Book Log: How I Find Books And Buy (Some of) Them

I purchase a lot of books (have over 100 on my Kindle in just over 2 years) and a lot more printed books both in India and US. I keep wondering why I buy these books and read them. I don’t have a good answer. So I hit upon a plan. I am going to write the title of the book and note down where I found the recommendation. I will start with the latest first and keep adding more.

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Tonianne DeMaria Barry

Saw it in the list of books for Startups by John Sechrest. It was the only in that list that I do not have. So just to complete the collection 🙂 But really, the ‘people need to be effective’ got me.
Machines need to be productive. People need to be effective. Productivity books focus on doing more, Jim and Tonianne want you to focus on doing better. Personal Kanban is about choosing the right work at the
Mar 16, 2012

Problogger Book 3rd Edition

Some times I buy a book, just to support an author, especially the ones who share a lot of  knowledge, unconditionally. This is one of those instances. It is not the only reason for buying this book. It is a reason for buying it without reading any reviews or asking your friends what they think about it, etc.

I blog a bit (not for money, yet) mostly to think aloud. But in the past couple of months, I am noticing that even in India blogging is becoming a business. Pretty remunerative one if you are good at it. Blogging may be one of the ways for students to make money (if they can get good at it). Since I work with students a lot and trying to help them find ways to make money without spoiling their academic performance, I thought this may be a good guide.

Tempo – Mar 12, 2012

I just bought: ‘Tempo: timing, tactics and strategy in narrative-driven decision-making’ by Venkatesh Rao
Tempo is a modern treatment of decision-making that weaves together concepts and principles from the mathematical decision sciences, cognitive psychology, philosophy and theories of narrative and metaphor. Drawing on examples from familiar domains such as the kitchen and the office, the author, Venkatesh Rao, illustrates the subtleties underlying everyday behavior.
I went to Twitter client and it recommended that I follow Daniel Lemire @lemire. I normally click on the twitter page to read the profile and also some of the recent tweets. Here is what I found in his profile.

Computer Scientist and Open Scholar: Databases, Data Warehousing, OLAP, Information Retrieval, Web, Time Series, Collaborative Filtering, e-Learning.

Montreal, Canada · http://lemire.me/en/

I started reading his tweets and in one of them refers to Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law http://bit.ly/x1f8rX. This got me interested and started reading about the law. In that post, he mentions Tempo. I went to Amazon, checked out the book and found it interesting. So I got myself a Kindle version. Here is an interesting pattern of purchases. If some one recommends a book and it looks good, I check whether there is a Kindle version available. If it is in most cases, I buy it instantly. If a Kindle version is not available, I put it my wish list to be purchased when I travel to US.

Two books from Mohr Davidow – Mar 11, 2012.

I just bought two books – Marketing High Technology and Over Connected. How did I find them? The source is Steve Blank. Here is the context:

In my 25 years as a technology entrepreneur I was lucky to have three extraordinary mentors, each brilliant in his own field: Ben Wegbreit who taught me how to think, Gordon Bell who taught me what to think about, and Allen Michels who showed me how to turn thinking into direct and immediate action.
I was also extremely fortunate to be working in Silicon Valley when three of its most influential marketing practitioners and strategists were active. As a VP of Marketing I was strongly influenced by the customer-centric books of Bill Davidow, former VP of Marketing of Intel and founder of Mohr, Davidow Ventures and consider myself fortunate to have had him on my board at MIPS Computers.
Regis McKenna was already a PR and marketing legend with his own firm when I started my career, but his thinking and practice still resonates in my work. Finally, I still remember the hair rising on the back of my neck when I first read Geoff Moore and the notion of a “chasm.” It was the first time I realized that there were repeatable patterns of business behavior that could explain the heretofore unexplainable.

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