AsanaCycles

Fordlandia
Team Rodent: How Disney devours the world
The Match King, Ivar Kreugar

gerv 

Fordlandia seems like a pretty interesting book.
https://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Hen.../dp/0805082360

AsanaCycles

yes, very interesting book! in my opinion, very much worth a read!

Team Rodent, also is a good book. super quick read. I'm not a fast reader, but was blown away that I read it in one sitting.

The Match King, Ivar Kreuger, follows a similar vein as Fordlandia... ponzi schemes, off balance sheet accounting, etc. i.e. i think it was 1924 when Ivar Kreuger loaned Poland $6M. a premiss is "Loan for Monopoly"

Roody

Interesting to me because I grew up in a North American Fordlandia. Highland Park, MI was the site of the first Ford assembly line, and Henry Ford was partially responsible for the design of the city. The funny thing is, the design is just about perfect for a carfree city. It's a square mile in size, and at it's peak housed about 40,000 people. But it's so well designed that most of those people lived in single family homes on beautiful tree-lined streets. Every home was within 3 blocks of a commercial street, and no further than a half-mile from the main shopping area. The auto plant was in the center of the city, so almost everybody could walk to work if they wanted to.

I won't go into any more detail because it's off topic, but it is ironic that Henry Ford was untrained in urban design, but seemed to understand the "modern" concepts of livable (AKA carfree) urban design.

wahoonc

Looks like an interesting read, it is going to be my first purchase for my Kindle when it gets here...

Aaron

Artkansas 

I saw a video documentary of that. Pretty strange set up there. Certainly idiomatic for its time.

no motor?

I read most of it, I liked what he was trying to say but he sure took a long time to say it.

no motor?

It's an amazing book. I hadn't heard about Fordlandia until I read the book, and found out he'd tried other company towns too. Highly recommended.

gerv 

I hope this thread didn't egg you on. I was thinking about getting some kind of e-reader too. But then I realized that when I did, I wouldn't need to ride to the library any more.

And actually the ride is as good as the read.

wahoonc

Been on the fence for quite a while. I have been reading ebooks on my Blackberry, Droid and netbook and after playing with my sister's Kindle Touch over the holidays it was only a matter of time. Eyes are getting old and the e-ink screen is easier for me to read than the LCD versions.

Aaron

Roody

Cool!! I liked riding to the library since I was a kid. This past year, I loved it even more riding there with my young grandson. I will die happy if he learned a love of reading and riding from me.

gerv 

Yeah, I might get one sometime... there are lots of them on Craigslist at half price. It's just that I don't want to buy anything else right now... I'm becoming a real cheapo.

wahoonc

Haven't seen any on CL around here, but then again I don't think WM sells them

I ordered a Kindle Touch without the ads and have already located a few interesting "upgrades" for it.

Aaron

Kage01

Currently Reading:

Catching Fire (along with my daugter)
Atlas Shrugged
Bottom of the 33rd

wahoonc

Got my Kindle and got it loaded up with mostly free books from a variety of sources. So far I am very impressed, there is a learning curve and some workarounds that are needed, but all is good.

I haven't had a chance to try downloads from the public library yet, it may take a while, I checked and most of the books I was interested in have waiting lists of 15-20 people. My sister and I are sharing books and my son is going to add me to his list too. Our reading tastes are fairly different but I suspect there may be some overlap.

Currently reading House of Seven Gables_Hawthorne, Walking_Thoreau, and a few others. I have a huge list on Amazon that I hope will be fulfilled as gifts later on. Looks like I may need to shift some allowance from my bike budget to my book budget.

Aaron

Roody

That tells us something. The devices themselves are quite nice, but I fear there's no future for libraries and bookstores--two of my favorite places.

wahoonc

I think libraries in one form or another will always be around. Bookstores are a crap shoot. The small stores that deal in used, classic and rare books will be around for a long time to come. The others? Who knows...we only have a one or two small stores left in an area of over 200,000 people, they are specialty stores and are staying in business by catering to those special needs. We only have one big box book store and it does well. I think too many people have stopped reading, if they ever knew how to read to begin with.

I have always been a reader, my mom claims she thought I was sick the week after I discovered the school library, I came home and went to my room and didn't come out even for dinner, turns out I was buried in the Boxcar Children series, followed by The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and anything else I could get my hands on. I know that my son followed in my footsteps to a certain extent, when he was in middle school he would get into trouble (usually by talking or socializing during class) and the teachers could not figure out the best discipline...dear old dad suggested that they limit his library privileges straightened him right out. He still loves books and refuses to live where there is not a decent library.

Aaron

gerv 

My thought is that books will become what they were about 150 years... expensive and rare objects that only the rich can afford. Or collectors.

Your everyday individual will access book texts digitally. This, of course, raises many questions and concerns. For one thing, will the Kindle book be something we can dig up out of the ground years from now and actually read? Well... no. That won't be possible. (Of course, my beloved Penguin Classics paperbacks. which I read in the 60s and 70s, are now so yellowed that I can't read them.)

Roody

Newspapers from the American Revolution are supposedly better preserved than those from just a few years ago, because the 18th century used acid-free paper even for newsprint.

Google and Project Gutenburg are in the process of scanning every book in existence for preservation and searchability. I don't know what provisions are being made for changes in data retrieval technology. Of course, a lot of the stuff written isn't really worth reading--now or 200 years from now.

Artkansas 

You'll never know what will turn up. My Great Great Great Grandfather was rather an interesting character. A circuit riding minister in the nation of Texas for a portion of his life, I had always wondered what his position on slavery was. In a recent search, I turned up documents indicating that slavery was the only thing he disliked about Texas and apparently he broke ranks by ministering to them around Houston.

gerv 

Project Gutenberg is pretty interesting.

I'm amazed that you can download Ulysses by James Joyce on your Kindle (or whatever format you want) for free.

When I was just starting university, Penguin came out with a cheap newsprint edition, but it had been somewhat hard to find before that.

In my father's generation, it was banned and you likely would need to know Joyce or Sylvia Beach to obtain a copy.

Artkansas 

Fordlandia reminds me of the first place I was exposed to planned communities, Celesteville.

Roody

I heard the author of Why Nations Fail on the radio this morning. This looks like a book the Jared Diamond fans would love.

https://onpoint.wbur.org/2012/03/21/why-nations-fail

gerv 

You can catch a good chunk of the book on Amazon's preview. The radio show was interesting. Earlier here I mentioned Paul Gilding stating that societies that have the highest "happiness" level also having more economic equality. So this is an interesting twist.

Did you catch some of the questions at the end? I still think a big investment in education would also help prevent failure.

no motor?

I read this a while ago (I started reading it while thinking about taking some longer fun rides when the weather got better and fit with the story starting out with the main character starting his first bicycling vacation) and had a hard time figuring just what the main character was riding. It sounds like he was riding an early fixie - was he? It seems like it wasn't a penny farthing, and he couldn't coast from the sound of things but I couldn't quite place what he was riding.