you to download the first chapter of any book for free as a sample. Two goals are achieved simultaneously this way: 1) If you are curious about a book, you can find out right away if it’s for you or not, and 2) instant gratification. I am curious and also anxious (have I mentioned that I’m a little neurotic?). If I find something I like, I have to have it right away. Before I could order a book on Amazon, but then I’d have to wait for it to be delivered. Now I can download the whole thing to my Kindle in 60 seconds. I love this feature. When I find something that interests me, I have a great sense of urgency, and the Kindle allows me to satisfy this urge.

Ilaria: How about other newspapers besides the Times?

Cristina: We Italians are woefully behind, in this respect. I would love to be able to read Il Manifesto. I would gladly pay for the subscription, because it has always been one of the ways I “do my part.” But there are no Italian newspapers on the Kindle yet. There are several English, French and German papers, but no Italian ones. We need to catch up.

Ilaria: What about Italian books?

Cristina: No, nothing, that I know of. When my sister visits from Italy, she brings me a few books, or I can order them from Internet Book Shop, but the shipping costs are prohibitive. The funny thing is that I haven’t stopped buying books. I still buy one or two books a week, and I get some for free as a faculty member, but perhaps I am digressing here.

Ilaria: Not at all. This reinforces my point that the Kindle is not detrimental to the publishing industry. It doesn’t stop people from buying books. On the contrary. A book you might be interested in but not enough to pay hardcover money for becomes affordable on the Kindle, so you do buy it. And books are like cherries, you can never have just one — you buy one on the Kindle and you have more money to buy the one you really do want to have on your shelf, so you buy that one too. It makes for abundant reading.

Cristina: And then there is another thing. Since I don’t have a lot of time for fiction, I have a lot of novels that I have started but not finished. The Kindle is very lightweight [editor's note: 10.2 ounces], so I don’t have to choose which of the novels I’m in the middle of reading to take on the train. I just pick up the Kindle and then decide what to read once I’m in the subway.

Ilaria: This definitely resonates with me. I have been late to appointments before because I spend five minutes staring at the pile of books on my bedside table and agonizing over which one to bring. I often end up with two or three, and a heavy bag.

Cristina: Between books, folders and papers, my bag is huge and extremely heavy already. Before the Kindle I would most of the time give up on reading for pleasure while commuting because I just couldn’t bear to add one more weight to my bag. And there’s another thing. I commute during rush hour, naturally, so half the time at least I don’t have a seat. The Kindle allows me to read with one hand, so I can read standing up. Before I would resent my book because I would have to leave it in my bag, it would be weighing me down, and I wouldn’t even be able to read it. Those days are over. Also, it has this new technology, iInk, which makes it more like a book. The Kindle is not backlit like a computer screen, so it requires an external light source, just like a regular book. This means that it does not tire the eyes the way the screen does. It’s just like reading a book. And the Kindle 2 is going to be much better. I have already got one on reserve at Amazon.

Ilaria: So my friend who was afraid that the Kindle would kill book sales was wrong?

Cristina: Absolutely. In the old days, for instance, when the first big bookstore chains started opening up all over the place, we used to say that “another bookstore will kill the libraries.” That is not at all true. They feed each other.

Ilaria: The more we read, the more we read. The more channels we have through which to read, the more we read.

Cristina: And it can be seamless, from one place to another, one medium to another. You end up reading constantly.

Ilaria: Thank you so much, Cristina, for this lovely conversation. The Kindle 2 is going straight to the top of my wish list!

So, in summary, here are the advantages of owning a Kindle:

• Being able to move from one environment to another without having to stop reading;
• Being able to read things you normally would not have time for, like fiction and newspapers;
• Being able to download a sample chapter for free, which allows you to find many more books to read;
• The instant gratification of downloading an entire book in 60 seconds;
• Portability and reduced weight in your bag;
• Being able to carry many books with you at one time with no added weight, all inside the Kindle;
• Being able to buy books you ordinarily would not want to spend the money on, because they are less expensive [editor's note: there are some books to which this does not apply, but most bestsellers are $9.99];
• An esthetically pleasing reading experience with no eye strain due to backlit screen, since the Kindle relies on external light in the same way that books do;
• Being able to read standing up, even when there are no seats on the train, with one hand;

Since this conversation with Cristina I have been thinking quite a lot about the Kindle and how it can help the publishing industry and authors as well, and something new occurred to me. One of my goals with this blog is to help new authors become published, and another is to extend the “shelf life” of previously published books. In future posts I am going to explore both of these possibilities. I know that authors who self-publish can get their books published on Kindle, or at least that is what I have heard, so I am going to investigate this avenue. But I also want to find out whether books that are out of print might get a second life on Kindle, without having to be reissued on paper. Then, if interest grows, there can also be another print run. The possibilities are endless! Stay tuned, because we have not heard the last of the Kindle, by a long shot.

