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”.
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.
The uber-popular blog DailyCandy has a new book out. The kick-off party spawned this post, about the blog-to-book movement, from CNET’s Caroline McCarthy. Nothing earth shattering in the post, but through the article and comments you can glean some titles of some recent blook hits and misses, if you’re following those kinds of things.
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.)
Amazon.com has announced that they will no longer allow Print On Demand books to be sold on their site… unless they are printed by Amazon’s own POD service BookSurge. It’s no secret that the big A has been struggling to gain a foothold in the booming POD world. But they haven’t been able to. Many of the other services out there just do it better (something about focusing on your core business…) and they offer a better community.
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….
Cult of Mac and Cult of iPodare 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.
