Instead of reading mediocre to bad fiction in your spare time, how about some classics? For free?
I might be defining my opinion about Twilight by this entry, but, really, what happened to reading good literature? After leaving high school where many of us had required reading, how many continue to pay tribute to the oldies (English majors not included)? There are plenty of classics in similar genres to what is available today.
Many classics have been freely available for while, since works enter the public domain after copyright expires. Project Gutenberg has been making available public domain books since 1971 and is the largest collection of free ebooks around. It is a pretty huge collection, and a great source of reading material especially if you own an ebook reader.
Something new on the rise, however, is Read Print, which is a website that also puts out books, but in more modern Web format complete with Facebook, Twitter, and extensive chat capabilities (Meebo, Facebook, AIM, MySpace IM, Google Talk). It was recently named one of TIME’s 50 best websites. I would still use Gutenberg for getting ebooks to read on my Sony Reader, but being able to read online is an attractive function of Read Print.
It would be interesting to try to have a virtual book club meeting through Read Print. It would be quite easy to communicate and the readers would not have to be worried about buying the same edition of a book to keep track of page numbers. It would be possible to even try to schedule our reading sessions to be synchronous so that we can chat as we read. That might be more distracting than helpful, but it would more closely emulate watching a TV show or a movie together.
Check out the Read Print collection. You can browse for books by title or by author, here are a few:
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Or if you are a science nerd like me, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- Shakespeare
- Charles Dickens
- George Orwell
I’ve just started reading the book Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman. They are two brothers who got into seemingly different fields of business and psychology, but found that there are really interesting ideas that tie the two together.
I haven’t gotten that far in the book yet so I can’t give a full review yet, but I will highlight some interesting points that I have picked up on so far.
A lot of the concepts they bring up tie back to the idea of loss aversion, which I have blogged about in the past. The authors brought up the example of an extremely experienced commercial airline pilot who made a series of errors that led to the crash of the airliner and death of everyone on board. Long story short, the situation he was in placed him under pressure to avoid certain losses and eventually got the better of him in even the simplest decisions like waiting for takeoff clearance from the air traffic controller.
A few more things to think about:
- diagnosis bias: when experts make an initial diagnosis and ignore all evidence against it, particularly in medical fields
- value attribution: how the value or respect we place on or expect from a thing or person affects our view of their work
- commitment: when we are very committed to a decision, we are more likely to behave irrationally to stay the course even if we realize we are wrong
I have so many books on my to-read list, but if you have any more suggestions, I would love to hear them!
A friend told me a few months ago that when he was going through heartbreak, he found his way through it by reading an entire graphic novel series in a slightly obsessive binge. He assured me that I would find something to help me through my heartbreak as well. This hopefully is my graphic novel series, not literally of course. For me, it is Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide.
As strange as it may seem, making sense of what is going on in my brain and in my heart seems to be the only way out of heartbreak for me. Somehow, figuring out some of the things that might be causing me to feel pain is therapeutic and somewhat exciting. I want to know why I feel the way that I feel and why things happened the way that they did. I might be able to parse out some things for that first half but probably not the second half.
Heartbreak has been so difficult to deal with because I feel broken by the loss of love. I’m thinking it is at least partly loss aversion, a concept that means people strongly prefer avoiding a loss, and that feeling might be stronger than the desire to acquire a gain.
Loss aversion is a theme that comes up in How We Decide, mostly when dealing with gambling and betting. People who are losing money are more likely to keep gambling or hold on to depreciating stocks because the thought of leaving at a loss is too much to bear. Loss aversion can be linked to some irrational decisions and/or behavior.
The neuroscience behind this suggests that certain areas of the brain increase in activity when the potential gains increase and decreasing activity may represent potential losses. Neural signals could be measured to try to predict loss aversion behavior by comparing the relative activity induced by the gains and losses.
For me, the thought of not being able to create more happy memories with that person is unbearable. I feel unsatisfied with the way things ended and have the urge to hold on until things look better. This is irrational of me and I know that, but my emotions won’t let me accept that loss very easily.
Continue reading →
With a slew of recent releases of gadgets that serve as ebook readers (Barnes and Noble Nook, iPad, and all the ones announced at the Consumer Electronics Show), I thought I would take some time to look back on the experience I’ve had with my Sony PRS-505 Reader and why I love it and e-ink technology. (Mine is dark blue, not like the one shown here!)
First of all, I got the Reader a little over 2 years ago in Fall of 2007. I bought it somewhat as an impulse buy, but I justified it as a long term investment. Since then, I read at least 4x more books than I would have otherwise. This is the biggest reason why I’m thankful that I decided to buy the Reader.
Here are the other main reasons why I bought it:
- I don’t have space at home for all the books that I want to read, and I don’t do well with library books (see #3)
- I don’t have the money to buy all the books I want to read (ebooks are usually cheaper, and many you might be able to find for free)
- I’m allergic to old books and dust (I get itchy all over), so I won’t be able to enjoy re-reading any of the physical books, bringing their value down over time
Here are the reasons why I love my reader now:
- It is way lighter and smaller to carry around than a book
- I like being able to immediately start reading another book once I’ve finished one
- The e-ink screen is nice on my eyes, as compared to a lit LCD screen (I get enough of that from staring at my laptop!)
I’m also happy that I chose the Sony Reader over the Amazon Kindle because any of the content that I buy from the Sony store is not locked to my device (i.e. anything bought for the Kindle only works on the Kindle, there are tons of stories if you Google “Kindle DRM”).
I don’t buy books very often, but when I do it is in a format that is more useful and open (usually ePub). The Kindle uses its own proprietary format. Also, I’m not so interested in the wireless download function of the Kindle so that does not bother me.
There was also that incident where Amazon deleted George Orwell books from all Kindles. That type of control is not something I am a fan of. Even though it was for valid reasons and they said they were changing their practices so it wouldn’t happen again, the fact that they have the ability to go into each device and perform that function irks me.
So, while I did have to shell out $280 for my Sony PRS-505, I’ve read enough books to make it worth it and I’m sure that I will be using my Reader for at least 4-5 more years.
Do you have a reader? Would you consider buying a reading device like this? I hope my comments have been helpful!
Image credit: Flickr user cloudsoup
When you train your dog to bring you the morning paper, that is a neat trick. When you train your computer to bring you news you want to read, that is an RSS feed.
I never fully appreciated RSS feeds for what they can do until I started reading the book We the Media by Dan Gillmor. The underlying idea is that you don’t need to search the Internet for the things that interest you but that they come to you through your RSS subscriptions and preferences.
This is useful for you when you want to be kept up to date on certain topics. Anytime there is an article, your RSS feed is updated to show it. I currently use Google Reader to keep track of blogs, job postings, and news.
Gillmor discusses another way to use RSS, which is to follow what is being said about yourself. This is a good way for popular bloggers and organizations to know what is going on in their realm and connects with their readers on a different level.
Honestly, I haven’t used RSS feeds enough in the past but I’m starting to really appreciate what they do. It could particularly be very helpful for my current job search!
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The wikiquest for innovation: Part 2
September 9, 2009
Books, Commentary, Society
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Some more interesting quotes from the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams: