Enlarge. Excel. Evolve.: Critical Thinking, Reading & Change-Hug and Nudge. 'Hug and Nudge' is a fortnightly column with two different perspectives from two different continents and cultures on the same question viz.
Dr Amit Nagpal (based in New Delhi, India). Question-How do we take what we learn from deep thinking and reading and apply it to change? The purpose of a book is to serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us ~ Franz Kafka I believe your competitive advantage is not what you do or where you work. Your competitive advantage is the accuracy of your macro scan and the way you choose to articulate your life experience. Zadie Smith’s 10 Rules of Writing. Twelve quotes from authors to remember when starting your first book. A-highly-unlikely-scenario-by-rachel-cantor. In a not-too-distant future, in a world much like our own, a young man sits in a white room, answering a white phone, listening.
In his world, fast-food chains and political philosophies are one. The Case for Preserving the Pleasure of Deep Reading. When a minaret dating from the twelfth century was toppled in the fighting between rebels and government forces in Aleppo, Syria, earlier this spring, we recognized that more than a building had been lost.
The destruction of irreplaceable artifacts—like the massive Buddha statues dynamited in the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan in 2001 and the ancient texts burned and looted in Iraq in 2003—leaves us less equipped to understand ourselves and where we came from, less able to enlarge ourselves with the awe and pleasure that these creations once evoked. Which is why we should care about the survival of a human treasure threatened right here at home: the deep reader. “Deep reading”—as opposed to the often superficial reading we do on the web—is an endangered practice, one we ought to take steps to preserve as we would a historic building or a significant work of art. None of this is likely to happen when we’re scrolling through TMZ.com. Hugh Howey: Self-publishing is the future — and great for writers. The story of self-publishing is Jan Strnad, a 62-year-old educator hoping to retire in four years.
To do so is going to require supplemental income, which he is currently earning from his self-published novels. In 2012, Jan made $11,406.31 from his work. That’s more than double what he made from the same book in the six months it was available from Kensington, a major publisher. He has since released a second work and now makes around $2,000 a month, even though you’ve never heard of him. Rachel Schurig has sold 100,000 e-books and made six figures last year. Like Schurig, Robert J. Right now you are probably thinking that these anecdotes of self-publishing success are the result of my having cherry-picked the winners. My fascination with this story began back when major media outlets like Entertainment Weekly and Wired magazine called to interview me.
My call for anecdotes was my first attempt to find data to support this theory. Let’s compare music and literature for a moment. The nominees for the 2013 Hugo Awards have been announced! Books contain fewer words about feelings. U.
SHEFFIELD (UK) — Other than fear, words about emotions have steadily decreased in books throughout the last century, say researchers. As reported in PLOS ONE, the researchers looked at how frequently “mood” words were used through time in a database of more than five million digitized books provided by Google. The list of words was divided into six categories (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) previously used by a co-author Vasileios Lampos, from the University of Sheffield’s department of computer science and the Natural Language Processing Group, to detect contemporary mood changes in public opinion as expressed in tweets collected in the UK over more than two years.
“The initial idea was simple: what if we apply a similar analysis on digitized books? And even the very first experimental results were depicting clear patterns of correlation between historical events and mood tendencies, such as the obvious peak in sadness during the Second World War,” says Lampos. The Past and Future Histories of Books: An Interview with Ted Striphas. Amanda Hocking, the writer who made millions by self-publishing online.
Apple poised to bring important changes to its iBook platform. Apple may be poised to announce changes coming to iBooks, and perhaps eBook publishing, sometime this month.
In particular, we believe the announcement may have important reverberations for textbook publishers and buyers. According to a report by All Things Digital published Monday, the company is planning a media event in New York to make a "media-related," not hardware-related announcement. Further, sources for TechCrunch claimed the announcement will focus on "improvements to the iBooks platform," and the event will supposedly be more geared towards the publishing industry (not necessarily consumers). Apple has recently highlighted the ability of its iBooks platform to include sound, video, and other features by offering a free eBook of The Yellow Submarine. And based on information from our own sources, we believe the announcement could likely involve support for the EPUB 3 standard, which enables a wider variety of multimedia and interaction features.