More and more publishers seem to be taking advantage of Google Books in the early stages of promoting their titles. I wonder if HarperCollinsCanada plans to leave the entire book up (which released today)or take it down eventually? Either way. I’m stoked about this being put out there for us and will dutifully spread the word! Ha! See? I’m a sucker for book marketers.
Orbit Books is offering one e-book for $1 for one month, through April. They even set up a special promotional site. One thing I found interesting is that they are not serving up the downloads themselves. They have tapped into the myriad of online distributors of digital book files.
I think this is great promo Orbit is running. And I’m sure more publishers will follow suit. I just wonder how long it will be pefore publishers bite the bullet and invest in their own site infrastructure so they can serve up all these file formats themselves… fewer clicks is a good thing, for the customer and for the distribution fees.
I am a HUGE fan of our library system here in Birmingham. They are great and very rarely do I feel let down. I’m betting the folks in Boston feel the same way about their library system too. Especially with the launch of their Open Library Scan-on-Demand program.
Here are the directions from their site:
…if it’s at the Boston Public Library and hasn’t been scanned yet, there will be a “Scan This Book” button… …we’ll have a librarian go and get the book from the stacks, bring it to our scanning center, and have our team of scanners digitize it page-by-page. Within 3-5 days, you should receive an email follow-up with a link to the newly-digitized copy, complete with PDF, online flip book, full text (using OCR technology) and more, all thanks to your request!
How cool is that? You can tell these people have put a ton of thought into their library system. if you go the site, you can even see which titles are in the process of being scanned. Kudos Boston!
I mean, there were some GORGEOUS covers done this year. Maybe Amazon’s editors just let some random number generator pick these. Even with the Chip Kidd cover included, this list is just weird, at best. Feel free to disagree and if you do, please explain why. I just don’t get it.
I am a HUGE fan of 
