Mohit Just's Library tagged reading →  View Popular, Search in Google

Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

reading books kindle ebooks publishing clay_shirky wp

When and where do you like to read?
When I can. I read less fiction these days, and it worries me, although my recent discovery that wearing reading glasses makes the action of reading more pleasurable is, I think, up there with discovering how to split the atom or America. Neither of which I did. (I clarify this for readers in a hurry.)...

If I started it, I’d read it to the end: until I found myself a judge of the Arthur C. Clarke Awards in the U.K., and obliged to read every science-fiction book published in the U.K. in the year of eligibility. I was a judge for two years. The first year, I read everything. The second year, I read a lot of first chapters and took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter.
Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.

neil reading habits books neilgaiman wp

I think the models of protection, be it law or technology, are fast dying and we need to move from protection to sharing. That solitary consumption of content will move to group and shared experiences. And what's tremendously powerful there is that you then have the ability to influence not only what other people will watch and hear and listen to, but also the kinds of content that are being created. That the content industry needs to move from being gatekeepers of content to curators of content, and that top-down models of content creation will go the way of the dinosaur very soon because (a) we have the Internet to distribute content and (b) tools are available to everyone. So the high priest model of content creation will very soon be challenged, as we saw in the case of Encyclopaedia Britannica, by the community models of content creation.

thoughts future content publishing gkjohn friends books reading creation wp

I've long been curious about why so many people are frightened of a potential future Amazon monopoly while simultaneously so sanguine about the real existing monopoly run by New York's so-called Big Six. And it's been interesting for me to see people try to explain away the evidence of collusion between the CEOs of the major publishers as set forth in the US Justice Department's suit against these publishers and in the equivalent suit brought by 16 states...
I wasn't around for previous technology-driven disruptions of industries, but I'm confident that as cars displaced horse-drawn carriages, electric lights displaced candles, and digitally distributed music displaced CDs, to name just a few, the establishments of the day decried the newcomers' methods and aims and predicted that the new way would inevitably cause The Destruction of Civilisation and the End of All That Is Good. And yet the doomsayers' predictions have never come true. In all these transitions, something was lost, but more was gained. The same dynamic is now playing itself out as a hidebound and moribund publishing industry, notable chiefly for its decades-long failure to involve itself in even a single innovation, is displaced by something more efficient and effective. And the dynamic will go on repeating itself, again and again, long after the legacy publishing industry has gone the way of the icebox, the telegraph, and the Vulgate Bible. As internet guru Clay Shirky recently put it, "Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution," and in this regard legacy publishing is in no way unique.
Though I'm certainly rooting for legacy publishers to successfully adapt (and why wouldn't I? When someone is sick, you don't want him to die; you want him to get well), I also think Amazon has been an enormous boon to readers and authors. Does anyone really believe that, without Amazon's innovations, readers would be paying less, or authors making more? Or that there would be remotely as big and vibrant a digital and self-publishing market for books if Amazon hadn't blazed the trail with the Kindle, the Kindle Store, and digital self-publishing?...
In the meantime, the publishing establishment wants you to believe that in order to prevent Amazon from possibly one day charging higher book prices, the establishment has to charge you higher prices today. Or, to put it another way, "Hey, you might get robbed if you carry all that cash around, so I'll just save you the trouble by taking your wallet right here." This isn't an argument; it's a con job. Consumers ought to recognise it as such.

amazon publishing establishment books reading wp

But I thought I was! :)

books reading wp

Let’s say there’s an interesting article on the web that you would like to read on your Amazon Kindle while on your way back home. Or maybe you have a couple of PDF eBooks on your desktop that you want to transfer to your Kindle. How do you initiate the transfer wirelessly?
You can either use bookmarklets to send web pages to your Kindle or email the documents as attachments to your @kindle.com address. However, a more convenient option is the Send to Kindle app from Amazon.com – this app has been available for Windows PCs for quite some time now and today, Amazon released a Mac version as well.

