Kafka and iPhone

Although my prime occupation is related to technology, my personal relationships with various technologies can be described in terms of Kafkaesque ambivalence: I don't really crave that much for being up to date when it comes to latest gadgets or cool services like Twitter but I push myself hard enough to get the latest when working on a concrete web project. Due to that peculiar fact my personal arsenal of available innovations gets updated rarely and almost always not by me.

That's probably why I have got iPhone only now, long after hysterical tsunami of iPhonification got subsided (well, unless you don't consider iPad as some kind of variation on iPhone theme). My wife bought it for me so I would stay better connected with the world. That made sense for my old cell phone was as ancient as the one you could see in the sequel of "Wall Street" when Michael Douglas receives back his personal items at the very beginning.

I have to admit - all that iPhone hysteria is not entirely baseless. iPhone is really cool piece of electronic engineering. Touch screen provides with shockingly new experience for those who relied solely on keyboard and mouse for the last decade or so. Numerous iPhone apps and bells and whistles can make anybody feel deeply entertained and in a way powerful. But for me personally the greatest revelation was its book store, iBook.

That's not to say that I never bought and read electronic books before. I have Kindle and did quite a bit of reading on it. But my Kindle compared to iPhone is like medieval arquebus to M-16. Reportedly, such comparison is not totally alien to Amazon.com executives for as per news from media Amazon.com purchased a hi-tech company in New York to develop its own touch screen technology in response to Apple's challenge.

The ease with which one can read and leaf through iBook is very addictive. Moreover, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that a great deal of classic literature available at iBook store free of charge. Majority of them are made available via Gutenberg Project. I was able to download and peruse books I did not open since early childhood, those like "Treasure Island" and "Black Arrow" by Stevenson, or "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Conan Doyle, or "Ivanhoe" by Walter Scott. Reading it in English, recollecting its Russian translation read far away and long ago, comparisons and finding familiar details was increadible fun.

One author though was of special interest for me - Franz Kafka. Some of his books are also available as free downloads for both iPhone and Kindle. Nevertheless, I went extra mile and bought "The Metamorphosis" with a great deal of comments and data on author for something like $2.99. I did start reading that story on computer sometime ago (at really good website of ReadPrint.com) but never had a chance to complete reading due to lack of spare time. iPhone is making now possible for me to fill that embarrassing literary hole in my not so classical education. I read whenever I have a moment. Even in the line up in Starbucks.

Reading Kafka makes me feel kind of delirious; reading about his life makes me delirious and sad. His family ended up terribly in flames of WWII. He himself died of hunger at a quite young age (not of the lack of food but due to some complication with his throat). His final will to have all his writings to be burned unread is equally delirious and sad. Reading Kafka on iPhone inevitably brings up an idea that if iPhones were available in Kafka's time, sadness component maybe much smaller in his biography (I don't mind delirium of his writings though).

I was driving yesterday morning to work and saw some homeless dude pushing rusty shopping cart with his dirty belongings in front of him. He had easily recognizable Apple's headset under stained baseball cap. Apple's market penetration is almost absolute at this point. Nothing Kafkaesque about it though.