Recently I've noticed a strange thing - people tend to be more willing to add a stranger on Facebook than give them their phone number. How stupid is that? Your phone number says nothing about you. You're not obligated to answer your phone or reply to texts, you can always blacklist the really annoying people, you retain full control of your privacy. Facebook on the other hand, tells the whole story of your life! Your social circle, your photos, your likes, comments, status updates and all other types of activity give away details of your life you don't want strangers to know.
This made me think - who am I friends with on Facebook? It turns out I have lots of people I've never really had a deeper conversation with and still I allow them to observe personal bits of my life. I've decided to remove half of the people from my friend list over the next couple of weeks. If i remove you - sorry, nothing personal, I just don't feel that comfortable sharing everything with you. You can still call me.
This reminds me of another topic - Facebook Chat! You probably heard about non-verbal communication. They say words account for mere 7% of a message, followed by 38% for vocal characteristics (tone, volume, speed, pauses, etc) and whopping 55% for body language (facial expression, movement, posture, etc). Chat cuts out the latter 2 leaving you with only 7% of effective communication. According to Online Schools, 57% of people talk to people more online. For me it seems that soon lots of people will not be able to develop basic social and communication skills!
Facebook is great, but it's a really bad substitute for going out and just having fun with your friends. Now who's up for a beer tomorrow night?
Jan 26, 2011
Jan 20, 2011
Are eBooks the future?
I've always been very skeptical about ebooks. I hate to read long text on a computer screen and I've always liked the physical feeling of a book.
Things have changed as soon as I got an iPad :-) There are a couple of things I underestimated previously:
Online store
This is a big one. Almost all the books I heard about over the past couple of weeks I was able to instantly get them right away, straight into my device. It's always been my problem that whenever I heard a book recommendation I wrote down the title somewhere and then just lost it. Now I can get the book instantly or at least put it in the wish list to review it later and it won't get lost.
Besides that I just love the fact that I can simply look for a book, buy it and start reading instantly while bored on a train.
Universal access
I have Amazon Kindle app on my MacBook, iPad and Desire Z. All synchronize nicely with my Amazon account giving me access to all my books from whichever device I feel like. Even if I don't have my tablet on me I can still use my phone to quickly locate a quote, review notes or even read a chapter. I'm never away from my personal library.
Kindle also synchronizes how far along in the book you are, so you can easily resume reading on a different device.
All books everywhere
With ebooks I basically carry around all my books wherever I go. I can decide what I feel like reading while on a train to work. I don't have to prepare the book before I leave home. When I tell my friends about a book I read I can show them the table of contents and more interesting bits right away. I can get the exact quote whenever I need it.
Highlights
eBooks let you highlight text in the book without destroying the book or messing with physical bookmarks. You can highlight quotes that were most inspiring or significant for you and then get a nice list of all the highlights with instant access to them.
Also, Kindle has this nice social feature that shows popular highlights in the book. It's not a huge improvement, but the first time I saw it it was really inspiring. It never occurred to me that books can go social!
Minor features
There are other minor features that improve the experience. Text search is obviously a pretty big step forward. Recently Kindle introduced newspapers and magazines to their app. Adjusting text size and colors to your needs is also nice.
The biggest drawback
I was telling my friend about this great book on evolutionary psychology I'm reading, how amazingly complex stuff is happening in our brains, how our emotions evolved in a totally different setting and how they're doing in a modern world, which is so much different than where they were created. He got really interested and then the killer question came up: "Sounds interesting. Can I borrow the book?". No, you can't. Not because I'm an asshole, but because it's tied to my Amazon account and there's nothing I can do about it. This is a really huge drawback and it's not that easy to solve. I just hope they come up with a good solution soon. They're experimenting with "e-lending", but so far it's too limited to be useful.
The iPad
I'm fairly satisfied with reading on my iPad, though there are lots of things that can be improved. Active display sucks when reading longer than an hour. Some books are laggy when turning pages. There's no in-app bookstore, you need to do your purchases through a browser (thanks to Apple's sucky AppStore policy). I really can't wait for a decent Android-based tablet, especially interesting is the Notion Ink's Adam tablet with the cool dual-mode display (both active and passive) which seems to look great even in direct sunlight.
Overall I'm very satisfied with ebooks so far and it seems I'm not gonna buy physical books any time soon. Too bad, I kind of liked to expose the more interesting titles on my bookshelf for everyone to see :)
Things have changed as soon as I got an iPad :-) There are a couple of things I underestimated previously:
Online store
This is a big one. Almost all the books I heard about over the past couple of weeks I was able to instantly get them right away, straight into my device. It's always been my problem that whenever I heard a book recommendation I wrote down the title somewhere and then just lost it. Now I can get the book instantly or at least put it in the wish list to review it later and it won't get lost.
Besides that I just love the fact that I can simply look for a book, buy it and start reading instantly while bored on a train.
Universal access
I have Amazon Kindle app on my MacBook, iPad and Desire Z. All synchronize nicely with my Amazon account giving me access to all my books from whichever device I feel like. Even if I don't have my tablet on me I can still use my phone to quickly locate a quote, review notes or even read a chapter. I'm never away from my personal library.
Kindle also synchronizes how far along in the book you are, so you can easily resume reading on a different device.
All books everywhere
With ebooks I basically carry around all my books wherever I go. I can decide what I feel like reading while on a train to work. I don't have to prepare the book before I leave home. When I tell my friends about a book I read I can show them the table of contents and more interesting bits right away. I can get the exact quote whenever I need it.
Highlights
eBooks let you highlight text in the book without destroying the book or messing with physical bookmarks. You can highlight quotes that were most inspiring or significant for you and then get a nice list of all the highlights with instant access to them.
Also, Kindle has this nice social feature that shows popular highlights in the book. It's not a huge improvement, but the first time I saw it it was really inspiring. It never occurred to me that books can go social!
Minor features
There are other minor features that improve the experience. Text search is obviously a pretty big step forward. Recently Kindle introduced newspapers and magazines to their app. Adjusting text size and colors to your needs is also nice.
The biggest drawback
I was telling my friend about this great book on evolutionary psychology I'm reading, how amazingly complex stuff is happening in our brains, how our emotions evolved in a totally different setting and how they're doing in a modern world, which is so much different than where they were created. He got really interested and then the killer question came up: "Sounds interesting. Can I borrow the book?". No, you can't. Not because I'm an asshole, but because it's tied to my Amazon account and there's nothing I can do about it. This is a really huge drawback and it's not that easy to solve. I just hope they come up with a good solution soon. They're experimenting with "e-lending", but so far it's too limited to be useful.
The iPad
I'm fairly satisfied with reading on my iPad, though there are lots of things that can be improved. Active display sucks when reading longer than an hour. Some books are laggy when turning pages. There's no in-app bookstore, you need to do your purchases through a browser (thanks to Apple's sucky AppStore policy). I really can't wait for a decent Android-based tablet, especially interesting is the Notion Ink's Adam tablet with the cool dual-mode display (both active and passive) which seems to look great even in direct sunlight.
Overall I'm very satisfied with ebooks so far and it seems I'm not gonna buy physical books any time soon. Too bad, I kind of liked to expose the more interesting titles on my bookshelf for everyone to see :)
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