please-reply@readmill.com

Never in my online life have I seen such a lovely invitation to customers to keep offering feedback. No anonymous “no-reply@” or off-putting “do-not-reply@.” Instead, customers see a welcoming and wonderful opposite. Please reply. Gracious and personal. When I wrote back to express how delighted I was to see it, I received a personal reply from David Kjelkerud who promptly credited Orson Kent for the idea.

Readmill opened to all recently. If you haven’t yet, you must sign up. I hope you love it as much as I do.

If you’re reading something, even a one-sitting short story or article, you’re making a commitment. You’re making a lot more of a commitment because reading is in fact extremely interactive from a neurological point of view. Your brain lights up a lot. Whereas [listening to] music is more like something that happens to you, reading is something you do.

–Margaret Atwood on Twitter, the internet, and literacy

Readmill continues to improve with each iteration. The last update included an in-app dictionary, something that I find indispensable. Readmill doesn’t yet have the ability to re-read a book. You can re-read it, but the book is considered “finished.” I find re-reading far more pleasurable than the first read. On Erin’s recommendation I read The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Fantastic stuff! Read it twice. Am now reading Grossman’s sequel, The Magician King.

Some of my favorite random passages from The Magicians:

Use magic in anger, and you will harm yourself much more quickly than you will harm your adversary. There are certain spells . . . if you lose control of them, they will change you. Consume you. Transform you into something not human, a niffin, a spirit of raw, uncontrolled magical energy.

Alice was still watching him. Behind her the mosaic was a swirl of green tentacles and whitecaps and floating fragments. He slid down the stone bench to her end and kissed her and bit her lower lip until she gasped.

He felt his intoxication already turning into a hangover, that queasy neurological alchemy that usually happens during sleep. His abdomen was overfull, swollen with tainted viscera. People he’d betrayed came wandering out from the place in his mind where they usually stayed.

Space was full of angry little particles.

So instead he kept his little particle of shame and filth inside, where it could fester and turn septic.

Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.

Learn more about Readmill.

Perceptions are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. Esthetic judgements rather than abstract reasoning guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.

Highly recommended: Daniel’s book, Born on a Blue Day.

I humbly submit that there is no single element more important to your interface than the copywriting. There is nothing that makes or breaks a positive experience more than the simple set of words that you choose to communicate with. In a world in which we have to simplify as much as possible, nothing matters more than the small vocabulary you end up with in your final work.

Amen to that.

I’m beyond proud to announce Contents, an online magazine devoted to content strategy, online publishing, and editorial mischief.

We’ll publish essays, articles, as well as point you to the latest thinking, events, and job opportunities in the field.

Publication starts in the fall, 2011.

Check out our temporary HQ, where you can learn more about how to contribute.

Follow Contents on Twitter.

The list composed in anticipation is an antidote to the current life. It contains the ingredients of a future, perfect self.

From The List Maker, published on August 23rd, 2011 by The Morning News

I’m curious: when you write to customer support, how quickly do you expect a response?

Who have you had outstanding experiences with when you’ve had to write to customer support for a piece of software or web application that you use?

—Richard Koci Hernandez

Street photography and Instagram photobooks by @koci from Blurb Books on Vimeo.