We have a club for those who’d like to review or mention books they’ve read and want to recommend to others. If you’d like to share a book but are reluctant to use GitHub, please send me your text and I’ll post it for you.
In case people would like to browse this list…
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Hi Pat,
I have to make a correction to your statement here. The book club repository has been created by me to facilitate the idea of creating a book club. But since then no one has picked up on the idea, so technically we do not have a book club. Just the idea.
If you and others want to go forward with this idea, you should organize accordingly. Here is the original thread where the idea came up: Idea - Start an online book reading club on the subject of Humane Technology
Edit: If going forward with the idea, a ‘Books’ section to the community website might be best for presentation. Individual reviews are then created as Markdown documents on the forum and moved to the repository, where they are automatically converted to html (using e.g. the Jekyll or Hugo static stie generator).
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An interesting challenge would be to read every time you want to be on your phone (with practical precaution) and after a month see how many books or pages you have been able to read.
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@sidnya, that is a nice thought. Thank you for it and all your contributions to the forum.
Right now, I’m reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which is a hardback book of several hundred pages, not counting the notes. It’s big and cuddly, like a teddybear 
I wonder if we could come up with badges or something like that to reward people for reading. Maybe each time a member finishes a book and reports on it, he or she would get a badge? Might be fun to try to design a badge.
@sidnya - clever idea!
Currently (re)reading Walden. The third chapter (“Reading”) is, like, psychedelically good. 
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Humane Tech & Media:
- The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
- Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts
The Future of Work:
- Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux
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In the two days that I just chilled out on my phone use I read Weapons of Math Destruction. Now I got half way through Digital Fortess by Dan Brown(for fun) in two days by replacing my phone time with reading time. Its pretty cool to see how productive you can be when you arent on Youtube :-p
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I like this! We can make some different bages for the number of books. Like
1 book - orange
5 books - purple
10 books - green
Or something like that. We can design it together!
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@sidnya, if you send me a personal message with your email address, I can add you to a Canva design team.
Hi Pat,
I have authored a book called “The Digital Pied Piper Effect” (October 2018) about gadget addiction and mitigation, especially aimed at parents-to-be, parents, teachers and mentors. It is being reviewed by researchers in the field, academics, doctors and parents. Will anyone be willing to review it?
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Thanks for telling us about your book. I would be happy to review it, but let’s see if anyone else responds. A parent or teacher would probably be better than I.
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Hi Pat,
Some of these are a bit dated now, but I found them very enlightening when I first read them. All on the behavioural implications of tech: Shirley Turkle’s “Alone Together” (2013), Matthew D. Lieberman’s “Social” (2015), and Banks, Hirschman & Siegel’s “Wired to Connect” (2016).
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Hi, seems like the github hasn’t really been updated - is there another area you’re using to share and talk about these books? If so I’d be interested in joining. In particular I see a couple threads talking about Surveillance Capitalism which is a great book to start a conversation about if there ever was one. Let me know!
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@joshs, see my earlier post above. As community facilitator I create a project if there is interest from the community, but if then there is no traction the project is either on hold (our mindfulness principle) or will be cancelled + removed later on (to clean things up).
Hi Pat @patm and all
I have a collection of books on the subject here I’ve personally read and consider useful, hope it will be useful!
Additionally, I’d love to propose my own book for reading, if this is of an interest for community members (we can look at how to arrange this). It’s called Homo Distractus: fight for your choices and identity in the digital age. Pm me if interested!
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Hi @aschrijver, I have an idea. Please leave this thread open even if not many posts are made and acting like a book club community . This way we will have a list of books* to pick whenever we force ourselves to make the time to read one - list of books or book titles shared by highly ethical people because it inspired them!
Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn't Want to Be Free book is currently $0 in his store https://craphound.com/shop/ for ebooks format. I recommend it, it’s most recent of his I’ve read. Need to catch up with his more recent books.
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Thanks for all your comments, everyone. Your response shows that reading and books are still important in our lives.
And yes to those who want to have their books reviewed: I do want to do that. Will discuss with the moderators and admins the best way to set this up.
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I would love to review your book. This is an area that is both important and urgent. I’m an elementary teacher with a long prior career in marketing.
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