I’m pleased to announce the publication of the first installment of Cognitive Productivity with macOS®: 7 Principles for Getting Smarter with Knowledge, which is now for sale on Leanpub!

This book is based on Part 3 of Cognitive Productivity. Whereas Cognitive Productivity contains only text and images, I’ve recorded over 70 screencasts for this new book.

Most of the text and screencasts for the entire book, minus principle 7, have been created. The first installment, however, contains only principles 1 and 2. In the spirit of lean publishing, I hope to get feedback on the book before publishing the final installments. My plan is to publish a new principle every two to three weeks or so. However, principle 7 will take longer, and I might experience unexpected delays, particularly given that we are in the final stretch towards releasing a new app based on my Cognitive Productivity books, and I’m writing an epic theoretical paper.

A note about the way screencasts are embedded in this book. When, in 2013, I first decided to create this book, I expected to include the screencasts directly in its epub version. I kept postponing publishing this book until Leanpub supported embedded screencasts. When it became clear that this might not happen soon enough, I decided to publish using the current Leanpub approach. As such, each screencast is represented in the book by a poster image. When the reader clicks on the image (or the associated hyperlink), he or she is taken to the web page on youtube containing the screencast.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the current Leanpub approach has a substantial and fitting advantage. The fact that the reader can view the book’s screencasts in a web browser rather an ebook reader enables him or her to apply more of the cognitive productivity techniques described in this book! Whereas in Principle 5, “Delve”, I do explain how to get the best out of ebook readers, the fact is that information in ebook readers is somewhat sequestered due to the way ebook readers are designed. (I discussed this in Cognitive Productivity and on this blog.) When accessing videos using a web browser, you can, for instance, add Pinboard bookmarks for them. You can also create bidirectional links between your notes and screencasts. This means that you can easily navigate between your notes and the screencasts. With youtube, you can even bookmark specific locations in videos, enabling you to return to specific locations of the screencast. And the list goes on.

Another advantage of the videos being offloaded onto YouTube is that this keeps the size down. That’s particularly important for a LaunchBar book that gets updated often,and which a single reader by read on more than one device. Also, we don’t need to be limited by Apple’s 2TB iBookstore ebook limit when this book becomes available there. And the screencasts are approaching 2TB.

Still, readers will appreciate that the rest of the content is available in an ebook. For instance, it packages all this material, enabling you to search through it easily; there are convenient hyperlinks; you can embed annotations; you can read offline; etc.

I hope that by viewing the screencasts in this book, my readers will more deeply appreciate the powerful concepts conveyed by Cognitive Productivity, and be able to apply them in their own information processing. Having said that, readers can dig straight into this new book without reading the previous one.

The book is available at an introductory discounted price, which will increase as I publish more chapters.

(In case you’re curious, I wrote the book in a text editor using Markua.)