After Ahrens’ book I see an awful lot of people talking about “processing” books. There are too many assumptions about what this can mean and this hides many levels of inherent work involved in analyzing and synthesizing knowledge. I would suggest that we’re better off talking about reading them, annotating, excerpting, and thinking about them, or maybe writing about and combining them with other knowledge than “processing” them.

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

2 thoughts on “”

  1. I haven’t run across this book, but the idea of processing books makes me feel sick–it turns a pleasurable exercise of leisure or learning (or both!) into a capitalistic and extractive process. (Hm, this might be why a lot of the rhetoric around BASB turns me off, will have to think more on this.)

    But at the same time, because humans are nothing if not self-contradictory: you will pry my Kindle from my cold, dead hands because otherwise, my house would be made of nothing but books. Which is already a situation going on, but without the Kindle, it’d be much worse.

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