Reading Copy Book Blog

An Indonesian businessman tossed over $10,000 out of an aircraft about 40 miles west of Jakarta as a promotion for his marketing book.

The stunt was captured on video

This is a great podcast. It explains how to make a handbag out of an old hardcover.

Follow the instructions and you are left with… this

Fantastic video preview of an upcoming pop up book.

Google is to share video archives of the authors that come and speak to their staff. Looks like a wide variety of authors - science fiction to politics to business to culture:

• John Scalzi - who we also interviewed here
• Chris Anderson
• Neil Gaiman
• Joseph Stiglitz
• Hillary Clinton

I was tempted to just post this without comment, but I think it probably requires some background. Diehard AbeBooks fans may remember that a few years ago we made the step into the world of TV advertising. It was a small, baby step. And the above is the result.

Looking at it now, I tend to cringe a little … the accents, the overacting, the non-acting, the graphics. In the fall of 2004 we hired a production company to assist us with creating a 30-second spot on cable channels - a type of ad called Direct Response Spot. We put together a script and storyboard for the shoot and flew down to Philadelphia for a two-day shoot.

The shoot was actually pretty interesting (being my first TV commercial experience) and what I remember the most was the repetition of everything. Each scene was performed numerous times with slight variations on the lines, the delivery, the backgrounds, the lighting, the actions performed, the camera movements and so on. And no matter how hard we tried, the woman doing the first voice over couldn’t shake that accent, and the child was not into being there that day.

Anyhow, we’ve uploaded the video to YouTube for everyone who missed it the first time around, so enjoy the show and let us know what you think…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTulORORBBY]