I had my heart broken by technology once. The $10 million department that I managed crumbled and fell despite my best efforts, simply because the wonderful things that programmers were creating just weren’t useful enough. So perhaps I’m a little bitter, but I know all too well how things can sound great on paper, and suck in real life.

Want an example? Electronic Cookbooks. They were going to be bigger than normal cookbooks, and the sales people sounded so convincing because they were utterly convinced themselves.

“You can have 10,000 recipes on a single CD-ROM!” they cried, in a day when the word “CD-ROM” was still something mysterious and new, a shiny piece of silver packed with infinite possibilities. “Imagine that! That’s twenty cookbooks, all in one disc!”

And they’d hold up the disc, beaming happily in your direction, just so you got the point.

“That does sound cool,” I said, and indeed it did. Hell, I was the New Media Buyer for Borders Books and Music, which meant that I’d staked my job on these electronic books being as cool as people said. I was buying these new CD-ROM educational books for one of the largest bookstore chains, because we were going to ride the wave of The Future.

“But that’s not all!” they said. “You can search by ingredient for what you want that evening! Do you have eggs, bacon, and some leftover pie crust to work with? You can just put those in – “ They leaned over, clacked some words into the keyboard - “And voila! There’s twenty-seven recipes, all using those ingredients!”

“Awesome,” I said in a hushed tone.

“And,” they continued, “You can filter all the results by calories, or by fat content. When you’re done, you can rank and bookmark the recipes you loved – no more stained index cards in some battered paper tray! It’s all at your fingertips!”

I went away convinced that electronic cookbooks would be our number one seller. As did my boss, and his boss’s boss. It sounded awesome.

They never sold.

Oh, some of them did okay (and they did even better when they tumbled into the bargain bin and went for $5.99), but all of the cool shit that electronic cookbooks did wasn’t a match for what people wanted.

Years later, I was across the hall from the woman who bought cookbooks for Waldenbooks, a sprightly cute blonde who always had thick red books stacked to the ceiling around her. And I asked her about that.

“Oh, people don’t buy books for recipes,” she informed me. “Well, they do, but for most people cookbooks are a way of dreaming. They want big pictures so that you can envision what they look like, and exotic recipes that you haven’t heard before – most of the die-hard cookbook buyers will never use a tenth of the recipes, but they like browsing. It’s like looking through a catalogue of clothing; half the fun’s in the exploration. It’s not the same, clicking.”

“Oh,” I said, crestfallen.

“Plus,” she said, “Most of our business is at Christmas anyway. Most recipe books are bought as gifts. If you’re looking to make actual food, all you really need is The Joy of Cooking; it’s got enough recipes to last just about anyone for a lifetime. Everything after that is just curiosity.”

“What about the ease of electronic cookbooks?” I asked. “Wouldn’t they be handy?”

She frowned. “I don’t have a computer in the kitchen,” she said.

“But you could print them off!”

“And then what? Put the printed recipes in a looseleaf binder? Oh, that’s just ugly,” she frowned. “Plus, there’s something comforting about having the books in your kitchen, ready to pull down – they’re big, you can get stuff on them and keep using them. I have cookbooks that my Mom gave to me, and her notes are in the pages….”

“All right,” I said, dejected. “I get it.”

Years later, after I began to cook myself, I finally understood what she meant. I myself have a laptop I can bring anywhere, and I still buy cookbooks. She was absolutely right; there’s the fun of looking, and the satisfaction of pulling that old James Beard cookbook down to figure out how to make the Peanut Sauce for my classic Thai beef. Printing and scanning and clicking isn’t the same when you’re cooking – half the satisfaction of cooking is tactile, and that’s gone when you’re mousing your way to a calorie-slim life.

In other words, the advantages that electronic cookbooks had to offer were largely illusory. They sound like things you’d want, but in practice? Nobody did. They didn’t fill a need that people were willing to pay money for.

This is relevant because we just watched “Who Killed The Electric Car?” last night.

Who Killed The Electric Car? is mostly an honest documentary, but it’s also misguided. They do tell you the big problem with the electric car, but they also don’t seem to register it as a problem:

The electric car that was marketed could go a scant sixty miles before recharging. The recharging process was somewhere between forty-five minutes and twelve hours.

Now, as Electric Car points out, the average consumer drives about twenty-seven miles a day. That’s half of what the electric car can do, so clearly an electric car is useful and wonderful! But that’s bullshit. An electric car cost about as much as a regular car, but it had a drawback. Yeah, I don’t usually need to go more than sixty miles in a day – but on the days I do, it’s fucking inconvenient.

I just drove to Penguicon and back, which I could not have done in my cool electric car. And that’s not even an emergency – what if I’d had to go get a friend on the other side of the state? What if I wanted to drive to Connecticut to attend my grandfather’s funeral?

My electric car? Useless in those situations.

Plus, the whole “sixty miles” thing would terrify me the entire time. Okay, so I have sixty miles… But I also occasionally have screaming traffic jams. Not often, but it’s bad enough to be caught in one without having your car run out of juice in the middle of one.

Oh, and what happens if I do run out? I can recharge my fuel car in two minutes with a fill-up. The electric car? If I botch it and run dry, then I’m stuck for an hour - assuming I can get to a socket in time. That’s a little disconcerting.

“But you can have two cars!” they cry. “One for the short-hand trips and one for the long trips!” And yes, clearly, purchasing two cars to make up for the deficiencies of one is the way to go. (Plus, I wouldn’t particularly trust the long-trip car I’d left in the garage for the last three months to start up on command when I aroused it from its slumber.)

Sure, there are arguments to be made for families with two cars which do often have a long-term and a beater, but then you run into the whole issue of “Who are you trying to sell to?” These cars are more environmentally friendly (and easier to maintain, with lower repair bills, or so I’m told)…. But in terms of what they actually do, they’re not good enough. (You may, one day, need both cars to drive long distances simultaneously – what then?) One is actually less useful, making it a sacrifice to purchase the electric car.

Sadly, “Inconvenience yourself for the environment!” has never been a strong marketing point. We like little things. We can sort plastics and paper into boxes after we’re done buying the fifteen million excessively-packaged products.

The movie blames the consumers, the car companies, the government, and everyone except the damn batteries. They don’t seem to grok that the “advantages” they’re peddling don’t actually meet the needs of the consumers, just like I didn’t see how electronic cookbooks didn’t quite serve the niche we needed it to.

Of course, the environmentalists also claim the unlikely benefits of Mass Production (“If we make enough electric cars, they’ll be so much cheaper than real cars that it’ll be worth it!”) and super batteries (“This car, which we have not tested in production, goes for three hundred miles!”). And who knows? Maybe they’re right.

But it’s like the Apple Newton. Apple tried like hell to sell their palmtop computer, and the technology wasn’t ready yet. That fucker couldn’t do what you needed to, and all the coolness and the marketing dollars couldn’t move it out the door. There wasn’t a conspiracy to kill the Newton*; it just was too expensive, too big for your pocket, and not able to read what you wrote.

Then the Palm came out. That did it. And when your electric car can run five hundred miles consistently with a backup battery I can stow in the back for emergencies, talk to me.

Until then, nobody killed the electric car but itself.

* - Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that the car companies marketed it poorly (calling it the Impact?), and did strange shit afterwards. But these are also the same companies that can’t get their shit together to battle Japan, and are currently going bankrupt, so I don’t see it as a “conspiracy” so much as “short-sighted executives who don’t understand the first thing about making cars.”

Still, if the electric car was as good as they said it was, I suspect Honda would probably have something to say about it.

(93 shouts of denial | Tell me I'm full of it)