Tag: kindle

One Book At A Time – 2023

In 2023, the world of information consumption was dominated by short-form content. We’re constantly bombarded with bite-sized pieces of information from websites news, short / long videos, blog posts, social media, slide decks, even industrial research reports and PDFs. Podcasts have also become a popular way for me to consume information while jogging.

This constant influx of quick hits has undoubtedly impacted my reading habit, making it a slower year for in-depth, long-form reading, particularly of ebooks.

Anyway, here are the books (in purchasing order) of 2023:

And the best book to me this year is … The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma. YMMV.

Previous years’ book list:

AI 2041

Instead of believing in the marketing hype of generative AI, it’s important to understand what AI is, what AI can do, and what likely we will see by year 2041. Mr. Kai-Fu Lee’s AI 2041 is really a good read with all sorts of different AI use case scenarios. Highly recommended.

It’s also a dream came true to have Mr. Kai-Fu Lee’s “digital” signature with my Kindle Scribe in an AI event !

One Book At A Time – 2022

I told myself earlier this year I needed to read more SciFi, Blockchain and AI books. However, it’s a year with a lot less time to read …

It’s also year with a new Kindle – the big brother Kindle Scribe. Look forward to have better reading and note-jotting experiences with this great new device.

Anyway, here are my favorites this year :

  1. Winning the Right Game : How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World – A great strategy book about ecosystem innovation / disruption. Don’t miss it if you want to learn more on top of industrial disruption.
  2. 所謂「我不投資」，就是 all in 在法定貨幣 – Probably the best crypto foundation and investment book in Chinese, period.
  3. Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains – The ideas behind Ethereum in the words of its founder, Vitalik Buterin. You will find that every crypto idea has been brewed for years.
  4. The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything – To me, it’s the best book of the year, for IT professionals. Lesson learned – the Metaverse is not what you think.
  5. Exhalation: Stories – Nine excellent SciFi short stories, from Time machine, to Robot, Metaverse, Video Artificial Memory and Quantum Machine. Some of the best SciFi short stories I ever read.
  6. Children of the new world – If you are fans of SciFi short stories and Black Mirror, and if you love the movie “After Yang”, don’t miss this book. Not as good as Exhalation and Stories of Your Life though.
  7. Stories of Your Life and Others – Another eight short SciFi stories from Ted Chiang (Exhalation, above) and great read. Note that some of the stories are Science Fictions, some are Fictions about Science.
  8. The Blockchain Innovator’s Handbook : A leader’s guide to understanding, adopting and succeeding with this disruptive technology – Post-COVID information about Blockchain, with 3 parts (This time it’s different, The journey, Making it happen). Good for business professional to understand and to promote the technology within your organization.
  9. The Bomber Mafia : A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War – I learned a lot about Second World War and Bombers from this book … bombing is not as easy as what you see from war movies.
  10. Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy – Will the search engine giant survive after AI and Machine Learning ?
  11. Scary Smart : The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World – The book that tells you why Ethical AI is important … “The course of action we take at any given time is also the result of a value system that guides us and sometimes restricts us from making decisions that contradict our values.”
  12. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control – One of the most important AI books ever written, everybody should read it.

Previous years’ book list:

One Book at a Time – 2020

Year 2020 is a year of Work From Home, for me it means less time to commute and therefore less time to read. Unlike what I promised last year, I didn’t read books about Artificial Intelligence and Decentralised Identifier. Instead I read books about product management, history, organisational design and even meditation. Here are my books of year 2020.

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  1. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones – One of the best books about developing good habits. Don’t miss it. (https://amzn.to/3mxPuy8)
  2. Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life – Believe it or not, the daily morning 20 minutes meditation helps me getting through this tough year.  (https://amzn.to/2Wrz145)
  3. Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society – One very deep book, but if you’re in the world of IT, don’t miss the “Data as Labour” chapter. (https://amzn.to/3rcMVFA)
  4. The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage – If you repeat one idea hundreds of time, you can write a book … you can safely skip that one. (https://amzn.to/3anbfyk)
  5. Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments – We all know it’s important to test our ideas, business models … but how ? Check out this book. (https://amzn.to/3mvFmWW)
  6. Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem – The story behind the 350 years old mathematical puzzle, Fermat’s Last Theorem. One of the best books I read in 2020. (https://amzn.to/2Wu9wiK)
  7. INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love – If you’re a product manager, or want to be one … in a startup or an enterprise, it’s the best book in town. (https://amzn.to/2KzOAEi)
  8. The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data – Want to get a good book to read after The Phoenix Project ? This is the one. (https://amzn.to/2K8cQgY)
  9. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World – Lot’s of methods and stories about how to be an “original”, as long as you don’t mind most references are from USA. (https://amzn.to/2LOXwpS)
  10. Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos – I am a big fans of Jeff Bezos’ annual shareholder letters. If you are a fan as well, this book is for you, in his own words. (https://amzn.to/34m8ppl)
  11. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention –  Talent Density, Candor, and Reduce Controls … these are the three ways Netflix designs their organization. To me, it’s BEST book of the year. (https://amzn.to/3nwqLvJ)
Hotel lobby of Eslite Hotel, Taipei

My 20 Kindle eBooks of 2014

books

2014 is a tough and rough year.

However it is also a good year, as I kind of picked up reading again (thanks to the Kindle Paperwhite II, my fourth Kindle), even though I am still a slow reader. Managed to only finish 20 Kindle eBooks this year, and my favourite ones are “Stuffocation“, “Lean Startup“, “Service Design” and “Pitch Perfect“.

The 20 books in reading sequence …

  1. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
  2. David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
  3. Data Science for Business: What you need to know about data mining and data-analytic thinking
  4. Chariots of the Gods
  5. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
  6. Stuffocation
  7. Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: How I Went from Gang Member to Multimillionaire Entrepreneur
  8. The Fortune Cookie Principle : The 20 Keys to a Great Brand Story and Why Your Business Needs One
  9. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
  10. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
  11. Difference: The one-page method for reimagining your business and reinventing your marketing
  12. Pitch Perfect: How to Say It Right the First Time, Every Time
  13. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean Series)
  14. Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
  15. Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising
  16. The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt
  17. Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain
  18. Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)
  19. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
  20. The Lost Empire of Atlantis: History’s Greatest Mystery Revealed

Still, there are a few books in the Kindle impatiently waiting … shall be good for the next three, four months !!

  1. The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids (a reread)
  2. The FastDiet – Revised & Updated: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, and Live Longer with the Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting
  3. Loyalty 3.0: How to Revolutionize Customer and Employee Engagement with Big Data and Gamification
  4. Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
  5. The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users
  6. The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch
  7. Flash Boys

Keep reading !!