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When you’re looking for a great book to savor, think of tech books that will entertain you while they make you think about the world around you. As our lives are being changed dramatically by personal technology, books can help us to reflect and learn about the transformation we’re experiencing.
These books, both fiction and non-fiction, may give you a new perspective on how we use tech in our daily lives, how quickly we’ve become dependent upon tech, and how our relationship with tech may change in the future.
[note]The prices for books listed below are for Kindle books at Amazon (unless otherwise noted). All books are available in print as well. [/note]
Non-fiction Tech Books
Having a good idea in tech isn’t enough. The following books show how tech successes often are as much about an innovative way of doing business as about ground-breaking technology.
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
We now can get nearly anything from Amazon within days, if not hours, so we may forget that Amazon was known as the World’s Largest Bookstore before it became the Everything Store. What started as a simple online bookstore has quickly become our go-to shopping site for everything from electronic books to groceries to fashion to Amazon Web Services to streaming videos and more.
The Everything Store by Brad Stone is a fascinating history both of Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. While we now take shopping at Amazon for granted, we may not realize that many risky business moves contributed to its success.
Imagine Amazon without customer reviews. Believe it or not, adding customer reviews to the site was a controversial decision Bezos made in the early days of the site. According to the book, some people at Amazon feared that negative reviews of a product would hurt sales so were against including customer reviews. They also realized that Amazon couldn’t moderate all the reviews being posted at its site so some were concerned about the lack of control over what customers would say.
We now know that the customer reviews at Amazon can be one of the most efficient ways to evaluate whether or not we should purchase a product. While reviews aren’t always accurate, visitors can flag reviews and vote them unhelpful so Amazon can weed out ones that don’t belong on the site.
The Everything Store is available for $9.99.
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Google is another website we take for granted so revisiting recent history reminds us how quickly the company has grown. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy traces the history of Google, its successes and failures, showing us how the business decisions made by Google helped the company grow and shaped its effect on our lives.
When Google started as a search site, it went up against a crowded field of powerful competitors such as AltaVista who had a different attitude about search: don’t give visitors the most helpful results.
Most websites, especially those that contain advertising, want visitors, especially repeat visitors. If search results give visitors what they want, then those visitors have their questions answered. They won’t hit the Back button to repeat the search, looking for better answers. So why give them the best answers in the initial search results? Search engines believed they would lose traffic if they gave visitors the best results the first time they searched.
Google had the radical idea to make search results as helpful as possible. If a visitor hit the Back button that meant that the search results weren’t helpful. So Google tried to make the search results as helpful as possible so visitors wouldn’t return to repeat the same search, hoping for better results.
The book points out that by taking the long view of giving its visitors the best services, Google quickly became the most accurate search website, allowing the company to grow exponentially, leaving its competitors in the dust.
When was the last time you searched on AltaVista?
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives is available for $14.99.
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
Video games aren’t all, well, fun and games. Masters of Doom by David Kushner is the tale of the rise and fall of the developers of one of the most successful video games of all time: Doom. As the video game industry moved from arcade machines to home computers, game development opened up to anyone who could code.
Even if you never played Doom (I haven’t) you’ll still enjoy learning about how John Carmack and John Romero went from being kids who loved playing video games to multi-millionaire developers who transformed the gaming industry and pop culture. Carmack and Romero, being gamers themselves, realized the value not only in the game itself, but also in the story and artwork that help make games become a more immersive experience.
Their ground-breaking idea was to give away their video games for free, for the first few levels. Players got hooked then had to pay money to unlock higher levels. This innovative approach to marketing their games helped give Doom and later Quake the publicity that propelled the games to success. App developers who offer free apps with in-app purchases are following the Doom model.
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture is available for $9.51.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
Never before has the human population been vulnerable to instant worldwide humiliation. But the Internet has made that event a possibility for anyone, especially those who use social media. One tweet gone wrong and you can lose your job, your reputation and your dignity.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson examines stories of people who have been publicly shamed on the Internet. He interviews people whose lives have been ruined by information going viral, sometimes instantly, that have shamed them publicly. You may begin to develop sympathy for those who have faced the wrath of judgment on the Internet.
This book is more than a warning of what not to do online. Instead, Ronson gives helpful advice to help anyone who has been shamed rise above the horror and go on to face the world with your chin held high.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is available for $13.99. For a real treat, check out the Audible audiobook version, narrated by the delightful author Jon Ronson: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed on Audible for $20.99 or one credit.
Don’t miss => Audible: My Favorite Way to Read a Book
Fiction Tech Books
The world of tech fiction can help us imagine what life would be like both without the tech we take for granted or if tech took a different turn. The more we become dependent upon tech the more we take it for granted. What if the tech we use in our daily lives were gone tomorrow? Where is tech taking us in the future?
CyberStorm
As cyberattacks are becoming more bold, attacking governments, banks and others, we may wonder what life would be like without the Internet. CyberStorm by Matthew Mather shows us a world we may not want to live in: New York City during a blizzard when the Internet shuts down.
This End of the World as We Know It book show us that life without tech may not be just a matter of going back a few years earlier. If we return to days without tech, we may not be faced with a simpler time.
This book does an effective job of showing how pervasive our dependence on Internet connections is and how we can’t go simply go back to a past world where we didn’t depend on cyberspace. If you have a difficult time imagining life without email, Google search, social media and more, you’ll enjoy this book.
