All posts by trav

At the heart of it all, I’m a fan. A fan of books and bookstores. A fan of fiction and non-fiction. A fan of authors and publishers. And most of all I’m a fan of great conversations sparked by books. All that to say - I really need more bookshelves.

Best Business Books

I like business books. I’m a firm believer that if you really want to know what’s going on in your community, then skip the fornt page of the newspaper and read the business section foirst. This is about the folks actually doing the work, not just talking about the work that needs to be done (i.e. politicians.)

So, I read a fair amount of business books…

Continue reading Best Business Books

All together now

Here’s a pretty neat post from some folks over at Picador about publishing a book simultaneously as a hardback and paperback.

I’ve always wondered if it’s two different customer sets. Paperbacks have always been easier for me to read, so I always go for those (the lower price point helps too). But the hardbacks look sooooo much better on the shelf and 9 out of 10 times are designed better.

From my desk here I can see six titles that I bought in paperback and liked it so much that I bought it in hardback too. Is that weird? I haven’t reread any of them, but it just seems more appropriate to have these books as hardbacks sitting on my shelf.

Adobe Adds to the Ad game

Now here’s a new service/product that could really do wonders for small publishers and anyone with print content. According to Publisher’s Weekly, Adobe has teamed up with Yahoo to provide a service that allows you to place ads in your pdf documents.

So, if you post a 10 page pdf document to your site, and are running this new service, Adobe/Yahoo will give you code to place on random pages that they’ll serve ads to, whenever it’s opened/downloaded.

WOWIO (which lets you download whole books for free) has been immensely successful at doing this and advertisers love them for it.

This could be really cool for folks sitting on tons of content with no way to pay for distribution. Ahhhh, the power of the internet!