(www.gadgetreview.com)
I actually read on my phone and have since ~2005 and a Palm device. I don’t use e ink or paper much simply because my phone fits in every pocket and is always there. I read constantly at every moment I get a chance to. No other form factor works for that. Even in a suit it fits well in the jacket pocket.
I find that reading on an ereader is many times easier for me, primarily because I can make the text gigantic and I don't lose track of my place on the page nearly as often. I'm not dyslexic (I've been tested), but I do think that there's some issue with my brain where if the text is small I really can't follow it. On all my computers the text is gigantic and even then I will click and highlight text as I'm reading so don't lose place. I would love to be paid to read but I don't think I'd love to be paid to read physical books.
I remember my grandmother was wholly unconvinced that my Kindle was a different thing than an iPad or a Game Boy, and that it was not "real" reading, for whatever reason.
First was when I go the Kindle I realized I could make the text as big as I wanted so I would do that, as stated before.
Another time is when I wanted an external monitor and I bought a big TV because it was much cheaper. Because the TV was bigger the text was also bigger, and I realized how much easier it was for me to work.
I think I used to feel like there was a "coolness" factor to keeping the text small. I don't know why I thought that, but I think what's much cooler than having lots of small text is actually being able to read and understand the text on the screen.
Now I have no desire to impress anyone, and I keep my text in the browser at like 200%.
This alone has caused my reading to skyrocket. I swear i do 1-2 books a week this way
I know this works because I've seen it with some PDF readers on desktop in the past, when I lucked into a combination of lightweight document and right "fit page to display" scaling. And, of course, this works natively in browsers with PgUp/PgDown, but only on the few remaining websites that haven't been thoroughly shittified (no "en-" there on purpose) with JavaScript and excessive styling.
https://www.read.gov.sg/join-the-readsg-challenge
It seems like turning points into money is just a happens to exist sort of mechanic. Enough to write a headline that they are technically "paying you". The real mechanics are much more typical gamification. Like earning xp, streaks, leaderboards, limited edition goodies at events, prize draws, collective goals.
The strict money payout is S$0.02 per 15 minutes at most once a day. Obviously if you were doing this it would be more for the rest of the dopamine then hoping to buy a candy bar after like 50 days.
Anyway I was banned from AR in the 5th grade because I learned you could sort the book list by points awarded, so I wrote down the list of most valuable books and checked them out from the library. I convinced a 2 friends to help, one would take the test and write down the questions and then someone else would read the book to get the answers and share them. We ended up racking up like way more points than anyone else and the teachers called out and made us explain.
Reading is fundamental.
EDIT: Other skills and habits that you can then build on reading: critical thinking, reasoning, detection and handling own biases, numeracy, financial literacy, and more. All these dimensions are manipulated via phones and the apps on them, so you need a firewall.
Also: writing. Cursive writing.
Is there anything useful about cursive writing? Other than it being positively correlated with many good things because education is the common topic?
note that at least "Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom" is critized - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
Maybe it doesn't deserve to be on the bottom, dead, but something this basic certainly doesn't deserve to be showered in upvotes
I prefer to draw the distinction at creating vs doing vs consuming, and focus on balancing the time spent consuming (which is a natural part of enjoying life, but usually people consume way too much) unless it's in the service of one of the other two categories (e.g. consuming articles to learn/inspire the creation of something better or plan a trip to do something, etc.)
Words matter, don’t take your word choice from ad factories instagram which popularised this term.
Reading (I won’t say consuming) a good book can stay with you forever. People from 2000 years ago can speak to you in their own voice from behind the grave. And you have the audacity to call it content and compare it to cat videos and call it ‘overhyped’?
On days when I am too lazy to be productive or be “creating” something, I sometimes take out my old Harry Potter collection and read for two straight hours. I don’t really feel that’s meaningfully different from watching online videos for two straight hours. It is indeed just consumption. And Harry Potter series is in fact one of the better ones among contemporary literature.
Those are the same language tools you need to use to create and evaluate your own writing. You're using a mental tool at a high level, even if it's not Ulysses (or Homer's Odyssey). This is fundamentally different from passively viewing cat videos, or thirst traps, which may well not involve language at all.
A 2 year old can be entertained by short form video, but can not even sound out a single word of a book.
Thailand at least gives you a 1 hour pass.
Not that anyone asked but my ranking of public libraries in Asia
1/ Taiwan
2/ HK
3/ Thailand
4/ Laos (private libraries are cute, but hot…)
4/ Vietnam (Bring your passport!)
5/ Singapore
I haven’t been to a library in Japan or S Korea. I tried working from a community center in Japan but I couldn’t figure how it works.
It's very much a classist country where you position in society is determined by your immigration status. Everything there is tiered based on whether you are a "citizen" (first class), permanent resident (second class), and you are in a permanent out group if you are not in the above two classes. And if you are a foreigner, whether you are a white "expat" or a Dubai -style indenture servant migrant worker. Valley tech bros are obsessed with that country but all that glitters is not gold.
