Category Archives: Book Talk

Authors, Birmingham, Book Talk, Events, New Releases

Local author sheds light on local liquor laws and history

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Joe Coker, a Samford Religion professor, has turned his doctorial thesis into a book, Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement. (Nov2007/Univ. of Kentucky Press) It sounds very facinating as it looks at the history of the South’s view of alcohol and prohibition, through the lens of religion.

Black and White ran a short, but very informative Q&A with Coker. Coker is also on the calendar to sign and read from his book, at Jonathon Benton Bookseller on April 12th from 2p to 4p.

Book Talk, News

Lightning strikes Amazon

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Let’s hear it for compeititon! Amazon has been forced to spell out exactly what their new POD policies allow and ban. In response to a letter from competitor Lightning Source‘s John Ingram, Amazon has conceded that there are still ways to sell your POD books on site without using their Booksurge program…

Amazon further notes that if publishers do not want to use BookSurge for pod, they can still sell their titles through the e-tailer as part of it Advantage Program, provided they pre-produce five copies of each title that Amazon will stock in its warehouse. Publishers can also use Amazon’s third party marketplace option to list titles. Amazon is not requiring that pod titles be printed exclusively through BookSurge.

So basically, you can pay Amazon the extra fee through Booksurge to have your POD book sold on site or you can by Amazon the extra fee through the Advantage program or merchant marketplace program and have your book sold on site.

So either way Amazon is going to get you to pay for not using their POD service. But at least today they had to own up to their plans.

{via Publisher’s Weekly}

Book Talk, Media, On the Web, Publishers

Free books!

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Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod are now available for free download off of BitTorrent. The publisher No Starch Press calls it an “experiment”, to see what kind of reaction they get and if they can measure it.

“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}

Book Talk, On the Web

Links for Booklovers

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Kevin Bondelli has re-posted his massive 80 Online Resources for Book Lovers listing. It’s one of the best lists, of the sort, that I have come across. Many of the links I’m familiar with, but there’s about a third of them I’ve never heard of.

I’m had some fun with What Should I Read Next. Though, I just entered The Terror by Dan Simmons (which I just finished) and the third recommended title is  Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3. Which is uncanny. I fought Adobe all day today trying to get my PhotoShop transparencies to flatten correctly in InDesign. How did they know I needed the help? Anyway, I think I like LibraryThing’s feature better. It’s turned up many a good read.

If you want to see some b-e-a-utiful books check out the Rare Book Room. Lots of great scans and photographs from books printed in the 1600’s on up.

And I am saving Free Tech Books for later. It can’t be everything I need it to be, so I know I’ll just be disappointed. Though I’ll have to look and see if there are any useful books. Later though.

Anyway, that 80 link list is worth your time to check out and see if there is anything new for you!