Enthralling trailer for David McRaney’s book, “You Are Not So Smart”. I love the animated typography – it has the effect of forcing you to be engaged with the video.
You Are Not So Smart Book Trailer
– Posted on December 20, 2011Posted in: Books
Books Archive
0
Marco Ament Reviews The Kindle Fire
– Posted on November 17, 2011Posted in: Books, Technology
Marco Ament:
I expected the Kindle Fire to be a compelling iPad alternative, but I can’t call it delightful, fun, or pleasant to use. Quite the opposite, actually: using the Fire is frustrating and unpleasant, and it feels like work.
=(
0
The Verge’s Kindle Fire Review
– Posted on November 14, 2011Posted in: Books, Technology
Joshua Topolsky:
For an OS that’s still playing catch up to iOS, and one which is plagued by fragmentation in its main, fully supported app store, the introduction of a completely separate store on a completely separate product which developers now have to to consider seems relatively awful to me. Sure, there are some great titles available to Fire owners — but what’s the long term plan? If the Fire doesn’t reach parity with Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich, all of the new “tablet” Android apps will be unavailable for this platform or require a second build which developers will have to maintain, and that seems untenable.
Disappointing if you’re looking for the Kindle Fire to be an all-purpose tablet device. That doesn’t mean that it’s completely useless as a full featured tablet, but I wouldn’t hold out hope for long-term developer support on yet another fragment of the Android ecosystem.
0
Amazon Prime Now Includes Monthly Free Kindle Books
– Posted on November 3, 2011Posted in: Books, Technology
Okay so it’s technically called the “Kindle Owners’ Lending Library,” (Really? You couldn’t think of an easier name to remember, Amazon?) but in practice it’s essentially a free book every month for Amazon Prime subscribing Kindle owners.
With Prime, Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers – as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates.
Keep in mind that “Kindle owners” is a key term, because you can’t “lend” books via Kindle apps. You actually need to own a physical Kindle to take advantage of this offer. In fact, my chief annoyance with the service is that you can only browse and “borrow” books via the Kindle Store on the device itself. You can’t find the book you want on the web and have it delivered to your Kindle. It’s a pain because e-ink is TERRIBLE for quickly flipping through hundreds of pages.
Critics also will point out that there’s only 5,000 or so books available, (none from any of the major six publishers) but so what? I easily found a handful of books that I wanted to read immediately from just browsing the first couple of pages of offerings. Seth Godin’s latest, “We Are All Weird,” Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy, Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball.”
It’s pretty clear that Amazon is test driving a potential “all you can eat” digital book subscription service ala Netflix or Spotify. Let’s face it, $10-$15 digital books are still a fair chunk of change for most people. Why not go for a $10-$15 monthly service and essentially sell a guaranteed 12 books a year to people? I’d wager that it would be a greater source of revenue than selling titles a la carte.
Slowly, but surely, Amazon is creating its own Apple-like ecosystem. It’s a brilliant maneuver because in order to access the “free” ebooks and streaming video content you have to be both a member of the $80 a year Amazon Prime and own an Amazon device. Once they get a subscription music service implemented, you theoretically won’t have to go anywhere else to consume your content.
Of course, this assumes that Amazon’s content offerings are robust enough. Currently, their video streaming and ebook lending catalogs leave much to be desired. But it’s a step in the right direction.
Content publishers, consider yourselves disrupted.
0
Neil Gaiman Knows The Meaning Of Free
– Posted on March 11, 2008Posted in: Books, Music Industry
Neil Gaiman has been my favorite contemporary fiction author ever since I was captivated by The Sandman in the early 90’s. Recently, he and his publisher have put up his most defining literary work, American Gods, in its entirety for free online (I recommend you give it a read, it’s wonderful!). Apparently, he’s gotten some flak from some small bookstores who believe that move will be the death of them if authors everywhere started putting up digital copies of their books for free. Neil, on the other hand, appears to have read Chris Anderson’s Free! article and understands the current marketplace climate:
Just as a bookseller who regards a library as the enemy, because people can go there and read — for free! — what he sells, is missing that the library is creating a pool of people who like and take pleasure in books, will be his customer base, and are out there spreading the word about authors and books they like to other people, some of whom will simply go out and buy it.
If you have the time, I suggest reading his full reply to the letter – he’s got some pretty insightful thoughts on the process of building a customer base with “free” content.
The music industry could stand to learn a thing or two from this affair.
Read Neil Gaiman on giving away free content [neilgaiman.com]
Read American Gods online [harpercollins.com]
0
The Music Industry, It’s FANNNNNNTASTIC! [Rock On]
The book is not so much a biography of Kennedy’s life as a whole, but a snapshot into the 18 months of his life as a creative video marketer for Atlantic Records circa 2002. Having never worked in the industry before, Kennedy’s perspective as an outsider depicts an industry of excess, complacency, and hilarity. In fact, many of his initial encounters mirrored my own initial impressions when I started working in music. The internal monologue of “Oh shit I am standing next to (insert big name music star here)! Pleaseletmesaysomethingnaturalbecoolbecool” that he writes is spot on with how I reacted when I was a wide-eyed initiate in the music industry. A lot of the humor comes from Kennedy’s written “thoughts” and they had me lol’ing in my chair quite a few times.
There’s not much of a coherent plot, but that’s fine. Rock On is basically a collection of anecdotes from Kennedy’s tenure at Atlantic. If you’ve never worked in the business before, it’s an eye opening tale about just how ridiculous the inner workings of the industry are. You have executives in corner offices who don’t even show up to work because the whole reason they have their jobs is because they signed a big artist 25 years ago and have been riding the coattails ever since. $50,000 office desks, fat expense accounts, cluelessness, artist hypocrisy, two and a half hour lunches, corporate sycophants, high employment turnover are all things you’ll read about. All that glamor, glitz, coolness that you’ve attributed to the music industry in your mind is brought crashing down to earth in what amounts to an episode of The Office.
The funny thing is, everything Kennedy writes about working at a major label seemed natural to me at the time. In fact, I probably had less of a jaw-dropping reaction to a lot of the anecdotes than most people will when reading the book. If you’ve worked in music before, you’ll know what I mean. Nevertheless, Rock On was a very entertaining book that I read in two sittings one day. Recommended if you like music and/or office humor.
*statistics are from googling “the average american reads how many books a year” and checking out what the first page gave me