Some time ago, I wrote about my feelings for books, and where I thought reading was going.

At that stage (March 2009), I had just discovered reading on my iPod Touch. It was long before the iPad was announced, but I’m pleased to find that my earlier comments are all pretty much still valid. I still treasure the feel of a “real”, dead-tree book and will no doubt still hang on to most of my current collection of some 3,000 volumes – at least until the next time we move house!

But since I bought an iPad in late May of this year, it has become my reading device of choice.

I have now read almost a dozen books on the iPad, and I find it a very comfortable experience, though I am appalled at how badly some e-books have been constructed by the publishers.

Apart from free classics, I have paid full price for all of the e-books I have acquired.

My favourite e-book store is Books on Board, which has a great selection, good prices and a really easy mechanism for selection and payment. Though I have bought a couple of books from Amazon to read in their Kindle app, and a few from Kobo books to read in their app, I prefer to use the Apple iBooks app, which I find is by far the best of the reading apps on the iPad. However, in Australia Apple are still only offering classics from Gutenberg (they haven’t been able to negotiate agreements with local publishers, it seems).

Getting my books into iBooks has involved some shenanigans to remove the Digital Rights Management. I’m not going to tell you how I did this, because it’s arguably against US legislation to publish such information. But I am confident that I am within the law to actually do this – I have paid for the books, after all, and all I am doing is format-shifting them. What nonsense that we even have to worry about this stuff!!

But as well as books, I have been reading a lot of other stuff on my iPad. There are newspapers, for example. I also regularly look at the New York Times. I tried their “Editor’s Choice” app, but though it is well-designed I prefer their web site, which has more varied content.

My local-city newspaper, The Age, doesn’t have an app out as yet (and judging by the offering from their sister publication, The Sydney Morning Herald, it won’t be worth waiting for), but their web site is OK, if a little tricky to navigate by touch. My wife and I both sit reading The Age in the morning on our iPads as we have breakfast. In this regard, I am very fond of the set of MoviePegs I bought, which enable me to prop up the iPad in a portrait orientation.

In the morning I also check out the local weather, using a great Australian app called Oz Weather HD.

I also particularly like the Guardian newspaper app called Guardian Eyewitness. Every day there’s a stunning photograph, complete with tips for budding photojournalists.

Looking rather like a newspaper itself, though actually a collection of my favourite RSS feeds, is The Early Edition, which I use to scan through what is new. Mostly, though, I shunt off longer articles to the brilliant app Instapaper. I’m particularly enjoying following the 17th Century blogger, Sam Pepys, this way.

My latest delight has been discovering that I could subscribe to New Scientist magazine on the iPad, through the Zinio app.

Over the last 30 years (!) I have tried to keep up with New Scientist in many different ways – a subscription to the hard copy through my local newsagent (expensive), a subscription on microfische (required a special reader, and uncomfortable), a digital version through an organisation called Newsstand (I could only read this on my computer, sitting at my desk – also uncomfortable).

But finally, I can subscribe at a reasonable cost (only a third of the cost of the hardcopy), and read it in comfort in an armchair. Brilliant! And much more pleasant and interesting to see all of the photographs, diagrams and sidebars (and even the advertisements) in their right place in the magazine, with excellent layout. The pinch and stretch zoom capabilities of the iPad make this a very comfortable way to read a magazine. I wish The Age was available in this way.

And then there’s… well, comics. OK, I know I’m now nearly 60 years old and I shouldn’t be indulging in reading the kind of escapist stuff I read when I was 13, but the fact is that I still enjoy it. Some time ago I bought a DVD collection of 40 years worth of Spider-Man comics, all in PDF format. I read some of these on my computer, but as usual, sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen is hardly relaxing. But come the iPad, and the excellent GoodReader app, I can sit and read my way through these with great comfort and lots of nostalgia.

Then there are modern comics, or graphic novels, whatever. Both Marvel and DC comics have their own apps (based on the same engine) and both have a good selection of free comic books. I particularly enjoyed ElephantMen, both for the quality of the graphics and the interesting story.

And if we want to get out of the graphic gutter and reach for the literary stars, then there’s always the excellent Shakespeare Pro app. Every play the Bard wrote, complete with line numbers, search capabilities, illustrations and much more.

