Hugh, over at BookOven just posted a pic of one his (neatly lines with bookends on every shelf) bookshelves and asked folks to share their own. I’m home with our 5-month-old this morning, so was able to turn around and snap this. I don’t get to play along much! I didn’t realize how crowded my shelves were until I uploaded the pic.
Cinder blocks and 2×4’s, anyone?
Via the HaperCollinsCanada Facebook group: “We’ve got 100% of Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? opened up for reading via Browse Inside.”
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.
So, click on over and give the entire book a look, if you’re interested.
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.
Tor seems to be doing this very well.
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!