Some things to think about (and do) in 2010.

Seth Godin got together about 70 smart people to write something brief about “What Matters Now” and he released it as a free PDF.  It’s been available for a few weeks already, but as we close in on New Year’s Eve, it seems appropriate to bring it back to the surface… Especially if you somehow [...]

It’s a Kindle Christmas… Maybe a KindleNation?

Amazon.com just announced record breaking sales of the Kindle for this holiday season.  On a personal note, my family had a total of three Kindles under various trees, and we’re now a two-Kindle household.  Here’s more from Amazon (full release here):
Amazon Kindle is the Most Gifted Item Ever on Amazon.com
On Christmas Day, for the First [...]

Covey takes ebook rights away from Simon & Schuster

Last week we learned Simon & Schuster will wait up to 4 months to release ebooks from their bestselling, top authors.  Today we find one of their bestselling, top authors, Stephen Covey, taking ebook rights away from them and going direct to Amazon.  Wow.  That didn’t take long.
Check out the full story at the New [...]

What could possibly go wrong with this idea?

Today in the Wall Street Journal, I found the headline:  Two Major Publishers To Hold Back E-Books.  Now what could possibly go wrong with this idea?  I for one find it brilliant to withhold your biggest books from folks that love to read so much that they drop around $300 for a device (sometimes more [...]

Snow Leopard Super Reference Showdown

One of the original ideas of the site was to have head to head book reviews. They’re not common in traditional outlets, probably for a couple of reasons. One, there has to be a winner and a loser (or degrees of each) and that’s not going to make some people happy.  Second, it’s [...]

Kindles, Nooks & eBook World Domination

To start, we’ll re-report on Giga-Om re-reporting on the New York Times’s report on Jeff Bezo’s and the Kindle.  Here are the key points of the original and the wrap-up:

If a book is available on Kindle, it sells 48 copies compared to 100 physical copies sold.
Kindle launched with 90,000 titles two years ago.
More than 350,000 [...]

Changing the Book Publicity Business

This week, I (along with a few thousand others on the “Tribes” website) received an email from author, speaker, marketing genius, Seth Godin, regarding how he planned to distribute review copies of his forthcoming book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?. Typically, the publicist at the publisher, or if the book is “big enough” the publicity [...]