Kindle ebooks allow to share individual insights into the ebooks. E-readers can aggregate their experience of a text, so that anyone can identify those passages that collective wisdom had identified as particularly pertinent. Enough ereaders need to highlight a passage to be visible to others as an aggregate or a reading heat map. It’s a great idea to save time reading ebooks by showing key passages illuminated by layering all readers’ highlights for the same text. More insights into ebooks, e-reading, etc
Tag Archives: Book summaries
Amazone’s new Kindle e-book reader
The new Amazon’s device for reading ebooks costs £100 and is a size of of a paperback book. Will it change the way we read ebook? It can store up to 3500 ebooks and one can download new titles in seconds from the online catalogue of more than 400 000 ebooks. Amazon is already selling most of ebooks for $9.99 (£7.53) and promises to undercut prices of paper books and ebooks rivals such as Apple and Sony. “In the US we now sell more electronic books than physical ones and we are happy to bring this to the UK,” said Steve Kessel, Amazon Kindle’s senior vice president. (To be exact, it had sold 143 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks). I’ve been using Kindle on my iPhone and iPad (and on my Mac) for some time now and I love it. Download Kindle for FREE to your mobile, iPad or PC/Mac and start ereading. To save time on reading start with book summaries. We recommend: Passing Time in the Loo: Vol 3 – Book Summaries (Summaries of Classics, Novels, Plays, Short Stories, Children’s Classics and Operas) [Kindle Edition] – more than 150 books summarised. And to brush on Shakespeare: Passing Time in the Loo: Shakespeare – Summaries of Shakespeare’s Greatest Sonnets and Plays (Comedies, Tragedies, Histories) (Passing Time in the Loo: … Glimpse Of His World And Greatest Plays) [Kindle Edition]
Read summaries – save time
I’ve just read 6 books in an hour – thanks to the best collection of book summaries.
Passing Time in The Loo – the best of collection of 150+ books summaries
Not just easy peasy books, but Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), For whom the bell tolls (Hemingway), Don Quixote, Das Kapital (Marx), The Origin of Species (Darwin) and – by way of light relief – Shakespeare’s King Lear. All books I ‘wanted to have read’ but didn’t think I’d ever get round to reading and. To be honest, wasn’t really looking forward to reading). How did I do it? I read brilliant two-page summaries in ‘Passing Time in the Loo’. I got the stories, a flavour of the books and some info on their relevance. And I didn’t feel bad about it because research shows that people remember more from summaries than from reading the books. And loads more goodies to choose from tomorrow. Just checked out the publisher’s website (Passing Time in The Loo – 150+ classic books summaries) and they’re doing a deal – buy Passing Time in the Loo vol I or vol II and get the best of Shakespeare’s summaries free. Better than Amazon! But watch out – don’t be tempted to get ‘The Great American Bathroom Book’ or ‘Touch of Classics’ as well – they’re just the ‘loo’ books under different titles. Read more about the importance of summaries and how they help with remembering information
Knowing top plots in fiction helps with speed reading novels too.
The 100 Best Books of the Decade according to The Times
The top 10 books of the decade (according to The Times magazine):
1 The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003)
3 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (2004)
4 Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers trans Robert Bringhurst(2002
5 Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky(2006)
6 The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell(2000) Speed-Read ‘Thin slicing’ of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers: The Story of Success
7 Life of Pi by Yann Martel(2002)
8 Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood (2008)
9 Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
10 The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown(2003)
Check out the full list of the 100 best books of the decade by the Times
Read only summaries, not chapters – you’ll learn more
Students learn more from summaries than entire chapters – research on summaries confirms
“In a series of experiments, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University compared five-thousand-word chapters from college textbooks with one-thousand-word summaries of those chapters. The textbooks varied in subject: Russian history, African geography, macroeconomics. But the subject made no difference: in all cases, the summaries worked better. When students were given the same amount of the time with each – twenty to thirty minutes – they learned more from the summaries than they did from the chapters. This was true whether the students were tested twenty minutes after they read the material or one year later. In either case, those who read the summaries recalled more than those who read the chapters.” from Errornomics, Why we make mistakes and what we can do to avoid them by Joseph Hallinan
Good summaries are short – like miniskirts – short enough to retain the interest but long enough to cover the subject.
We’ve been saying that for some time now – just download the FREE summary of 37 Speed Reading Techniques
There have been several studies that have examined the effect of reading summaries versus full texts on memory and comprehension. Here are some relevant references:
- Bretzing, B. H., & Kulhavy, R. W. (1979). Notetaking and depth of processing. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 4(2), 145-153.
- This study found that students who read summaries performed better on comprehension tests than those who read the full text.
- Reder, L. M., & Anderson, J. R. (1980). A comparison of texts and their summaries: Memorial consequences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(2), 121-134.
- The results showed that participants who read summaries recalled more important information than those who read the full texts after one week.
- Sanchez, R. P., Lorch, E. P., & Lorch, R. F. (2001). Effects of headings on text processing strategies. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 26(3), 418-428.
- This study found that participants who read texts with summaries (in the form of headings) performed better on comprehension tests than those who read the full texts without headings.
- Hartley, J., & Trueman, M. (1983). The effects of summaries on the recall of information from prose materials. Human Learning, 2(1), 63-82.
- The results showed that participants who read summaries before and after the full text recalled more information than those who only read the full text.
- Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1972). Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11(6), 717-726.
- This study found that participants who received summaries before reading the full text had better comprehension and recall than those who did not receive summaries.
While these studies vary in their specific methodologies and findings, they generally support the idea that reading summaries can enhance memory and comprehension compared to reading full texts, particularly for retaining the most important information over time.
Book Summaries – 50 Prosperity Classics
Research suggests that people who read summaries rather than the whole books remember more details and for longer (Read summaries not chapters). There is a whole industry of book summaries in the world now. Passing Time in The Loo series was one of the first to spot the market for book summaries. Tom Butler-Bowen has written summaries many different classic categories of books from prosperity to self-help to success to spiritual and psychology.
Malcolm Gladwell’s books summarised
“Indeed, Gladwell’s three lucrative theses are deceptively simple — even superficially simplistic.
His first book, The Tipping Point, noted that at a point of critical mass . . . things change, and that certain people have outsize influence in making that happen.
The second book, Blink, points out that first impressions and gut feelings matter.
And now his third, Outliers, makes the case that to be successful you need to work hard and have some lucky breaks. To which one could certainly say, “Duh”.