Tag Archives: Birmingham

Gifts for Book Lovers, On the Web

Paper & prose for the nose

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smell.jpgHere’s one for the Gift List this season. It’s a scent from CB Experience called “In the Library”.

Here is the description of the fragrance, from the manufacturer’s site:

“English Novel taken from a Signed First Edition of one of my very favorite novels, Russian & Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth and a hint of wood polish”

What’s really cool is that we all know exactly what they are talking about. If you’ve spent anytime in a used bookstore, you know that nice comforting aged paper smell they are referring to. I sure do wish there was a way to sample the goods over the internet.

Now, if they can just get the smell of a fresh batch of bluelines or color print proofs in a bottle… but maybe that’s just me.

(via Books, Inq.)

Media, News

Are you kidding me?

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While folks all over the blogosphere are debating the merits of Amazon’s Kindle, Japan has evidentially moved on. This just seems unbelievable to me, but…

“This week the 2007 bestseller list, published by Japan’s biggest book distributor, Tohan, revealed that five of the year’s most successful novels, including the top three, were first written for downloading on mobile phones before being republished in book form.”

That just doesn’t seem possible. I mean sure I can see some books getting their start on mobile media, but bestsellers? Has anyone ever tried to read a novel on a cellphone screen? I can’t imagine it.

This news tidbit came from the London Times Online and it’s a great little article looking into this trend. I can’t imagine this spreading beyond Japan, but I guess when you grow up text messaging your friends (like the new generation seems to be able to do in their sleep, or while walking down the mall, or sidewalk, or driving Birmingham’s highways) then reading Dickens on the phone is no big deal.

Maybe I’m just getting old.

On the Web, Publishers

Adobe Adds to the Ad game

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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!