kindle reading web apps labnol technology wp

If the computer games which exist now had existed back in 1979 I would not have read any books, I think; I would not have seen writing as an adequate entertainment; I would not have seen going outdoors as sufficiently interesting to bother with.
Similarly, I find it difficult to understand why any eleven-year-old of today would be sufficiently bored to turn inward for entertainment.
This raises the question as to how future writers will come about, without ‘silence, exile and cunning’ – without the need for these things?...
Readers more accustomed to screens – web pages, iPhone displays – will scan a page of text for its contents, rather than experience it in a gradual linear top-left to bottom-right way. This will make for increased speed and decreased specificity. These readers will be half-distracted even as they read; their visual field will include other things than just the text, because they won’t feel happy unless those things are there. A writer of long, doubling-back sentences such as Henry James will be incomprehensible to them. They won’t be grammatically equipped to deal with him. They won’t be neurologically capable of reading him. Their eyes will photograph fields rather than, as ours do, or did, follow tracks...
Proposition: ‘The human race is no longer sufficently bored with life to be distracted by an art form as boring as the novel.’
Perhaps novels will continue, but instead of the machine it will be the connectivity that stops, or becomes secondary.

reader technology writing reading novels literature fiction wp

We like to think that books line our shelves because we ask them inside, but the simple truth is that they cross our thresholds whether we invite them or not. Books alight under the Christmas tree or beside a birthday cake as presents from people we love. Like a thistle hitching a ride on the household dog, books attach themselves to our palms as we walk through bookshops or rummage sales...
But any book weeder, no matter how lenient, inevitably wonders if he’s weeding too much. Like many readers, I’ve often confronted the basic dilemma of culling one’s shelves, which is that the book one gives away today is the very title that will be needed — or fervently desired — tomorrow. I feel a tinge of grievance each time I’m required to visit my public library and borrow reference books that, in some previous clean-out, I donated to the collection. As if plotting to spring them from jail, I sometimes wonder if I can secretly steal them back...

books bookshelves salon reading

This suggests to me that the pursuit of happiness, which we may as well call life, is full of surprising temporary elements—we get somewhere we couldn’t go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can’t stay there. It isn’t our world, and we shouldn’t let that world come crashing down into the one we can inhabit. The beanstalk has to be chopped down. But the large-scale riches from the ‘other world’ can be brought into ours, just as Jack makes off with the singing harp and the golden hen. Whatever we ‘win’ will accommodate itself to our size and form—just as the miniature princesses and the frog princes all assume the true form necessary for their coming life, and ours...
I was very quiet for a while, but I had realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe...

books memoir reading writing wp

I keep everything I buy. Only occasionally do I buy a book by mistake. Someone recommends it to me and I buy it and it's horrible. I don't keep books that I don't like. In my mind there are real books and not real books. Real books are books that I like and not real books are junk that other people recommend to me. I don't believe it's taste, I believe they're wrong. People tell me they're good and they're not...
I I was a child I would kiss any book I dropped. When I was a very little child after I'd read a book I really liked I'd kiss it. Love is really the word. I think Children's books are a human emotional experience rather than an intellectual one. You have a human relationship with them. Children have emotional relationships with inanimate objects which it would be wise to carry on into adulthood. The way a child makes a person out of a doll, which I never did, I made people out of books...
My mother was a big bookworm. Not a bibliophile. My mother got me into what has been for my entire life certainly what could be called my drug addiction: the reading of detective stories. I read five or six a week and must have eight billion of them...
I don't give them away anymore. I keep them. I'm the only person I know who reads mysteries like this who does not care who did it. I don't read them for the mystery, I don't read them for the game or the puzzle. I think of them more as an eating experience than as a reading experience. I suppose I read them for the atmosphere or the characters but I read them like a drug. I read them instead of taking heroin...
Everything is disappointing to those who read a lot. There's no question that at no time in my life have I ever thought that life was as good as reading. And I haven't had a bad life. What's unusual about me is that most people I know who read to the extent that I do aren't as precarious as I am...
I would rather read than have any kind of real life, like working, or being responsible. Reading prepares you for other reading, and possibly for writing, but, I'm happy to say, it certainly has nothing to do with real life. All the things that I never did because I was reading, so what? If someone said to me, how did you spend your life? I'd have to say, lying on the sofa reading.

