Tag: reading
Start Reading Up To 3 Times Faster With These Online Programs

Start Reading Up To 3 Times Faster With These Online Programs

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt knocked people back in their chairs at a tech conference when he said humanity was currently creating as much new information in two days as the human race generated from the dawn of history through 2003. And once you wrap your head around that fact, consider this — he made that claim in 2010.

Information is being produced at exponential rates. And you can help get your mind in a position to take in as much of that information as possible with the training from this award-winning Speed Reading learning bundle ($19, over 90 percent off) from The National Memo Store.

You’ll kick off your training with a lifetime of access to e-reading program Spreeder CX. The system trains your brain to increase your RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) abilities, basically allowing you to cut down on eye movement. With your eyes moving less, your brain actually takes in more, allowing your reading sessions to go from crawls to sprints.

However, reading more than three times faster doesn’t mean a lot if you don’t retain any of it. That’s where the companion program 7 Speed Reading EX comes in. As you work through its lessons in videos, exercises and more, you’ll see your reading speed increases, all while retaining up to 100% of what you’re taking in.

Think about what that kind of speed increase, not to mention hanging on to all that new information, could do for your professional and personal lives. Try this package now for about the price of a meal out while this offer lasts.

This sponsored post is brought to you by StackCommerce.

Time To Learn How To Speed Through That Summer Reading List

Time To Learn How To Speed Through That Summer Reading List

To many, speed reading seems like no more than a parlor trick, a talent honed to impress onlookers like juggling or singing. Well, speed reading has some practical advantages that go way beyond being a simple talent… in fact, it’s practically a super power.

Best of all, speed reading is a skill that can come to almost anyone with the right training and determination. With this award-winning speed reading learning bundle on sale now from The National Memo Store for $19, you’ll see the value.

And while reading up to more than 34 times faster is definitely a benefit, the real value is in what information you can retain from all that reading.

You’ll open with a three-year subscription to Spreeder CX, an e-reading program that ramps up your RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) skills. As it cuts down on your eye movement, it actually works to help boost how much information you take in as you ramp up your reading speed.

Retention is where the accompanying three-year subscription to companion program 7 Speed Reading EX comes in. Here, you focus on training videos, exercises and other methods to improve your reading speed while achieving up to 100% information retention.

With your brain attuned to take in more information in less time, you can use your newfound “parlor trick” to do your job better or impress a new employer as you open up new career opportunities. Get it now before at less than $20 before this limited time deal runs out.

This sponsored post is brought to you by StackCommerce.

This App Is The Best Way To Finally Fly Through Your Reading List

This App Is The Best Way To Finally Fly Through Your Reading List

As political junkies, we’re all prone to biting off more than we can chew when it comes to our reading lists. From political biographies to historical classics, the books we hope to conquer in our lifetime are ambitious and varied. But what if you could absorb the knowledge within the pages of these books without having to go chapter by chapter?

With mountains of insightful non-fiction books at the ready, a lifetime subscription to Instaread (now just $49.99 in the National Memo Store) helps you not only devour loads of titles fast, but actually hold onto that knowledge as well.

Instaread does the heavy lifting for you, boiling down meaning and key takeaways from any given book and allowing you to understand the author’s major points in a matter of minutes. The Instaread app offers up detailed overviews and analysis of hundreds of nonfiction books, chapter by chapter. As you read (and sometimes, listen to) these intricate synopses, the book’s thesis becomes clear, as do its deeper meanings — all in a process that takes less than 30 minutes.

With over 560 New York Times nonfiction bestsellers (with 20 new books added to the list every month), you’ll be able to take down a book or two a day as you drive to work, run errands, workout or just decompress after a long day.

A lifetime of Instaread access usually runs almost $500, so lock in this heavily discounted price now before the offer expires.

This sponsored post is brought to you by StackCommerce.

Are Independent Booksellers Replacing Big-Box Retailers?

Are Independent Booksellers Replacing Big-Box Retailers?

