This summer I intentionally took a month+ “off” of all things social media and screens. The heat this season has been real and I had lots of travel and offline work to do. So I fully embraced it. It was great. Now I’m starting to scrape the surface of what I missed and what everyone else has been up to. Plenty of news and books to work through in the coming days and I’m actually looking forward to it.

Now that I’m back online, I can say I really missed some of the folks on Mastodon as well as many of the blogs in my RSS reader. I’m enjoying catching up and commenting on the posts and sites that I follow.

In an effort to help shake off my digital cobwebs I wanted to take a minute to share three things that I thought were worth the read:

Time magazine published a piece highlighting the recent numbers showing the decline in adults reading. Plenty of words have been written about this trend, but this piece acknowledges the book as “one of our most effective technologies” and offers solutions to help folks pick up books more often.

This one is worth the click just to see the logo that Amazon has on the front door of one of their warehouses in Las Vegas. Yep, it’s a dinosaur devouring a book. Sign up for that site if you want to read the whole account, but it’s a scanning facility that tears up old books so they can be scanned faster and fed to their AI machines.

I was pleased to see that Kobo ereaders are now back in Best Buy stores. While the prices keep creeping up, I am a HUGE fan of buttons. Does that make me a luddite? Just old? I am not sure, but I do know that turning pages on an ereading device are so much easier when there’s a physical button under your finger. Kobo has one of the last ones.

Hope you all have had a good summer season. Fall is on the way (though that’s hard to believe when the thermometer read 102 degrees yesterday).