The new reading stack
macwright.com
The new reading stack
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Re: The new reading stack
#2This is probably different for different cities & cultures but where I live there are a lot of small book shops. Both for second hand and newly printed.
People also tend to leave a lot of books on the street to take.
I recently found Dark City, Silence of the Lambs and The Dean(?) in his domain on the street. All in good condition and I enjoyed eating them.
I really don't understand why everything needs to be tracked.
Reading for me is a journey for its sake, the destination is not interesting.
Re: The new reading stack
#3This is probably different for different cities & cultures but where I live there are a lot of small book shops. Both for second hand and newly printed. People also tend to leave a lot of books on the street to take. I recently found Dark City, Silence of the Lambs and The Dean(?) in his domain on the street. All in good condition and I enjoyed eating them. I really don't understand why everything needs to be tracked…
But how exactly did you eat them?
Re: The new reading stack
#4I find https://readwise.io is a valuable tool for retaining ideas from what I read. That tool helps to gather book quotes from ebooks and physical books and then uses spaced repetition to remind you of quotes over time.
Personally I have never really used a tracking tool like Italic Type because I didn't feel compelled to enter all of the metadata for what felt like an unknown resulting value. But I do juggle 3-4 books at a time usually mixed between fiction and nonfiction.
Re: The new reading stack
#5I find https://readwise.io is a valuable tool for retaining ideas from what I read. That tool helps to gather book quotes from ebooks and physical books and then uses spaced repetition to remind you of quotes over time. Personally I have never really used a tracking tool like Italic Type because I didn't feel compelled to enter all of the metadata for what felt like an unknown resulting value. But I do juggle 3-4 boo…
Oh, that looks quite interesting. I’m going to have to check it out.
Re: The new reading stack
#6Specifically in the mostly-but-not-exclusively tech world, Leanpub (Leanpub.com) is very close to a bandcamp for books. Authors get most of the sales revenue, and are free to publish what they want including in-progress works. I’ve got a few books there, the readership is smaller than with my mainstream-published titles but as this article shows, that’s because readers don’t yet know about these places.
Re: The new reading stack
#7> the options we have to buy books and track our reading are terrible
I fundamentally disagree with the idea that reading must be tracked, outside maybe some textbooks/papers if you're going through a study plan.
Re: The new reading stack
#8> the options we have to buy books and track our reading are terrible I fundamentally disagree with the idea that reading must be tracked, outside maybe some textbooks/papers if you're going through a study plan.
Don’t miss the word “option”, which you replaced with “need” so you could come down hard on it. Many of us want to track it. (No more discussion on this point is needed imo)
If you want to know why people like to track it, just ask.
Re: The new reading stack
#9This is probably different for different cities & cultures but where I live there are a lot of small book shops. Both for second hand and newly printed. People also tend to leave a lot of books on the street to take. I recently found Dark City, Silence of the Lambs and The Dean(?) in his domain on the street. All in good condition and I enjoyed eating them. I really don't understand why everything needs to be tracked…
But how exactly did you eat them?
Boiled in milk with a side of raw jellybeans ;-)
Re: The new reading stack
#10Specifically in the mostly-but-not-exclusively tech world, Leanpub (Leanpub.com) is very close to a bandcamp for books. Authors get most of the sales revenue, and are free to publish what they want including in-progress works. I’ve got a few books there, the readership is smaller than with my mainstream-published titles but as this article shows, that’s because readers don’t yet know about these places.
Bandcamp is 15%, Leanpub is 20%, right? (For sales alone, leanpub also seems to be a lot about the publication process, i.e. how to get the book made, not just selling a finished PDF/epub)
Another interesting shop I've discovered for me within the last year is itch.io. It's mostly for games, but I found out that this includes more and more tabletop role-playing games as e-books. The site is responsive, the individual "store fronts" often have unique customizations, and payment/downloads works reliably. And the RPG PDF market is similarly dominated by a single entity (drivethrurpg), so getting away from that feels good, too.
They also feature an interesting revenue sharing option, where you're deducated the payment processor fees (stripe,paypal) directly, but after that the amount you pay to itch.io is totally customizable (and even their default is just 10%).
There's also a culture of "pay what you want" publications and people paying more than what's asked for. This is partly due to publications often being smaller and more frequent, instead of big honking monographs. As opposed to the programming/entrepreneur market, where e-books often seems ridiculously overpriced for what you get ("here's slightly value-added rephrasing of the react tutorial, that's $49, please").