Craig talks about reading, writing, books, publishing, and Amazon:
Kindle and non-Kindle book sales account for less than two percent of Amazon’s market cap. The Kindle could disappear tomorrow, and Amazon would not be materially affected. Even from a branding perspective, I don’t think AMAZON = BOOKS anymore, certainly not to younger consumers. AMAZON = PRIME. PRIME = A 3D PRINTER on a one-day time-delay that deposits anything you can imagine on your doorstep.
There’s also this about the double-edged sword of working at scale:
Does affecting one hundred lives turn you on? A thousand? A million? A billion? Why? What does it mean to have a positive impact on a life? How intimate does that connection need to be? Understanding your scale — the scale that moves you — is critical to understanding with whom and how you should work, how you should live.
The combination of taking more time (as longer form writing encourages) and publishing on a domain associated with your name, your identity, enables & incentivizes more thoughtful writing. More thoughtful writing elevates the reader to a more thoughtful state of mind.
Your attentive kindness doesn’t get picked up by any analytical tool I’ve got other than my heart and my memory—however short lived.
The out-of-copyright books of Olaf Stapledon are available to download from the University of Adelaide. Be sure to grab Starmaker and First And Last Men.
This looks like a really handy service from Readability: gather together a number of related articles from ‘round the web and then you can export them to a reading device of your choice. It’s like Huffduffer for text.
A superb skewering of Kindle and just about any other attempt to make book distribution digital that involves ludicrously restrictive terms of service (or worse, DRM).
I want to love my Kindle, I really do.