Change can be real, go read a book

The stock market taught me that when everyone say “this time it’s different,” it’s not. The dot com bubble proved the world is still filled with greedy people, and people can still be fooled by hype and marketing. As P. T. Barnum said “there’s one born every minute.” At today’s population explosion rate, there’s one born every second. I have many friends and co-workers that lost lots of money, a good part of their retirement, even their house in the dot com bubble. I’m not saying do not invest, I’m saying be careful when people say the world has changed. The greedy will not become saints at the wave of a wand. People are still out to make money any way they can.

Where am I going? The other day on the local NPR FM radio station was a news bite about Amazon setting up a new program to stress the selling of books printed on paper. Kind of nice, they’re getting back to their roots.

The next news bit was an interview with a guy from the Harvard Business Review. He had written a piece in the Review about how to read a printed (paper) book. The piece had a lot of the stock advice, turn off the TV and put away the remote, shut down the cell phone. Common sense stuff.

That noise I heard in the back ground was people, like Samuel Clemens, turning over in their graves. If you skipped high school English he’s better known as Mark Twain and wrote the book Tom Sawyer, or do high schools even teach that any more?

The guy doing the piece in the Harvard Business Review should have done a YouTube video about reading a printed book, or at least a power point slide show. If people don’t know how to read a printed book, will they know how to read a newspaper?

The world has changed if you have to tell people how to read a book.

Here’s a great chance for a writer to generate a 99 cents book, How to Read a PBook (printed book). Batteries and charger not needed.

Stay strong, write (and read) on.         Professor Hyram Voltage