Reading will never be the same again.

“Blasts from the Past” is a collection of re-published articles dating from wa-a-a-y back to the time when I was publishing sf fanzines (1970s), through to some more recent articles published on (and about) the early days of the web (1990s).

I hope that things have changed a little in programming circles since I wrote this 13 years ago, particularly with regard to the gender balance… but I’m not so sure!

This Rough Magic

(First published in July 1996)

From time to time as part of training for my job I attend computer programming seminars of various kinds. The most important is the annual Microsoft Tech Ed conference.

Now, whenever I go to one of these events, it immediately strikes me what a heterogenous collection of people are in attendance.

With no exaggeration at all, the audience is always 95% to 99% male. At least 30% of the attendees have beards and are bespectacled. Well over 75% are wearing jumpers, cardigans or short sleeves (depending on the weather), and look as though wearing a suit or even a tie would be absolute anathema to them. By far the majority have a distant, dreamy look.

What is very depressing to me is that I fit this stereotype perfectly.

But I’m also very puzzled. Certainly when I did my graduate diploma in computing, the students did not fit this stereotype; indeed the gender balance was almost equal, and the dress sense of both men and women was far more formal.

It seems there’s a great difference between the students of computer science and those who end up as practictioners of programming and the more technical side of things.

As I looked over the audience at the last such conference, it slowly began to dawn on me that there was a strange and compelling similarity between this group of people and that of another such group as described in history and legends.

Computer programmers are, in fact, wizards.

Think about it.

A group of almost entirely male. usually bearded, practioners of art which is highly arcane to the general public. A group of unworldly men absorbed in their books and their learning. Men who spend most of their days staring into a glowing crystal screen, muttering and cursing at it.

These people treasure special methods of doing things written in obscure languages. These methods may have been inherited from others, or found in special texts, or may have been worked out painstakingly by themselves by trial and error. Certainly they treasure their private libraries of methods and tools which they can use to alter the way things work. What is an algorithm if not a spell? What is a spell, if not an algorithm written in a difficult to understand language?

In the world of the computer, these people have real power to affect reality, and to conjure up things that were not there before.

There are some who have sold their souls to evil, and who create spells/programs which attack and destroy the work of others. Others, more pure-minded, who have dedicated themselves to the common good.

Looked at in this light, it is no wonder that there are so few women among this group. Wizards, both in Terry Pratchett’s books and in real legend, are an exclusively masculine lot. Witches operate in a different mode and gather in different groups. Not for them the lure of obscure knowledge and power, more the practical application of skills to everyday life.

For the wizard, often the more esoteric the knowledge, the more difficult the language, the more obscure the task, the better. How else to explain the popularity of cryptic programming languages such as C++ and Lisp?

The obsession that these people have is a strange one. It is certainly the lure of power, enormous power, within a particular sphere. It is the power of creation and destruction; of life and death, if you like. But the world in which this power is wielded is not the real world. It is the universe of cyberspace.

For all the increasing dominance of computers in our workplaces and our everyday lives, it is hard to imagine that these dreamy, bearded souls who are wizards or programmers depending on how you look at it, are ever likely to control the world.

Shakespeare, as always, knew the truth of it when he has his wizard-Duke, Prospero, recall wistfully:

The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported,
And rapt in secret studies.

– The Tempest, Act I Scene II

I’m amused by all the fuss about a portrait recently identified as – maybe, possibly – of William Shakespeare. There’s a fair bit of skepticism around, see this article from the Guardian, for example.

All this fuss about what Shakespeare looked like, and the related arguments about who ‘really’ wrote Shakespeare’s plays, are all fairly pointless, really. The works are what count.

My own answer to “Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays” would be something like the old saw about Homer:

Did you know that they found out that Homer didn’t write ‘The Illiad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ after all?

They were in fact written by another ancient Greek of the same name.

The point being, of course, that we know so little about Homer that it is a distinction without a difference.

It doesn’t quite work for Shakespeare, but it almost does:

Did you know that William Shakespeare didn’t write all those plays?

No, they were written by another Elizabethan of the same name.