Posts tagged Reading

How We Read our Newspapers

fotojournalismus:

A man reads a newspaper inside a dilapidated baby’s crib along a street in downtown Manila, Philippines on April 10, 2013.

[Credit : Aaron Favila/AP]

FJP: I personally spread it out over the kitchen table but this works. — Michael

100 Great Nonfiction Books

One of my New Year’s resolutions isn’t necessarily to read more, but to read more books. Happily, the Electronic Typewriter’s put together a list to help get me started with categories ranging from science to memoir to politics to art and beyond.

Bookmarked. — Michael

A Library Grows in Manila

Via the BBC:

If you put all the books you own on the street outside your house, you might expect them to disappear in a trice. But one man in Manila tried it - and found that his collection grew.

Hernando Guanlao is a sprightly man in his early 60s, with one abiding passion - books.

They’re his pride and joy, which is just as well because, whether he likes it or not, they seem to be taking over his house.

Guanlao, known by his nickname Nanie, has set up an informal library outside his home in central Manila, to encourage his local community to share his joy of reading.

The idea is simple. Readers can take as many books as they want, for as long as they want - even permanently. As Guanlao says: “The only rule is that there are no rules.”

It’s a policy you might assume would end very quickly - with Guanlao having no books at all.

But in fact, in the 12 years he’s been running his library - or, in his words, his book club - he’s found that his collection has grown rather than diminished, as more and more people donate to the cause.

“It seems to me that the books are speaking to me. That’s why it multiplies like that,” he says with a smile. “The books are telling me they want to be read… they want to be passed around.”

BBC, The man who turned his home into a public library.

Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum writes about the ethics of social news apps.

In particular, he notes that while there’s much we may want to share, most people don’t understand the extent of what we share. For example, one partner in a relationship reading an article about breaking up that then appears in his or her Facebook timeline.

Facebook calls this frictionless sharing.

Chittum believes that publishers need to be more transparent about what their Facebook apps are going to do and share. Using the highly successful Washington Post app as an example, he writes:

The tagline [to the app] is “share what you read with your friends!”, which sounds innocent and useful enough. I like to share links to stories I think other people should read. Up high it says, “Okay, Read Article,” and when you push that button, it installs the app. There’s nothing telling you directly that you’re installing an app. A box in the bottom corner says “This app may post on your behalf, including articles you read, people you liked and more,” but how many people actually read that?…

…Not only does this stuff show up in my news feed several times a day (Yahoo’s app is also a frequent offender), but you can also go in there and click on your friends who have the app to see what they’ve read. The history goes back months. Jeff Bercovici reported back in the fall that even if you set the Post’s Social Reader to not let anyone see what you’ve read, friends can still go in and see what you’ve read. That’s egregious.

The solution, of course, comes back to the reader. First, monitor your app settings. Although, the Bercovici article gives pause as to whether that would even work. Second, contact publications about their apps and the concerns you have with them.

Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. The Ethics of Social News Apps.

Underground New York Public Library is an awesome new Tumblr featuring photos of people reading while they wait for the subway. The arresting photos speak for themselves.

Long train commutes make New York one of the most literary cities in the U.S. And because New York as one of the fashion capitals of the world,  you have all the ingredients you need for one very stylish documentary project.

H/T: In Other News

Put a business model at the bottom of each column, and we might really have something!