Rommel, You Magnificent Bastard. I Read Your Book!

If you are reading on a smartphone, use landscape / hold phone sideways. 

In the movie Patton, my favorite scene is when U.S. General George S. Patton has just spent weeks studying the writing of his German adversary Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and is crushing him in an epic tank battle in Tunisia. Patton, sensing victory as he peers onto the battlefield from his command post, growls, "Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book! 

Today, I feel myself wanting to send an email to Congressman Adam Schiff:  "Adam you magnificent bastard, I LISTENED to your new book!

If you polled one thousand people and asked them: paper books, eBooks, audio books - I am sure that you will get a nice spread. This is something that I guess you can Google and find out quickly. 

I am old enough to remember when "eBooks" first made their debut. There is a pretty good article about paper books vs. eBooks here. Some people really love holding a dead tree in their hands, others love using a Kindle. 

For me, I am now hooked on Audible. When I listen to a book - especially a book read by the author - I feel like I am in a lecture. I feel like the author is right there, in the room with me. Their voice inflections, their tone, their words seem to come alive to me.  

Another benefit of Audible is that once you buy the book via technology - you can get updates, edits, even new chapters - over the air. Recently, a book that I bought via Audible gave me an alert - that a NEW chapter was added to the book, due to recent world events. It's hard to do that via the dead tree version. 

I have watched audio podcasts become video podcasts. I have watched paper books become eBooks. I truly think that the future of books - even the future of the term "reading" is making a pivot. There is now a term called Bookiness. That's the term that Glenn Fleishman, a technology writer and longtime bookmaker, uses to describe the situation. It's how you feel when you are USING a book. You FEEL it. Ask yourself: do you READ a book, or USE a book? Ah so. 

Two thousand years after the codex and 500 after the Guttenberg press, the paper (dead tree) book persists. Why?

OK, joke time. Mother and Daughter are cooking a roast. The daughter asks: "Mom, I see that you always cut off the ends of the roast before you put the roast in the pan. Why?" Mom says: "You know, I don't know why. That is how MY mother always did it." So, they call Grandma on the phone. "Hey Mom, quick question: why did you always cut the ends of the roast before putting the roast in the pan, before putting the pan in the oven?" Grandma says: "Well, I never had a pan big enough, so I would cut off the ends, so it would fit in the pan."

Sometimes things don't change, because we don't ask why. 

Today's blog was ALMOST about paper business cards. Why are paper business cards still a thing? I mean, everyone has LinkedIn, everyone has a smart phone. Heck, why do we need to SCAN a paper business card with our smartphone, INTO our CRM or other tool?  And yet, we still have little mini dead tree billboards that we hand out, just so that someone can scan them, or find us on LinkedIn, and throw the little bits of dead trees into the trash. Or, they throw them into the trash, without scanning them... the horror!

On 11/8, VIP members of NYDLA.org shall be attending the NYC book signing for Adam's new book. He will be signing the dead tree version of his AMAZING new book, probably several hundred times that evening. And, I am confident that the dead tree version of Adam's new book will be a best seller, many times over.  

Maybe Adam will sign my smartphone... since that is where I keep my Audible library.