While, admittedly, I lack the vision that it takes to see this Booker Prize winner translate into a musical, I am very excited about more people discovering Ishiguro’s work. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get to see it one day.

So I was glad to see Yen’s post about this today and even more excited to see some of the groups online that she highlighted. I’m familiar with all she mentioned and would only add a few of the discussions over at the Book Blogs ning site and the discussions at O’Reilly’s TOC community (also a ning site). And if you’re on Twitter the #followreader back-and-forth every Thursday are fantastic!

Someone on Twitter also said that they left BEA more pumped than ever, which is great news. Publishers need to adapt quickly if want to be able to continue adding value to an author’s work. And industry events like BEA and TOC are just the places to hear how… if the right people get to speak.

Here are the directions from their site:

…if it’s at the Boston Public Library and hasn’t been scanned yet, there will be a “Scan This Book” button… …we’ll have a librarian go and get the book from the stacks, bring it to our scanning center, and have our team of scanners digitize it page-by-page. Within 3-5 days, you should receive an email follow-up with a link to the newly-digitized copy, complete with PDF, online flip book, full text (using OCR technology) and more, all thanks to your request!

How cool is that? You can tell these people have put a ton of thought into their library system. if you go the site, you can even see which titles are in the process of being scanned. Kudos Boston!

This trained “professional filter” is exactly why I will always watch the network news and read newspapers. There is just too much bunk out there that I want to know that some sort of professional has done the leg work and sorted it for me. But I’m not sure how successful Reference Extract will be…

there just seems to be too much info out there to really make “human sorting” a real game-changer.

It just seems that too often the returns would have to rely on a Google or some other algorithm, since no one has had a chance to tag it. They only launched their site on October 1st, so we’ll just have to keep watch and see how they do. It’s really a pretty good try at the “original” search engine model.

Religious publisher Thomas Nelson has amassed a list of select titles and will send review copies to bloggerswho agree to post a 200-word review on their blog and and 200-word review on Amazon. The company’s CEO has been an active blogger and tweeter for some time. So he seems to really get the power of the medium and the tools that his marketing department can use.I know a lot of publishers are active in social media, but do you know of any other houses that have an official program like this in place? Obviously, they can’t fill every request, but it’s a neat idea. Kind of like LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program, but they just don’t have to go through LT. 

“I personally don’t have the attention economy to read a 250-page crime novel from start to finish.”

So that’s where he is coming from, on this. Zuiker goes on to say that these suspense-thillers will “reward” readers with rich media and video to enhance the reading experience. Basically, Zuiker will write an outline, then a ghost-writer will crank out 100 chapters and then Zuiker will back in and write 20 “cyber-bridges” (how lame-o is that phrase? Is this 1980? -ed.) for people to watch, before continuing on to the next chapter.

Of course, the example they give is a reading up to a crime, then log-on to watch a sex snuff film, and then go back to the book. I do have to concede this to the Hollywood folks… you’ll probably sell more books if you are including websites to watch sex videos.

To be fair, I am all for this type of convergence. It’s interesting how all these media formats merge and play off each other. I just think that this one pitch misses the mark on just about all of it. They really should have planned to do more and dig deeper.

(from Variety)

Thanks to Carla Jean Whitley for the mention in the August issue of Birmingham Magazine. Very cool! So everyone go out and buy a copy so you can tell all your friends “hey, I read that book blog”… but seriously she put together a great list of what the article calls “The Essentials… must-visit websites that will guide you through the city”.

The piece is populated by local online heavy-hitters, including al.com, bhamterminal.com, wadeonbirmingham.com, bhamwiki.com, etc. (you know all the guys that must have invented the interwebs).

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks. It’s fun keeping this site going and even more so when you know folks are reading. Plus, she got every last punctuation mark correct in {head}:sub/head. Why is that important to me? I dunno. It just is… and you have to appreciate someone that pays attention to detail like that.

It all just seems to be marketing driven to me. You tell a sales/marketing person, in any industry, “here’s a group of engaged like-minded folks”, then they are going to try and sell them something. I haven’t found a blog-to-book I liked yet, but there are a few more that I’m willing to give a shot.

{via Joe Wikert} (note: Wikert’s blog is a good read and highly recommended to folks trying to keep up with the evolving book industry.)

So, for once, Amazon can’t walk in the room and sweep away business from its competitor fast enough. What’s the answer? Take away your competitor’s avenues of distribution! Just don’t allow other businesses to play in the same room as you. Way to go Amazon, ya big bully!

All I can hope for is that this sets the stage for some really smart enterprising person to step in and make a strong business out of opening the doors Amazon just shut and locked. Hmmmmmm….

{via Publisher’s Weekly}

“I’ve been in publishing for just over 20 years and my training has not been to give books away,” writes Pollock on the No Starch blog. “But I think there’s something to this and logic tells me that if we increase the visibility of our titles, we’ll sell more books.”

I have checked out the Cult of Mac book, from the library and really enjoyed it. I haven’t flipped though the iPod book yet. Both books are at least a couple of years old.

So go download them if you want them! I do hope someone will share the results of their little experiment here. You can click through to wired.com’s site to get the torrent links.

{via wired.com}