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Cristina and Lisa’s social experiment with Twitter has come to an end, and I am thrilled to present the final analysis of their tweets. First, let’s review their basic situation and the purposes of this experiment.

1. Cristina and Lisa share a life, two houses and a main area of interest in their profession, but they spend most of the time in two different cities: Cristina in New York, in the new apartment they have just purchased, and Lisa in North Carolina, in the “old” house they bought together several years ago and shared until a professional engagement brought Cristina to New York.
2. The house in North Carolina, having been lived in by the couple for quite some time, is already set up to accommodate their lifestyle, but the new apartment in New York presented a white canvas, as it were, to be customized as much as space and finances allowed. Our goal was to make Lisa’s visits as seamless and convenient as possible, by allowing her to travel light and to have the “perfect” setup waiting for her on her arrival. All this while accommodating Cristina’s needs on a daily basis.

By analyzing the hourly tweets of Cristina and Lisa over a two-week period, we set out to:

1. Capture their “life flow,” the rhythm of their daily lives, their routines and habits;
2. Gain insight into their relationship with their home and work spaces (they often overlap);
3. Understand what is important to them in their relationship with their space.

At the end of the first week, I printed out and analyzed their tweets, and reached a fair number of preliminary conclusions and tentative recommendations. Now the second week has ended, and I am curious to find out whether one week might have been enough to get a fairly good picture of their situation, or whether this second week has given us some deeper glimpses that we might have missed had we stopped the experiment after the first seven days. So, here goes.

First, some statistics:

Cristina:

• Total number of tweets in the second week: 205
• from computer: 205 (almost all from Twitterfox, a small number from Twitter.com)
• from iPhone: none

Lisa:

• Total number of tweets in the second week: 66
• from computer: 42 (Twitter.com)
• from iPhone: 24 (Twitterific)

They both did a great job again. The discrepancy in numbers is due not to the fact that Lisa’s commitment is lacking, but to the fact that her semester had already begun while Cristina’s was still gearing up.

New Insights into Cristina’s Life Flow

• Now that some more furniture has arrived, Cristina has been able to add to her morning ritual the reading of the paper in the kitchen. The best thing about this apartment is the light. The quantity and the quality. She can also read the paper in the dining room, where there is a new very large table from CB2.
• This week was very busy, between furniture deliveries and preparations for the new semester at school, so Cristina was even worse about her eating habits than usual: she neglected her shopping, cooking and eating, frequently skipping lunch and/or snacks or highly necessary cups of espresso!
• I can confirm that morning is the most important time in Cristina’s day, in terms not only of the ritual of awakening, breakfast, radio, communication with family, paper reading, etc. but also as far as setting the tone for the day. This week, in anticipation of the new semester and experiencing a mixture of anxiety and excitement about all the furniture deliveries and assembly, as well as managing and coordinating the various helpers, Cristina woke up very early several times, but I never detected a feeling of unease, which is comforting. She reads in bed, almost always on her Kindle ***an interesting detail vis-a-vis gadgets***.
• The home office seems to be gearing up nicely. Cristina is able to communicate with family via Skype, use Google Docs to collaborate with her Graduate Assistants (GAs), and of course do her own research and writing, and let’s not forget Twitter!
• Her days at work have been more intense but similar in pattern to those of the previous week.
• An important new development of this week has been that Cristina has begun to familiarize herself not only with her apartment but also with her building and her neighborhood. She is definitely a city girl, loves the fact that she can walk everywhere in very little time and that almost everything she needs is located conveniently nearby. There is a gym, so the next thing that is going to be included in her daily routine is some kind of exercise, like yoga perhaps. ***apartment vs. house — my outlook vs. hers, see below in the conclusion***
• I can foresee that evenings will begin to rival mornings in terms of rituals.  The slow, languid teeth brushing in front of the tv, the Kindle reading in bed, the takeout dinner with a friend in front of a movie… it all sounds lovely.

Observations on Cristina’s Experience of Her New Apartment

• The washer/dryer cannot be installed soon enough, as far as I can tell. This week Cristina has repeatedly tweeted about her procrastination with the laundry, and I’m sure it’s due to the fact that it’s not fun to go down to the basement. Once she installs the appliance in her kitchen the quality of her daily life will improve tremendously.
• The kitchen has already improved quite a bit with the simple addition of a table, and Cristina’s gladness is apparent from her tweets about her morning ritual. She might benefit from having a tiny tv in the kitchen.