If you were running one of the most land- and resource-scarce countries in the world, you'd be this 'classist' too. For the record, most visa types get a SingPass; if one doesn't, then said visa is explicitly for short-term visit, and I believe the hoops to jump through for such fleeting visitors are acceptable, whilst making it extraordinarily easy for citizens and permanent residents to get stuff done. The Singapore civil service is completely out of everyone else's league. Most countries (especially those with an economic migrant problem—see Western Europe) could stand to learn from it, in my view.
It famously doesn't allow refugees in either. There are countries with wider tracts of land (ahem, up north and down south) that can take them in. Singapore does its fair share by providing emergency services, disaster relief, and financial reprieve to areas of conflict and disaster, from Palestine, Sudan, and Ukraine, to Myanmar.
There's a FAQ specifically addressing this [1]:
> If you do not have Singpass, you may still approach our pool or gym staff to buy single-entry passes.
[1] https://ask.gov.sg/activesg/questions/clztixkjr00agracq0ys53...
Where I live, electricity price is so ridiculous, I leave my PC off for 3 to 5 hours a day.
You get bored after 5 minutes. This is the best time to open your book and read.
----
Same idea applies for the phone. Just leave it off.
We raised a child with the principle that "No News is Good News". She turned out great! And she lives that way still. That constant level of screen stimulation is strictly not necessary for family happiness, and I think you all who think so have not really internalized what it means for a child to learn responsibility.
See also free-range kids, and the social insanity that causes kids/parents to get arrested for eg playing in a park alone. There's a bunch of mental illness out there, and the screens are big reason why.
Oh right. My beautiful daughter reads books constantly. Weird that, huh.
Phone is not the only communication you need for your kids or spouse.
Instant messaging and calling is extremely valuable. Algorithmic social media is extremely noxious. Unfortunately, they both live on the same device.
They, and I, are disagreeing with you. Instant messaging and calling are nice-to-have at best, and a huge burden at worst. They teach an extreme codependency that has little benefit, and causes a lot of anxiety.
They're convenient when somebody needs to go to the hospital, needs to get picked up, you can't find somebody in a museum, you're at the store and somebody at home might need something.
You are rarely using it for this. You're mostly wittering on and on about nonsense and not giving each other any room. When others go silent or don't answer quickly enough you get nervous about what they think about you, or if they are in danger. When others are interrogating you about things that make you uncomfortable, you feel like you have to answer now or you're making a statement with your silence.
Most of the useful stuff could be moved to a house phone (which doesn't exist anymore) and a payphone (which doesn't exist anymore.) For the people farther away, writing a letter was better. You don't need to be on the back of somebody 1000 miles away. There are too many of them, and companies and governments slip in. It's not healthy and it's not safe.
Nowadays I "turn off" all the distractions that I can before bed to get a few pages in. Reading during the day is still pretty challenging if the book has dull bits (I recently finished the 3 body problem series. At it's peak, its some of the best sci-fi I've ever read. But some parts of the books were such a slog to get through. During those sections I often found myself reaching for my phone, just out of habit)
is there like a duolingo for books
like a bookmark that annoys you if you havent moved it in too long
If the "get paid to walk" programmes [1][2] were an inspiration for this, it's mostly retirees and students that will do and try to game this [3].
[1] https://www.healthhub.sg/programmes/healthyliving
[2] (RIP) https://www.hpb.gov.sg/healthy-living/our-lumihealth-journey...
[3] https://sgunfitrunners.blogspot.com/2016/04/5-despicable-way...
I'm in the Bay Area. It's Sunday morning and I'm working becasue I still need to pay for food, rent, and enormous medical bills and don't want to get fired, and I got yelled at by my director this morning on Slack because I'm not delivering fast enough despite squashing 12 months' worth of work into 4.
I don't have time for books. Finding time for even exercise is hard.
EDIT: while more common in the US, if you are actually regularly working weekends, look for a better job. In my part of FAANG I rarely have to work weekends, although the occasional crunch time can happen.
At each stage, you'd do some activity on the diorama to determine what sort of book you had to read next -- i.e. a little spinner, or a launcher that would launch your paper dude into a bunch of cups each with a different topic written on the side. You then had to find a book at the library on the topic, and the librarian would gauge whether it was appropriately "difficult" for your reading level, or whether you were trying to read something easy just to progress faster.
Each time you finished a book, they'd ask you a few questions to ensure you read it, and then you could progress to the next diorama. If you completed the circuit, you got a star on the board and could restart from the beginning. Some kids would do 10 or more circuits in a single summer.
I had a blast with it. I lived pretty far away so couldn't participate as much as I would have liked, but kids in walking distance would sometimes read a book every day or two just to keep going. All those librarians are gone and the library has moved on to a different location, and I never did find out who was responsible for building all those dioramas every summer.
RMS makes the same mistake in thinking that disallowing proprietary software in repos is better than giving the tools to avoid it and education about what is compromised in the process.
A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy
― John Milton, AreopagiticaRegular daily intellectual concentration is much the same be it game, book or reddit. And it makes you crazy. You withdraw from reality.