Some other interesting books I'd like to read
Nothing like finding one book you'd like to read to suddenly get a whole bunch more popping up in front of your consciousness. All of these are reflections of the stuff I'm obsessed with these days, the conversations I'm having inside my own head.
Starting with the one from the last post:
- The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove
- The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr
- Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres
- Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web by Gene Smith
- The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
And yes, I find it odd and somewhat disturbing that so many of the books I want to read are in the business section. Of course, if there's a book that you feel I should be reading, please drop a comment and let me know!
Also, related to the last post on The Future of Reputation, Michael Nielson pointed me to an article by Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net. Goldhaber also has a blog covering much the same territory.
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2 comments:
I would highly recommend most of Freakonomics but I am less bullish on The Long Tail. If you are going to read Freakonomics you should also read The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford as it is a better read though the subject matter is a little more economics. Harford also has a blog which is quite good.
The Long Tail could be skimmed and you wouldn't miss the main points (which I mostly agree with) but many of the chapters felt repetitive even though the subject matter was often different.
Also, there's nothing wrong with reading a lot of business/popular economics. There's more overlap between many sciences and econ than most people would think -- says the science librarian whose mother was right when she said he should have been an economist...
Thanks for the tips, Ian. I suspected that The Long Tail might be a bit on the padded side, a sin a lot of business books are guilty of. Perhaps I just borrow it from the library and read it that way...
I've heard good things about the Harford book, so thanks for confirming that it's worth reading.
And yes, I guess some of those business books are actually grappling with the issues libraries face as organizations in a fluid environment.
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