Lisa’s Life Flow

• This week Lisa’s semester has really picked up, and therefore she has had even less time to tweet. But her routine seems to be much the same as last week’s. Much of her day is taken up by work, whether she is at home or at school. When at home, as always, work is conducted on the floor with a laptop.
• Lisa’s habits have overall been confirmed. I find it wonderful how in sync these two people are! Lisa too barely speaks of cooking, preparing food or eating (both Lisa and Cristina are miniscule women. They each weigh about four ounces.)

Conclusions and Recommendations

• First of all, I don’t think that the second week of tweeting yielded any very deep insights that I had not already intuited after the first week, but something very interesting did happen. The tweets became at the same time more self-conscious and more relaxed and meditative, like musings. Cristina and Lisa started to become accustomed to Twitter, and began to breathe into their tweets. Not to sound too new-agey, but that is what tends to happen. After the first week I was already impressed by how much the lives of these two very different people were in harmony. Through two very different routes, somehow they have arrived at the same place. Both appreciate simplicity, modern lines, organization. Neither of them wants to have to devote too much time to housework, but both need their space to be clean, in order and efficient. They are in the same field of work, are very devoted to their work, mix their work with their play. Lisa, after reading my analysis of the first week of tweets, commented that their lives are pathetic, probably in reference to the fact that they both work so much. I, on the other hand, find their lives to be very Zen. They have intertwined their professional and personal interests in a way that seamlessly weaves their “real” life into their “work” life and each component feeds and enriches the other.
• For the apartment in New York I recommend taking the maximum advantage of the storage space in the basement, freeing up as much of the space as possible in the apartment, so that both Cristina and Lisa can allow their minds to open to all the light and white surfaces that the apartment is now filling up with. Cristina repeatedly mentioned that she spends very little time in the kitchen preparing food because while she is doing it she can’t really “relax,” but her hints at the lack of a tv in there make me think that she equates relaxing and watching tv to a high degree. So I definitely recommend a small television in the kitchen. Lisa would like a microwave, and I think it would be a good addition, since cooking is not high on the agenda. A microwave is also useful to heat up leftovers that have been frozen, and since these two eat like sparrows, I think it highly likely that there will be plenty of leftovers.
• The dining room now has the lovely white table from CB2, but I think it should also house the sofabed for guests. It might seem, at first glance, that the best room for guests would be the study at the end of the apartment, but I don’t think that would be a good idea. Cristina’s mother from Italy comes to visit once a year or so, and naturally, having come so far she tends to stay for a while. Both Cristina and Lisa are early risers and immediately sit down at their computers to check emails and flex their brain muscles. If there were a guest in the study they could not do this, and in the long run it might make the hosting experience stressful, when it doesn’t need to be. If the guest were sleeping in the dining room, they could just slip by, move into the study, and everyone would be happy.
• The bathroom has acquired some new fixtures and seems to be very functional already. One day there will be money to redo the tiles and things like that, but for the time being I would say it’s fine as it is.
• Storage has been added to the bedroom, as we had all reached the conclusion that this is the room in the house that receives the least amount of “love” from the two women. They sleep in the bedroom and read in bed, but no significant amount of daytime is spent there and it is not a focus of their domestic attention.
• I would definitely invest in a radio wiring or wireless (even better) system throughout the house, so that NPR can follow them around during their morning routine.

As a final note, I would just like to speak about my friendship with Cristina for a moment. We have been friends for over a year now, I think, and I have been able to follow the acquisition of this apartment from the first glimmer in her eye to the furnishing and inhabiting phase. When she first started talking about buying a place I encouraged her to buy a house rather than an apartment. For nearly the same amount of money she could have much more space for herself and perhaps also a tenant, like I have. But she stuck to her guns and said that since she spends most of her time alone, a house would make her feel lonely. That an apartment building is a small community, where you can hear other people around you. I must say that now that it’s all over, I think she did the right thing. Both women care about the shape of the house, but neither wants to spend too much time taking care of it (they have too many much more interesting things to do) and I couldn’t agree more. This way, they have the best of all worlds. A house in North Carolina, an apartment in New York, two spaces perfectly in sync with their respective environments.

I am going to be visiting the apartment again very soon and taking a new set of pictures, so stay tuned for the completion of this wonderful and inspiring experiment. Thank you, Cristina and Lisa, for allowing me and the world into your wonderful lives. I wish you joy and serenity in your new place, and I think you’re off to a great start!

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1. (Re)Arrange Your House With Twitter: A Social Experiment In this post I introduce t^h's first social experiment using...
2. (Re)Arrange Your House with Twitter: Mid-Experiment Update In this post I analyze the first week of tweets...
3. (Re)Arrange Your House With Twitter: The “after” photos In this final post of the series, I offer some...