Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

According to ReadWrite Web, Penguin Books is using new social media tools to distribute six of its titles in a new We Tell Stories campaign. The British publisher is using a LiveJournal blog, Twitter, and Google Maps to post its stories in a serialized format over a weeklong period for each story.

If you’re at all interested in social media such as social networks, blogs, wikis, podcasts, microblogs, etc., you’ll want to check Mashable’s latest article linking to 15 Free Social Media White Papers and Ebooks. Here are some of the titles:

What is Social Media?

Social Networking, the “Third Place”, and the Evolution of Communications

We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information

12 Essential tips for Success in Social Media

Social Networking: Brave New World or Revolution from Hell? A look at the phenomenon of Social Networking and the implications for Businesses

Veronica Belmont at Mahalo Daily interviews author Tom Merritt about self-publishing.

Story Links:
Tom Merritt
NaNoWriMo
Lulu.com

via Social Media

Zigmas Bigelis creates a mega-list of 80 tools and applications sure to be of interest to librarians and other book lovers. I knew quite a few of these, but was pleased to find some that were new to me such as Paperback Swap and Free Tech Books. The list is categorized into the following sections:

• Social Networking for Book Lovers
• E-books
• Online Bookstores
• Find the Best Prices for Books
• Audiobooks
• Study Guides and Summaries
• Library Resources
• Bibliography and Research
• Book Exchanges/Swapping
• Online Documents
• What to Read
• Miscellaneous

In the spirit of Read an E-Book Week which runs from March 2-8, Epublishers Weekly comes up with 30 Benefits of Ebooks. Here are the top 10:

1. Ebooks promote reading.
2. Ebooks are good for the environment.
3. Ebooks preserve books.
4. Ebooks, faster to produce than paper books, allow readers to read books about current issues and events.
5. Ebooks are easily updateable.
6. Ebooks are searchable.
7. Ebooks are portable.
8. Ebooks (in the form of digital audio books) free you to do other activities while you are listening.
9. Ebooks can be printable.
10. Ebooks defy time: they can be delivered almost instantly.

A new mashup has been announced on Programmable Web which involves a non-profit service that enables you to select books in the public domain from websites such as Google Books and the Internet Archive and have them printed via Lulu.com, the print-on demand service. The mashup combines APIs from both LuLu and the Internet Archive and appears to be a straightforward way to get printed editions of over 200,000 public domain books from Internet Archive and 1.5 million from Google Books.

Most of today’s collaboration tools are free to use and easily accessible, resulting in wide adoption rates and increased experimentation. One way that authors are experimenting with these tools is by using them to enhance their writing process. Here are a few examples:

Author Uses Blog Comments to Peer Review Book
Author Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego is using blog comments to provide a peer review for his Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by MIT Press.

“Wardrip-Fruin is using an adapted version of CommentPress, which is a plugin that lets users comment individually on each paragraph of a blog post, and will be posting his book one chapter at a time on his blog.”

Writing a Book in Google Docs
Brian Jepson and Philipp Lenssen are collaboratively writing Google Office Hacks by O’Reilly using Google Docs.

“Once a document is written, I’m using the “Check spelling” feature Google Docs provides. When that’s done, I’m saving a local backup by using the “Export as HTML (zipped)” option… just in case anything gets lost. Then I switch to the Share tab to share the page with Brian. Brian will then get an invite to the document and can take over from there.”

Author Uses Amazon Kindle to Beta Test New Book
Former Microsoft programmer, Daniel Oran is beta-testing his second novel, Believe using Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

“Oran continues to innovate, this time by using the recently released Amazon Kindle e-book reader to let early readers help him refine a draft of his latest book. Oran’s use of the Kindle is one of the more interesting we’ve seen, and really demonstrates the device’s read/write potential.”

The Django Book
Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss published the first draft of their Django book and invited comments from readers on a line-by-line basis. Watch a YouTube video explanation of the project.