reading library interviews wp

The reason children’s books endure seems clear enough: The books that toddlers read are determined entirely by adults, and when adults select books for kids they naturally gravitate towards the books they loved as kids. As a result, the market for children’s books is probably more resistant to cultural churn than just about any other slice of the consumer economy; it’s a closed circuit that reproduces itself one generation after another.
There are benefits to this system. For one, it helps to ensure that passing fads doesn’t wash quality books away. It’s doubtful, for example, that toddlers would opt for Goodnight Moon as often as their parents do, so maybe it’s just as well that they don’t have a say. For two, the persistence of children’s books yields a kind of experience we don’t get so often in a culture that has relatively few traditions: the chance to revisit childhood experiences through an older set of eyes.

children books reading parenting wp

I couldn’t tie my shoes, tell time or left from right, or recreate musical notes or words. I not only couldn’t read but often couldn’t hear or understand what was being said to me — by the time I’d processed the beginning of a sentence, the teacher was well on her way through a second or third. When I did have something to say I couldn’t find the words with which to say it, or if I could, forgot how to pronounce them.
My situation then seemed hopeless; I had no idea what a learning disability was, or that it had nothing to do with intelligence...
<later when he started reading>
I didn’t know then that I was beginning a lifelong love affair with the first-person voice and that I would spend most of my life inventing characters to say all the things I wanted to say. I didn’t know that I was to become a poet, that in many ways the very thing that caused me so much confusion and frustration, my belabored relationship with words, had created in me a deep appreciation of language and its music, that the same mind that prevented me from reading had invented a new way of reading, a method that I now use to teach others how to overcome their own difficulties in order to write fiction and poetry...
We knew so much less when I was a child. Then, all I wanted and needed, when I learned so painstakingly to read and then to write, was to find a way to be less alone. Which is, of course, what spoken and written language is really all about.

dyslexia reading writing learning wp

the whole principle of freedom of speech is predicated on the right to offend.
Consider a society where everyone said nice things about everyone else. Would such a society ever need to enshrine the right to freedom of speech in its constitution? There would be no reason to do so because nobody ever got offended.
You only need the right to free speech when you want to offend people...
Because the ‘giving offence’ argument is so weak in the Rushdie case, those who want to ban the book have fallen back on another argument. Now they say that if a book like this is published, then it will lead to violence.
And why should it lead to violence? Well, because the same people who had never read the book and who we agreed had no right to demand a ban will now run riot setting fire to property and killing people.
A genuinely liberal society should recognise this for what it is: a law and order problem and not a free speech issue...
But when it comes to free speech, we don’t act against those who threaten violence. Instead, we turn against those whose right to free speech we should be protecting.

virsanghvi freedom censorship reading writing india wp

there will be no point to the festival if the invited writers are forbidden from challenging the fast-settling status quo. The fate of the festival is the same as the fate of free expression. The problem is not that four writers spoke up at JLF, the problem is that so few of us did...
19. It is wishful to assume the censors haven’t entered our heads. The space for thought has shrunk, is shrinking right before our eyes. They want not just that Rushdie shouldn’t come, they won’t even allow his image on a screen. They want not just that Kak’s documentary not be screened, they want the entire event cancelled. Each step they gain is harder to reverse...
22. Why read at all? For a sense of empathy and risk. Because only reading will prevent you from mistaking fiction for fact and help you see the internal borders of a made-up story. Why read? Because culture is conversation.

india freedom censorship reading writing JLF wp

To summarize, a true classic:
(1.) Addresses universal and permanent human concerns.
(2.) Is a game-changer.
(3.) Influences other great works.
(4.) Is respected by experts. Tastes change, but over decades and centuries readers and critics tend to refine the canon down to what is truly worthwhile.
(5.) Challenges as it rewards.

books reading wp

What is clear from these incidents is the role of the state: it has been glaringly absent or regrettably passive. The government has abandoned the people. Give up the idea that the state will protect you when some thugs say they are offended because you buy a book they don’t like. If you persist in reading it, they will threaten to turn violent. And instead of preventing them, the state asks you to restrain yourself...
So afraid have we become of the mob, and so attuned do we have to be of others’ sensitivities, that virtually no topic is safe any more...
There is peace in the graveyard, but there is no life. When they chill speech, they kill creativity, leaving an acquiescent state, an aggressive mob, and abandoned writers. Where is the poet who will “name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep”?
Not in India, which they won’t let him visit, where they won’t let him speak, even via a video-link, and where you won’t find the book in which that line appears.

