I read more than you do:
Childhood: when we lived in the country and could only get to town once a week, I checked out the limit of books from the library - 10 - every week.
High school: my first job was in the public library (along with classmate Esther Dyson);
College: My application (successful) to Harvard listed 100 books I’d read that year — but having to attend classes and study started cutting into the number of books I could read;
Work, first career: book publishing.
Second career: MTV, Showtime, Nickelodeon, The Movie Channel (I forgot to mention my second passion: movies. I saw over 500 movies my first year in New York, 300 the second, 200 the third, and only about 100 a year thereafter until I moved.)
Move back to Bay Area: gave away 3,000 books, kept only 3,000. Very painful!
Third career: Retail electronics chain startup had nothing to do with the content of media, just the devices. Started writing short stories and a novel. (You won’t see them, but at least I proved to my satisfaction that I had the discipline to write every day.)
Fourth: Publishing again, this time my own subscription newsletter on new technology arising from academic research, and transferred via startups, patent licensing. Scientific journals replaced nearly all the fiction in my diet. (Fiber is good for you!) Wired distributes its first issue at Esther’s PC Forum.
Fifth and counting: building the Web businesses for newspapers. Top three books: Blown to Bits, Cluetrain Manifesto, Innovator’s Dilemma. Blogs in my RSS reader: 168.
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bibomedia.com // March 7, 2008 at 9:42 pm
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