Blogging & Other Social Media: Technology & Law
Justin Patten, Andrew Mills, and Alex Newson co-edited Blogging & Other Social Media: Technology & Law by Gower Publishing, and used a PBWiki to gather contributions from legal bloggers and academics.

Walt Crawford has just released a new Cites & Insights book - Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples. This mega-guidebook has 289 pages and 231 examples from 156 college and university libraries in the US, Canada, Australia, Botswana, England, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, and Wales. This latest blogging compendium from Crawford complements his previous, and equally impressive Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples. Both are available for sale on Lulu or CreateSpace.

Educause has written a quick primer on how to use the popular self-publishing service, Lulu with their 7 Things You Should Know About Lulu. This handy introduction covers the following topics:

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Sam Wallin (aka Crash Solo), and other librarians at the Vancouver Community Library in Vancouver, Washington have created a series of 60-second book review videos called “The One Minute Critic”. Originally the video project began as a way to promote an event of the same name, but the effort has since taken on a life of its own. You can check out more of these entertaining and informative videos on the One Minute Critic blog, or on the blip.tv show page.

Web Worker Daily has issued an annotated list of the Top Ten Books for Web professionals for 2007. Many of these look good, however, the one that stands out as most appealing has to be The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - who wouldn’t want a four hour workweek?. Their favorites are:

1. Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet–Better, Faster, Easier by Mark Frauenfelder.
2. Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day by Gina Trapani.
3. One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success by Marci Alboher.
4. Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success by Penelope Trunk.
5. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss.
6. Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing by Lois Kelly.
7. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
8. The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun.
9. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger.
10. Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle

And they have announced their own book Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working, which available for pre-order on Amazon.

Aaron Wall, author of the SEO Book, along with Giovanna Wall has created a custom guide to search engine optimization for bloggers. Providing screenshots and online video, this guide presents an in-depth, multimedia look at SEO topics and presents focused tips concerning:

• What Google Knows About Your Blog
• Why Blog SEO is Different From SEO for Other Websites
• Domain Registration & Hosting
• Keyword Research
• Keeping Up With the Joneses
• Writing Clear & Compelling Headlines
• Optimizing Site Structure
• Web Analytics
• Controversy
• Use Push Marketing After Launching Your Site
• Understanding Network Effects
• Learn More About SEO

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, half of Japan’s Top 10 bestselling fiction books were composed via mobile phones. Each sold an average of 400,000 copies. This new cultural phenomenon sweeping Japan is called keitai shousetsu or mobile phone novels and it is transforming minor publishing houses into forces to be reckoned with.

These works are oftentimes written by first-time authors using a single-name pseudonym and are delivered to their young female-dominated audience via cell phone, the same medium which was used to create them. One of the most popular of these next generation books, Koizora (Love Sky) by Mika has sold over 1.2 million copies since last October.

via TechCrunch

The New York Times Book Review has selected 100 Notable Books of the Year from all those books reviewed since December 3, 2006. The list is set to run in the Dec. 2, 2007 print edition of the Book Review, but you can read it online first!

Here are a few of the more interesting tomes on the list:

• HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS. By J. K. Rowling. (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, $34.99.) Rowling ties up all the loose ends in this conclusion to her grand wizarding saga.
• LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY: Stories. By Jim Shepard. (Knopf, $23.) Shepard’s surprising tales feature such diverse characters as a Parisian executioner, a woman in space and two Nazi scientists searching for the yeti.
• PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. By Joan Breton Connelly. (Princeton University, $39.50.) A scholar finds that religion meant power for Greek women.

via Micro Persuasion

The Kindle e-book reader was released by Amazon today at a price point of $399. A click on the Kindle books section of Amazon’s website displays over 91,000 results with e-book prices ranging from just pennies to $1,000, with most popular books landing in the $9.99 range. Newsweek has full coverage of the story along with a talk with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos here.

Via Seth’s Blog.