Settling down with a good byook

   'What do you make of this, Watson?'
   I caught the object Holmes languidly tossed in my direction from the ottoman. 'It's a slipper, Holmes.'
   The great man sighed. 'Inside the slipper.'
   I carefully opened the persian slipper, within which Holmes habitually kept his tobacco. But instead a most remarkable device befell my gaze. An engine of outstanding craftsmanship, like a piece of polished jet that glowed alight with the richest colours. 'It seems to be a computing engine, Holmes.'
   'And much more beside. It is an iPhone, Watson. But I refer to the "app" that resides in its capacious memory. Do you recall the adventure of the Speckled Band?'

I can't keep this up. What I'm setting out to do is review a new iPhone app. It's the classic Conan Doyle short story, The Speckled Band, but this isn't just a common or garden ebook. It's a new format, called by the makers a byook. (We'll come back to that.)

The idea here is a very good one. Ebooks are often, if anything, a step back from from a traditional paper book. Because of the need to change pagination to fit text size and page orientation, they have very little of the elegant formatting of a good book. In fact, ebooks are often rather a mess. But the byook format takes the text, and adds to it, using the multimedia capabilities of the iPhone.

Yes, you are reading an ebook - this isn't a computer game. But there are animated illustrations, sound effects and more. It sounds brilliant. Back in the relatively early days of computer gaming, when graphics really started taking off, I was a great fan of a game called The Seventh Guest. It was spooky, atmospheric and intriguing. The byook format has the potential to apply the same sort of atmospherics to the process of reading an ebook.

There are, however, a few issues with the implementation in this first ever byook. I suppose I have to start with that name. The makers do not have English as a first language and, I'm sorry, 'byook' just doesn't work in English. It syucks. Then there's the chosen title. I have nothing against using a Conan Doyle story. And I think byooks will work best with atmospheric titles, so in that sense it's a good choice. But what we have here is not a novel. The Speckled Band is just one of the short stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and this byook isn't even the whole short story, only covering the first half of it. They're charging $1.99 for half a short story. Now bearing in mind the Sherlock Holmes stories are out of copyright, and you can download the whole book as an ebook for free, this is quite steep.

Is the experience worth the difference? I'm not sure. It is very clever. A lot of the pages are animated just with a change of page colour and some marginalia sketched in around the outside as if Watson is doodling as he takes notes, but they also accompanied by music and sound effects. These vary from the spot-on, like a gently ticking clock to the excessive, where a fire in the hearth sounds like the whole building is burning down. The effects come into their own on occasional pages where there is more animation, and the sillhouette of Holmes appears, blood spatters across the page or, perhaps most effectively, lightning flashes across the screen with the phone vibrating in time to the thunder. There are also neat effects where the text shakes, or blurs before settling down.

So - a good idea? Definitely. Atmospheric? A resounding yes. But it costs too much for too little content. (It was also too big at around 50 Mb - I hope most of that was the environment and a new byook title wouldn't add a similar amount, as that's an awful lot of storage for half a short story.) Without doubt it added atmosphere to the reading process. If I had a gripe there, it's that I'm a fast reader, and I found myself having to wait on each page (effectively just a paragraph or two) for the effects to do their bit before I turned on. This meant I tended to lose the flow of the story.

Am I dismissing byooks (please change the name) out of hand? No, not at all. With a suitably atmospheric story they are great fun and I hope to see more of them. But we need more content in a single title before they can really take off. You can buy The Speckled Band Part 1 byook at the iTunes Store.

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

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