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}

Bookshelf, On the Web

Books in the Balance

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bookshelf

I’m not sure I could handle this bookshelf in my home. I’m afraid the tilting tomes would cause me to be too anxious to enjoy them. But, I understand the “cool” factor of these shelves with their sliding weights and all. You can check them out over at Yanko Design.

bookshelf2

{via Gizmodo}

News

The Hobbit is a Cash Cow

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This week a 1937 first edition inscribed copy of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit sold at a European auction for £60,000 (or $119,122.61, for those folks who want to gripe about the weakness of the US dollar). All told the BBC says this is double the expected sale.

This is why I go to yard sales… the dream of one day running across an unkown copy…

Hey, it could happen!

{via Bookninja}

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!

Books, Publishing and Birmingham