One of my first posts on this blog back in November 2008 was my review of the first Amazon Kindle I had been using! I LOVED it and that has only continued as I have bought newer versions of the Kindle. I read fast and I always run out of books when I am traveling, the Kindle changes that! Plus the price of those books is usually cheaper. I love having the entire world’s library at my finger tips.

The new Kindle Voyage is awesome and I love the backlight. I thought I wouldn’t use it much but I love being able to read at night without bothering my wife, and on airplanes with a little less eye strain. The browser for buying new books and navigating my library is a huge improvement. And, battery life is good. I highly recommended the Kindle Voyage if you read a lot!

The only thing I kept in storage while I traveled was my books. But I finally decided it was time to say goodbye :(. I donated them all to a Denver goodwill, hopefully someone else enjoys them and gives them a new home.

Goodbye 658 books!

I love my kindle, I can carry every book in the world with me it feels like :)

2012 was a fantastic year for reading! With all my travels I had a ton of time to read and set a new record! I read 146 books this year and you can read all the mini reviews here.

If you only read 3 books this year I recommend the following:
*All of these are incredibly well written and fascinating reads. Thanks to the Daily Show for helping me to find them!

1. The Quants – A must read for anyone who likes the modern financial system and doesn’t want to see it wrecked (esp after some of the crazy days we have had since 2008)… An investigative look into high speed stock/bond/etc trading, trading AI, and a lot more. This book and others on the same subject are a big reason I don’t trust the stock market any longer.

2. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Cornelius is one of the most amazing people I’ve stumbled upon and a true American story of rags to riches. Just an amazing guy! Read the NY Times review here. At his death he possessed 1/9th of all American currency in circulation. Think about that, and he was also just a bad ass, even death couldn’t take him despite many horse racing accidents.

3. The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals. An amazing amazing guy who is responsible for so many of our modern financial rules after his huge collapse :). Read the NY Times review here.

Honorable Mention (Downgraded because it is INTENSE):
What It Is Like To Go To War. One of the most powerful books I’ve ever read, I literally had to sit and just think for a few hours at a time after I finished sections. And call a friend just to talk. Should be required reading for every single person in high school and discussed.

2 Best Business Books
1. Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All – I love Jim Collins and all his work, this is yet again a great read on what makes a company great.

2. Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Why this book? Because I think over the next 20 years Robots are going to change the global work environment. And I’m not sure how this will affect the concept of “work” and income for so many people. Scary/Exciting stuff.

3 Best True Books
Mountains Beyond Mountains. The story of a doctor trying to make a difference, beautiful story, made me cry at a few points. Changing the world is hard.

Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. A brilliant book that me and my brother read and had a fantastic time discussing. A lot of women should read this book.

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. A dense but great read if you want to understand the upcoming power dynamics in the world. Esp if you get tired of people claiming the sky is falling because the USA isn’t #1 in every category.

Best Travel Books
Weak year, have nothing I would recommend strongly :(.

Best Thrillers / Military
1. The last week of 2012 I found the best author I’ve found since Clancy. His name is Vince Flynn and I finished all his books within about a week. 12 amazing books about Mitch Rapp, an off the books CIA assassin. Fantastic, well written, awesome. Buy them all!

Best Sci Fi / Fantasy
A weak year for this category :(, the only stand out was the Repairman Jack series. Props to Laura/Karl for finding this one for me. A great read.

Best Bibliographies
Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. Just a well done biography about an amazing man who was also an uncompromising dick hole. Love it!

All In: The Education Of General David Petraeus. A fantastic book about an amazing man, flawed like all of us, but still amazing. A great read.

Best History
1. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. One of the best books I’ve read and a close one for best book of the year. Highly recommended if you want to learn about innovation, the patent system, and more. Check out this great Lincoln Quote that really sums the book up.

2. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Just an amazing book about the epidemic and also the medical community at the time. Almost made the best books of the year category. Highly recommended if you want a better understanding of the medical community and the risk of these type of pandemics.

