Pithy Title Here

Was speaking to my lovely wife today. As you likely know, we each love our Kindles. Sarah has been a bit flummoxed as to why Kindle seems to be the holdout when it comes to library books being available on the #1 e-reader device. After all, the Nook handles formats that most public libraries have adopted. The answer, to be sure, is why should Amazon encourage you to get loaner books for free when it's making enough money off e-book sales to offset the loss it takes on Kindles themselves (though, I read that the margin on Kindles may be improving)? From a business standpoint, that doesn't make much sense. Especially when market share is in your favor without offering support for the file formats libraries prefer. That said, I have a solution that I hope people smarter than me are already considering. It would look like this: Amazon and your local public library enter a contract where Amazon delivers content, likely segments of books at a time, for free to library members. The li...

Now that I've done mt top 10 albums, some other year-end retrospectives on the way. The last one will be an indulgent bit of self-reflection. This, however, isn't the last one. This is the year in pop culture! So... let's get to it! Favorite movie There are still plenty of Oscar-worthy films to see but, my movie-going 2010 is just about over. And my pick is for Inception . It may not win the big awards, though it should win some, but here was a movie that I didn't need to wear silly 3-D glasses to enjoy. A great concept, well-executed, buy a fantastic cast. Had no idea where it was going to end up. It felt fresh and didn't make me think as hard as Mission Impossible did all those years ago despite a much more complicated concept. Disturbing trend of the year Glee glorification. Seriously, this needs to stop. Rarely did anyone ever think a cover of an original song was superior to the original. Now, every week, someone in my Twitter feed has to tell me that some son...

We watched Food Inc. the other night. I read The Omnivore's Dilemma several months back (Sarah is starting it soon) and last night I started In Defense of Food . All of this is reinforcing some things that I had suspected, showing me some new ways to look at things and... generally making me immune to hearing about what we should be eating. Among the many points that are at very least worthy of discussion by everyone: Why do we want to ingest food that wasn't raised like what it's supposed to be? For instance, cows shouldn't be eating corn. In fact, corn makes cows sick. Yet, for reasons of economics (corn makes a bigger cow faster so you can sell more meat at lower prices), that's the way it works. Chances are you wouldn't want to eat mutated fish or some sort of anything that has been brought up in a way that wouldn't occur in nature. Yet, that's what we do for the most part. I already hear the "that's why I'm a vegetarian!" cries. ...

They say don't judge a book by its cover. Nor should I probably judge a new tech toy after one day. But, when your one day includes time at home and 8 hours of plane rides, you could argue you've done all the needed testing on a portable device of any type. So... new Kindle verdict: OUT-FLIPPING-STANDING. Firstly, can I get every electronic device I have to hold a charge like this? Probably not, bc unlike every other device I have, the Kindle isn't backlit . It uses "electronic paper," which ( thank you Wikipedia : "Unlike a conventional flat panel display, which uses a backlight to illuminate its pixels, electronic paper reflects light like ordinary paper and is capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing electricity, while allowing the image to be changed later." This basically means it really reads like a book. As in it gets dark and you need to shine a light on it. But the non-glare screen makes that a non-issue. The interfac...

I have come to love the works of Malcolm Gladwell . His first book, The Tipping Point , was of special interest to me given my interest in PR. The theory (part of the larger concept of the "diffusion" of ideas) is that there comes a moment where everything that ever "catches on" - a new product or a disease - comes to a moment where it spreads like an epidemic. I always think of the iPod . One day on the NY subway in 2002, I saw someone with one. A year later EVERYONE had one. His second book, Blink , basically examines how our snap judgments are usually right on. These are gross oversimplifications of both books, but Gladwell takes these topics and, in an extremely accessible manner, breaks them down. I finish his books in about two days. His new one, though, is the one I want to talk about. The book is called Outliers: The Story of Success . It is currently the #6 seller on Amazon. Here's the thing... we tend to think of successful people a certain wa...

I am in the midst of a fascinating book by Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us) and I highly recommend it for the non-fiction fan on your gift list. Basically, this isn't a book on how to drive better. It is an analysis of the way we drive. For instance, have you ever been frustrated on the freeway to be clipping along at 60, slam on your brakes and sit there stopped for 2 mins , slowly get back up to 60 only to have it happen again... but see no reason for this? No accident or anything? Vanderbilt, using research and sources countrywide, tells you why this happens. Some of the interesting things that this book has already pointed out: Doesn't matter where you are in the world, whether you drive to work in LA or walk to work in an African village... your total commute time is likely around 1.1 hours round trip. Just about half an hour each way. In fact, if you look at how cities have grown, they've generally grown as far out...