By Deborah M. Todd, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS)

PITTSBURGH — At the time Dan Iddings opened the doors of Classic Lines Bookstore in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood last year, his greatest fear was that the technologies that ate up some of his largest competitors would swallow his business whole.

“I had this fear that I would be the Amazon showroom — that people would look at our selection of products, then go buy them on Amazon,” he said.

Six months in, Iddings said he has seen his share of comparison shoppers, but they’re far outnumbered by customers seeking literary refuge following the 2009 loss of the neighborhood Barnes & Noble bookstore.

“People understand that there’s only one way to keep a bookstore in the neighborhood — that’s to buy the books,” he said.

The digitization of literature and Amazon-ification of book sales that rattled the publishing industry in the mid-2000s has settled into a moment of stability for independent bookstores primed and ready to fill voids left by the 2011 bankruptcy of Borders books and the closings of several Barnes & Noble locations in the area.

Borders — the second largest bookseller in the nation at the time of its demise — pointed to Web-based retail and a shift toward digital downloads as primary causes for its bankruptcy and subsequent liquidation of more than 400 stores. The Michigan company, which outsourced its online sales to Amazon.com in 2001 before suspending that deal in favor of its own website in 2008, also cited a failure to respond quickly to market changes. In October 2011, Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookseller, took over Borders’ brand name and website in a $13.9 million deal.

In Pittsburgh — where the loss of Borders stores came painfully close to Barnes & Noble closures — independent bookstores that had survived years in the shadows of the giants became bastions of familiarity for bookworms seeking new haunts to call their own.

They also became windows of opportunity for bibliophiles with lifelong dreams of opening their own stores.

Iddings noted that three community bookstores had closed around the time that Barnes & Noble entered Squirrel Hill, but he pointed out that his store and used bookseller Amazing Books have popped up in the neighborhood in the last two years.

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Squirrel Hill isn’t alone.

The suburb of Sewickley’s Penguin Bookshop, which has been a community institution since 1929, was sold to community resident Susan Hans O’Conner last year, and Mystery Lover’s Bookshop in the suburb of Oakmont was recently purchased by hometown native Natalie Sacco and her husband, Trevor Thomas.

Sacco, who grew up blocks away from the store, said she heard it was up for sale around Christmas and immediately devised a plan to transplant her family from Cleveland to get into the business of books.

After connecting with owner Laurie Stephens, a deal for an undisclosed figure (“Much less than what it’s worth!” interjected Stephens with a chuckle) was struck.

Sacco said not much at the Mystery Lover’s Bookshop will change physically.

The checkerboard linoleum floors and the red table and chair set will stay. The emphasis on mystery, live readings by authors and the section carved out for Pittsburgh authors have been grandfathered in.

The biggest changes will come in the form of new graphic novels and titles by small independent publishers, a revamped website, an extended social media presence and possibly a section selling vinyl albums.

And the couple is hoping to double down on offerings such as community events, book clubs and other opportunities to team up with other local small business owners.

Pablo Fierro and Amanda Johnson, members of the group that owns the Big Idea Cooperative Bookstore and Cafe in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Bloomfield, said capitalizing off of independent bookstores’ reputations as community meeting spaces has been one of their store’s greatest advantages.

Billed as a space for “multicultural, women-positive, queer-positive, class-conscious, anti-militaristic” literature among other things, Johnson said the space regularly hosts events for groups tied to alternative political movements or fringe causes.

It’s that sense of community — the idea that an individual can find his or her people among aisles of mysteries and biographies — that would have been the greatest loss if predictions of the printed book’s demise had unfolded the way some predicted, said Thomas.

“You don’t really understand until it’s gone,” he said. “Just like independent record stores, you’re not just buying records. You’re there to exchange ideas with other people, have conversations. It’s those ideas that spark an interest in certain other things and if you don’t have a place to exchange those ideas who knows what you’ve lost.”

If a digital takeover of books and the independent bookstore is coming, Iddings said it’s far from imminent.

“I don’t have to worry about that because I won’t be here that long. And I plan to be here a long time,” he said with a hearty laugh.

Photo: Robin Rombach via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/TNS