When we became parents, my wife and I decided that we had to actually decide what it would mean for us to be parents… Or else it would just happen to us. We read our Bibles, we talked to each other, and we learned from our experiences… The result was this. It hangs on our wall and we talk about it with our children (and ourselves) all the time…
Read MoreAll of these questions are key. And they all have their start with the author…. As a reader, I’m always asking this of any book that makes its way to my attention spectrum: Who wrote this? Are they a professional? Have they practiced this idea in other mediums? Where do they work? Have they experienced some failures on the way to getting where they are?
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Without intending to do so I’ve created a reading time machine to 6, 8, and 10 years ago. I loved thinking about and making this list and it turned out to be the best way to represent the decade without recency bias or too much bunching together. I commend each of these books to you as important, interesting, and original!
Read MoreThe effective endorser list of people on a book has two main reasons for existing: (1) to have experts in a field lend a credible voice to a work and (2) to get those same experts/influencers excited about your book ahead of time. Ideally it’s not just a list of famous/semi-famous people willing to write something.
Read MoreI recently came across an instance (and since then, a few more instances) of a school district announcing plans to change their school librarians' focus away from books/reading and changing them into "Innovation Specialists." Uhhhhhh. What?! ...This trainwreck of an idea is still unfolding....
Read MoreWhen we read certain books at certain times in our lives they smack us right in the face. Had I read some of these books a few years earlier or later, they would have objectively been just as good, but perhaps they wouldn’t have had the impact on me that they did then.
Read MoreI read mostly non-fiction. Over the years I’ve tried reading and retaining on my iPad (which mostly sits and gets dusty these days). I’ve listened to audiobooks, which I enjoy very much, but audiobook retention seems to be a hopeless case as well. These non-500 year old technologies are great for serial reading, but less great for actually remembering and referencing the content.
Read MoreI’ll never forget when I first held an Amazon Kindle in 2007. With tablets, smartphones, many more ebook retailers, subscription services, lawsuits, and countless other ereader models in our rearview mirror… What is the verdict on ebooks? I’ve got ten of them.
Read MoreIn most respects, it was everything a bookstore should and could be. As a book publisher, I took the whole experiment as a personal challenge to improve the quality and veracity of books that people want to read. Here were my biggest nine impressions after spending an hour at the newest bookstore in Chicago.
Read MoreOur goal should be to buy the things we buy at a great value. That doesn’t mean cheap, necessarily. It just means the price is below what you’d expect to pay based on what you get out of it. We’ll call this efficient spending. And, yep, you guessed it…
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