3. And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina. I love Argentina, fantastic people, amazing wine, beautiful beautiful country. And they got F’ed in the A on this one, by their bad decisions, plus the international community. A good read if you want to learn how not to govern + how not to help a country. Still causing them so many problems and it frustrates me. I hope they get better leadership in the next decade, their people deserve it.

4. The Last Days of the Incas. Great read to understand this aspect of history. The most amazing part is how a mere 60 to 200 heavily armed calvary destroyed such a vast empire, makes you realize how military technology can really do some crazy things. Very well written.

I was reading a book today about the history of cities and one of the little tidbits I really enjoyed was that the Harper Brothers and many other publishers pirated books to sell locally. Which is funny considering their positions now.

Like many publishers of the 1800s, Harper Bros. took advantage of the lack of international copyright enforcement. The firm printed pirated copies of works by such British authors as Charles Dickens, William Make-peace Thackeray, and Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. Harper Bros.’ best-selling pirated work by a British author was Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II. The book sold approximately 400,000 copies, a figure that would classify it as a nonfiction bestseller at the turn of the twentieth century. Because international copyright laws were not enforced, U.S. publishers did not pay royalties to either the British authors or their publishers. The American market had grown to be so significant that, in 1842, Dickens traveled to the United States in an effort to secure royalties from the sale of his works. He was unsuccessful at recouping this money, but the trip did give Dickens the material for his book American Notes for General Circulation, which Harper Bros. promptly pirated.

Read more info here on this and other in the early publishing industries.

Just makes you realize that once you are in power the way you got that power quickly becomes “illegal”. You see the same thing with online startups, they abuse all kinds of spam rules, or what they do with information and once they have grown they rewrite history to pretend they didn’t do x.

I still love love love my Kindle and I think it is the best product of this decade. In the past three years I’ve read barely any books on paper. Yesterday I started reading a paperback for the first time in 14 months and realized I was getting annoyed because I couldn’t read while eating since it required two hands part of the time in order to hold both flaps open (which is not a problem with the Kindle).

Base on my rough calculations from Amazon’s page I have bought 362 Kindle books or newspapers since I’ve had one. Plus you save money as most books are slightly cheaper!

I strongly recommend you go buy one! Here is my original Kindle review too! Batter life on the new ones is just amazing.

I realized today as I tried to sort out my Kindle books that there is no software application to do this with. Amazon or someone needs to make this as it would be nice to have something that can sort and show me my digital books (as well as load them on my Kindle) and allow me to load my actual books so I can see my library.

It can’t be too hard to make something that does this for the Kindle, I know there is stuff out there to scan in my books and handle all that.

I love to read and I feel the Kindle is one of the most amazing products of the last century. You have a device the size of one book that you can store your entire library on. And if that is not amazing enough you can buy books from anywhere in the world with an internet connection and save a few trees while you are doing so. Right now it costs $360 dollars but the books are all cheaper so you are slowly getting that money back as you buy books.

One of the hardest parts about being outside the United States is that books are incredibly expensive and Amazon.com is out of reach. The Kindle solves this problem as you can download books to an internet cafe computer and then transfer them to the Kindle. Plus my pack is that much lighter now that I only carry one book around. I had an ebook reader before this but the battery life was not great and the book selection wasn’t there. The amount of books Amazon has available for the Kindle is one of the most amazing parts and they have used their leverage to really push this format. Plus the books are cheaper as they are all digital. It makes sense as you are taking all the costs and risk out of the publishing system. If all book publishers had to do was to help find and develop good authors, or if all authors had to do was upload their book to Amazon and do marketing we are going to have some really amazing reading opportunities over the next decade.

I give the Kindle a 100% recommendation and I’ve already saved enough money on books to pay for the initial cost of the Kindle. There is a rumor a textbook version is coming which would be great for students!