CyberStorm is available for $2.99.
The Circle
In 1984 George Orwell shows us what life could be like if government becomes Big Brother, intruding into our daily lives. The Circle by Dave Eggers shows us what life could be like if tech companies become Big Brother.
The Circle gives an interesting insight into how much personal information tech companies, especially social media companies, learn about us, with our permission. The next time you Like something, allow an app to use your location, or do an Internet search, you may think twice about the information you’re sharing about yourself.
After you read The Circle, you’ll definitely want to Clean Up Your Permissions!
The Circle is available for $9.99.
Ready Player One
Part science fiction, part nostalgia, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline takes us into the year 2044, a future world where even more of life is lived on the Internet. Physical schools no longer exist, all learning is conducted online and each person is identified by their avatar.
This adventure story not only propels us into the future, it also takes us back to the days of classic video arcades where a quarter placed on a Pac-Man machine reserved your spot in line. Characters compete to play a video game in a virtual reality where the winner has to solve pop culture riddles from the 1980’s.
Ready Player One is available for $3.99.
Other Book Recommendations
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Your Thoughts
Have you read any of these tech books? Do books make you think about the ways tech is affecting our society? Which tech books (or other books) do you recommend? Share your ideas in the Comments section below!
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* Beach image (edited) courtesy of Aftab Uzzaman via Flickr and Creative Commons
Hi Carolyn,
Wonderful indeed 🙂
It’s been ages since I sat with a book, let alone doing anything else. Yes, even the ebooks are a far cry now, so your post is a great reminder for me.
As these are recommended by you, they’re bound to be good ones. So, as I’d be soon going on this years much needed Summer break, I’d just pick up one of these and get started with my reading! Have you read all of these? Which was your best pick? Just asking!
Loved the SlideShare – you keep getting better with them each time…hmm…need to sit and try one in the holidays too! Bookmarking this page for sure to come back to a little later 🙂
Thanks for sharing. Have a nice week ahead 🙂
Hi Harleena, Yes, my guest post at Aha!NOW inspired me to get back to making SlideShares. You’re right, every time I create one I learn something new. I should write a post on creating SlideShare presentations…
Yes, I have read all of these books. I don’t only read tech books but I do enjoy them. I have read others but these are the very best tech books I have read over the past three years since my last tech book reading list was published.
I would have a very difficult time picking just one as everyone’s taste is different. Some people enjoy fiction while others prefer non-fiction.
If you’re interested in social media, The Circle and So You’ve Been Shamed should be at the top of your list. If you want to learn about successful tech companies, the first three books should be the ones you start with. If you enjoy imagining what tech would be like in the future, then Ready Player One and CyberStorm should be the first ones you read.
I enjoyed each of these books thoroughly and I believe Wonder of Tech readers will enjoy them too!
Thanks for your lovely comment and for your sharing, Harleena. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead!
Hi Carolyn,
You set me thinking and trying to remember the Doom spin offs. Doom was too advanced for the time and needed the sort of computers we have today. It was the first really 3D game. but tended to run too slow. That was a great time, because everyone tried hacking and cracking and some of the cheats were great. I played F16 Flight Eagle then and altered the missile system! That was 3 dimensional, but the graphics were primitive. When I tried it on a new computer with a pentium processor, it was incredibly fast and great fun. My post today has photos of my event on Saturday night 4 hours of shooting in poor light, but got some good photos!
Hi Mike, Very cool that you were a Doom fan. Yes, the book discusses the restraints of personal computers at the time. If computers then were as powerful as computers of today, the game probably would have been even more popular!
I never played Doom but was still fascinated by the history of the game and its developers. We have come such a long way in a very short time!
Interesting article and I was lucky to came across some of them.
And guess what? I am adding some of these books into my bucket list for future reading.
Thanks for sharing, Carolyn!
Hi Reginald, Yes, I’ve read all of these and have really enjoyed them. They’re interesting both for fans of tech and for those whose lives have been touched by tech (which is nearly everybody!). I hope you enjoy these books as well, Reginald.
Hi Carolyn,
I haven’t read any of the books you recommend. I actually don’t remember the last time I read a tech book, fiction or non-fiction. I do read a lot, but mostly books about marketing and business, and “ordinary” fiction.
I remember one book I read by Jeffery Deaver about a serial killer using the internet to track his victims. It was a lot of tech involved and I remember it was an intense thriller and very well-written. Not sure about the name of the book though 🙂
Hi Jens, Wow, you don’t have time to read books because you are so busy writing them? Very cool!
Is the name of the Jeffery Deaver book The Blue Nowhere? Sounds interesting! Thanks for sharing that one.
Yes, that’s the name of the book. It was awesome.
Thanks for sharing…! The list is a nice collection of Technolgy books.
Well, reading is the most way for personal development. You know..? I want to start a new blog about technology, but I seem no idea to write about tech blog.
I want to buy some books, but I also have no idea about which book should I choose for better reading…
Thanks for sharing..! 🙂 I bookmarked your and I will back for reviewing the book.
Great list. I am not even a techie guy. But as a blogger, i have to adapt myself to get knowledge about more technology.
I really like to read “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives”. I want to learn more about Google, how they work, how they control everything.
I looking for a better reading from this book