One of my favourite websites is WorldChanging - an organization that looks at the world and ways of making it better - the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us.
They have posted a list of books that have inspired and informed their ideas and thinking. There are lot of great books in there to help anyone start changing the world.
I suspected the Harry Potter book would leak out early but I thought it would be some guy in the back of a supermarket, who’d unwrap the pallett and stick a few on the shelves thinking it was just another James Patterson book. This time, it’s the all-powerful Internet. PDFs were easy to obtain yesterday. I can’t help wondering what’s going on at Bloomsbury, Scholastic and Raincoast - are they trying to find the mole or perhaps moles?
No links to file sharing networks or spoiler bloggers…
Harry Potter stamps in the UK.
Ex-Carry On star Jim Dale, narrator of the audio version, is interviewed.
If you don’t follow the rules, you can’t have a Potter party.
Fury in Israel that the book is released on the Sabbath.
The American Library Association can be found in Second Life, now four years old, in an area called Cybrary City - reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.
An Italian author has written a novel on his cellphone. Compagni di Viaggo is a science fiction novel. GR8!
Canadian author Michael Winter plans to serialize his latest novel on Facebook. Winter is best know for The Big Why.
The New York Public Library gets its first ‘Expresso Book Machine.’ Several other libraries are set to install them too.
A hacker claims to have secured a digital manuscript of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, reports Reuters. At least, this is a little different from two years ago when we had supermarkets and drugstores selling the book early because the shelf-stackers didn’t know anything about an embargo laden with lawsuits.
If you follow the world of “social media” and “Web 2.0″, you may have come across the Twitter application - which is a small tool that lets you broadcast small text messages … or as they describe it:
“a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives.”
Anyhow, I came across someone who is using the Twitter framework to write fiction. As they describe it:
“Fiction + Twitter = Flits. Short stories. Really short. 140 characters to tell a complete fictional tale.”
It’s an interesting idea - along the lines of a haiku - a restricted format that forces one to get to the essence of an idea or thought. (via Book of Joe)
More technology….this time in Tennessee where seniors (that’s old people to non-Americans) are embracing audiobooks.
Students at Santa Clara University can visit the college library… in Second Life.
Richard Charkin, the CEO of publisher Macmillan, stole some laptops from the Google booth at Book Expo America last weekend. He was trying to prove a point about Google’s quest to digitalise books.
Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.
I would like to comment on this but I can’t. On one hand, Google brings thousands of customers to AbeBooks every day and on the other hand publishers keep publishing books that people want to buy from us.
Here are the most expensive books sold through AbeBooks in April. The most expensive one is not a book at all but a set of IT journals. Who’d have thought that some journals about software could fetch such a high price? A little further investigation revealed that there are quite a few sets of IT journals spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s for sale on the site at some very impressive prices.
The BBC speaks to science fiction writer Alistair Reynolds, who works for the European Space Agency as an astronomer. Reynolds’ latest book is The Prefect.
Congratulations to our colleagues at BookFinder.com, who have just launched their French website - JustBooks.fr. BookFinder.com, of course, has been going for just over 10 years and that’s a long time in Internet years.
JustBooks.fr joins JustBooks.co.uk for the United Kingdom and JustBooks.de for Germany.
Back after the long weekend - The Times of London has a story about further development of an e-reader device, this time dispensing with the glass screen.
One of the trial designs seen by The Times comprises a screen backed by soft, white leather, which is folded over and buttoned in the manner of a wallet. The fact that it looks more like something one might buy in Gucci…..