jaipur JLF freedom free_speech offence reading books friends salil_tripathi wp

But a third, more insidious kind of muzzle on the genuinely free expression of ideas in India is what one might call a soft opposition, or self-censorship. This is a section of well-meaning Indian opinion that honestly doesn't understand what individuals have to gain by rocking the boat of a particular religious order, and believes that "religious sentiments should always be respected" and art has no business to question or mock what is held by some to be sacred. As its representative, one might take the bestselling novelist Chetan Bhagat, who said about the controversy, "[Rushdie] is a hero as far as his others writings are concerned, but writing something that attacks somebody's god is not the right thing to do....I'll not make somebody who attacks my god a hero. This is India, you cannot hurt feelings here."
It is true that freedom of speech, as Rushdie observed in a long interview with Barkha Dutt, is the source of all other freedoms. But, as the number of hostile responses to Kunzru's arguments on his website demonstrate, this idea is bound to be interpreted only in the context of the overall climate of freedom in the society in which its value is asserted. India is actually unfree in so many ways, ranging from the casual harassment of women on streets to the persistence of caste hierarchies in social life to the entrenched patriarchy and deference of family life to the persistent tendency to explain all events as manifestations of the divine will. It is a country where young people are brought up to "always respect their elders" and to think twice before speaking their mind -- basically, to be conformist, to value the old or accepted answer over the subversion of the new idea or question.
It isn't especially surprising, then, that the notion of dissent and skepticism of absolute truths enshrined in the idea of freedom of speech has a limited appeal in India. Tolerance may be an idea with a long history here, but not freedom of speech.

reading books jaipur JLF freedom free_speech dissent offence wp

"I was reminded of all this by a friend's tweet from Jaipur: "Audience member has said that 'as a person from literature' she disapproves of adaptations." Not being there myself, I have no idea who this lady from literature was. Perhaps it was Virginia Woolf. Perhaps it was Salman Rushdie in drag, getting his revenge on Rajasthan Police. Perhaps she was a character from a Jane Austen novel come to life. Her identity will most likely forever remain a secret. But if that is how she described herself, not to mention her casual dismissal of a genre of infinite variation and possibility, I'm just glad I wasn't at the session today. Otherwise, just like last year, I'd have been begging Mother Earth to come claim her recalcitrant son."

jaipur JLF books reading showoff humor wp

Intolerance has grown exponentially in India. Words like “blasphemy” are tossed around as though they were part of Indian culture, tradition and discourse: Most recently, cabinet minister Kapil Sibal called Web pages about his party leader Sonia Gandhi that he found insulting, blasphemous, unconsciously giving her the halo of divinity. India’s greatest painter, Maqbool Fida Husain, had to die in exile, because the state refused to protect his right of free expression when vigilantes threatened him and cases continued to be filed against him even after courts had ruled in his favour, dismissing similar cases. Earlier this month in Delhi, another artist, Balbir Krishan, who happens to be gay, and whose art deals with homosexuality, was attacked. The impulse to take offence runs everywhere...
Delivering the keynote address at the India Today Conclave in 2010, Rushdie noted with alarm the “culture of complaint” that had come to dominate the Indian discourse. He chided India for not defending Husain: “He is even being jeered at for being old. This is the proud face of a philistine India. There is nothing wrong in not liking his art. You can easily opt out. A painting is a finite space of art. If it offends, don’t enter that space. The best way to avoid getting offended is to shut a book… The worst thing is that artists are soft targets… We do not have armies protecting us.”
Writers should not need armies to protect them in a free society. That Rushdie might need protection in India reflects poorly—not on him, but on India.

book books culture reading writing offense free_speech freedom salman_rushdie salil_tripathi wp

I know booklovers like that :)
"It turns out that people are more important than books. Sometimes anthropomorphising goes too far. Breaking a book’s spine does not disable the book. Books have no feelings. Who knew?
I’m getting better. Admittedly my bookshelves are pristine and most of the books appear unread. But my girlfriend is trying to encourage me to open the pages wider when I read, to just let go. Don’t fear the white lines, she says. It’s the sign of a book that’s been enjoyed, she adds. Or pillaged, I think."

book culture reading wp