what is the biggest media format globally?

A lot of people will be surprised to discover that good old book publishing is larger than movies, magazines, video games, and music in the global media and entertainment industry.

The global estimates for book publishing include trade, educational, and science-technology-medical publishing.

With the explosion of digital publishing, there are those that have declared the "book is dead." But the oldest communication technology is still alive and kicking!

The data was gathered by Rudiger Wischenbart Content Consulting for the International Publishers Association 2013 report.

what are the biggest book markets in the world

The United States is the largest book market with a 26% share, followed by China at 12%, Germany at 8%, and Japan at 7%. The top 10 markets make up approximately two-thirds of the global book industry.

The data was gathered by Rudiger Wischenbart Content Consulting for the International Publishers Association 2013 report. The chart reflects the value of each market as determined by book publishing per data along with number of new titles per 1 million inhabitant.

a time to fast

One of the hot new trends in the diet and exercise world is known as IF - intermittent fasting.

Tyler Graham explains in Men's Journal, The Magazine:

IF is not what most people typically think of as fasting – going without food or sustenance for days. Instead, IFers believe you can reap all the benefits (and more) of chronic calorie restriction after as few as 12 hours without food. Which means that simply skipping breakfast and waiting until lunch to eat any food (most say it's OK to put a splash of cream in your coffee) counts as IF.  It seems counterintuitive, but skipping meals helps you feel more energized, recover better from exercise, blast fat, and retain lean muscle mass, and even protects your body from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and cognitive decline – which is why NASA is interested in looking at fasting to improve the cognitive functioning of pilots and unmanned-aerial-vehicle operators.

But many doctor's warn against using a fast for weight-loss. A WebMD article argues:

"Fasting is not a weight loss tool. Fasting slows your metabolic rate down so your diet from before the fast is even more fattening after you fast,' says Joel Fuhrman MD, author of Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Plan for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss and Fasting and Eating for Health. Fasting for weight loss carries other health risks as well.  While fasting for a day or two is rarely a problem if you are healthy, "it can be quite dangerous if you are not already eating a healthy diet, or if you've got liver or kidney problems, any kind of compromised immune system functioning, or are on medication - even Tylenol," says Fuhrman, a family physician in Flemington, N.J.

But the time to fast I'm speaking of isn't about health or weight loss. The spiritual tradition of fasting is that there is a time to abstain from food in order to focus on God in prayer.

what makes a real home?

A home is a house with a heart inside.

Author Unknown

She was a single mother with a five-year-old son and a ton of bills. Just to stay afloat, she rented a musty, cramped camper at a local RV park. She was embarrassed and discouraged by her surroundings. She cringed one day as she overheard someone ask her little boy if he wished they had a real home.

But her grimace was replaced with a tear and a smile when she heard him give this reply: “We do have a real home; we just don’t have a house to put it in.”

Maybe you’re not happy where you are and want more. But no matter how bad things look or how long the journey to get where you want to be, don’t get so focused on the future that you miss the good things you have right now. God has a good plan for your future—but He has also sprinkled gifts and blessings in the life you have now.  Make sure your eyes—and heart—are open to see them.

Even if it was only a trailer, the little boy saw what was real and what mattered. His faith, love, and optimism created something that was real in the here and now.

God sets the lonely in families.

Psalm 68:6

Excerpted from A Daybook of Grace (published by Fall River Press, 2014). Created by Mark Gilroy. Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine booksellers.

do e-readers cause more eyestrain than paper and ink? (it depends)

In 2010 I wrote a blog, Why I Bought the Kindle Instead of the iPad, which listed the reasons that I had selected the simple black and white Kindle (E-ink technology) over the iPad, Nook, Sony, and other dedicated E-readers (all using LCD backlit technology). At the top of the list was the prevailing wisdom that E-ink and paper-and-ink cause less eyestrain than LCD during longer reading periods.

(Incidentally, it is hard to believe that the tablet format was new at the time! The first iPad was introduced April 3, 2010.)

I've continued to advise people to purchase a separate, inexpensive, dedicated E-ink device for long form reading. But when someone recently challenged me on this issue and asked where I got my data that LCD backlit screens increase eyestrain, I had to admit I couldn't remember where I got the information and that I had never personally read a primary research piece.

 I was delighted to find a fairly recent (December 13, 2013) peer-reviewed journal article, E-Readers and Visual Fatigue (Kevin Paterson), which is available to you in its entirety with compliments from the National Library of Science if you want to go through the design, methodology, and data of the study to draw your own conclusions.

And just in case you were wondering, with the explosion of digital reading, whether it be on E-reader devices,  smartphones or computer screens, there is a scientific name for eyestrain caused by digital reading: Visual Fatigue Syndrome (VFS).

So do e-readers cause more eye strain than E-ink or paper-and-ink reading?

The results were based on two objective measures - BPS, blinks per second and CFF, critical flicker
frequency (those moments when separate visual stimuli fuse together and appear as a single stimulus), and a single subjective measure of VFS, the subjects' own perception of six post-reading feelings: dizziness, headache, eyes feel funny, can't see as well, eyes feel tired, and numbness.

The results were conclusive. (And click on the link above if you want more details.)

the secret to writing so others will like it

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it. 

Jesse Stuart

The fact that I have made a living in the world of publishing for some thirty odd years is proof that I have acquired, written, edited, published, and sold what others wanted and asked for many times. I have helped publish a number of very successful books and series that were not necessarily what I might be looking for as a consumer and reader myself—a new devotional for mothers is a good example—but I knew that the material would meet a real need for many others.