I Just Bought the Same Book Twice

OK, for the second time, I just bought the same book twice. That's a bit abstract but true.

Grace bought me a Kindle 2 for my birthday. Yeah! Being in the publishing business, I have seen more blog posts on the shape, size, function and philosophical meaning of the Kindle and Kindle 2, so I think that ground has been covered quite well. So let this be a blog post for the people not in publishing that read this blog (I believe that number ranges in the area of a half dozen readers, give or take a few).

To put it simply, I like it. And yes, it is a game changer. I have been reading books with Ereader and Stanza on my iphone, which works, but only because of the convenience. But the Kindle 2 has been enjoyable - for the three days I have owned it. I find it is closer to a 'real' book and I have been reading it in the exact same scenarios - sitting in my Dad chair by the fire in the evening with my girls on all sides, or propped up on my bed.

And here is how I can tell I am enjoying it: I paid money, twice, to buy the ebook on the Kindle 2 for a book I already owned in hand.

OK, the first time was an experiment. I was reading Scott Turow's Ordinary Heroes in an old, tattered mass market paperback which I pulled off a book swap shelf in the British Virgin Islands. When the Kindle 2 arrived I just had to buy the ebook edition to try it out. So I did, and spent 7 bucks for it. It was worth it.

The second time - at 6:00am this morning - was not an experiment but instead was a bonafide consumer purchase. After finishing Ordinary Heroes, I was moving on to my next book - from popular fiction to popular non-fiction - and picked up Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". I love reading Bill Bryson as he has a quick wit that I find essential at certain times of my reading career. This book is a layman's guide to all things science, starting with the Big Bang, and I figured Bill Bryson was just the right guy to steer me through a dense set of topics.

I received this book from Grace as a gift, which she bought in Borders a few weeks ago as a trade paperback. Surprisingly, I actually found it quite cumbersome to read after reading Turow on the Kindle. It kept flopping over like it was made of paper! So, sitting in bed this morning, I proved to my wife Grace yet again that I am nuts and bought the Kindle Ebook edition for 7 bucks, searching for the product in the Kindle Store, buying it, downloading it and getting to the same page in less than a minute total.

That is a game changer. She complained for a moment that she had bought the Bryson book as a gift, but I simply countered that she had also bought my Kindle as a gift - and thank you very much.

Am I Really That Far Behind??

Man, did I blow it!

I have been trying to keep our Community News on our Firebrand Site fresh and current, but time has advanced so quickly that I fell behind. No excuses.

Well, I just updated it with announcements of many new clients who have joined Firebrand in the last few months.

We are really excited to welcome these publishers to Firebrand,most of whom are well into their integration projects already!

Here is the link to our Community News page.

And I promise I will stay current.

A Guilt Free Cruise on the Social Network Stream

Yesterday I spent a full day at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York listening, learning, and talking about social networks and communities. I wrapped up a long day talking with Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson and Mark Kuyper president of the ECPA organization. Michael is an accomplished blogger and twitter person (tweep? twitterer? I can never get that right) and we were probing him to learn how he could possibly keep up with running a large company, sending tweets and writing blog posts. His response was simply that he gets to the social community stuff in his small windows of downtime. Sounds so simple, but there is a unspoken discipline there that drives him. Chris Brogan in his talk yesterday mentioned that Michael's approach to Twitter is not 'what are you doing', but more importantly 'what has my attention'. That is a great line and cements the purpose of that particular platform.

I have tremendous respect for Mark, and simply enjoy talking with him, and we got onto the subject of his involvement with social communities and tools. He had commented that he had to swim through 1400 emails that day (that is harsh). Mark has recently joined facebook but is conflicted by the desire to be on twitter. He is concerned about making the committment to the platform and adding yet another baby to feed.

That got me thinking about my own involvement with these communities and I commented that, without really knowing, I did not twitter or facebook from Tuesday to Sunday last week. I was simply swamped and if I had the moments, I didn't have the mental energy to contribute to the cause. It struck me that my unplanned approach to social networks has been guilt free, and that we should not consider these committments in the same cateory of emails and phone calls where people are specifically reaching out to you. I likened it to a constantly flowing stream, where we can dip in and take some out when we have a moment, or add some into the stream when we have something to say. But, honestly, the stream keeps flowing wether we are engaged or not, and if we are not engaged for a little while, for whatever reason, then that's ok.

So, if you are one of the ten people that read this blog, and you miss this post, be assured that it is ok with me. Consider this a guilt-free exemption.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go twitter about this new blog post.

Tip of the Iceberg: Title Management Style

This morning I spent some time with the Firebrand team reviewing our new configuration for our Marketing Plan/Campaign/and Marketing Projects plug-in for Title Management Version 7.

I must say, this is pretty exciting stuff for us. The Version 7 is essentially a highly configurable Project engine. Without any development, Susan Burke and Rob Sidor built out a robust set of Marketing Plug-ins. They include:

-Marketing Plan: Typically across a season, a collection of Campaigns adressing individual titles. Includes comments, files, costs rolled up from campaigns and projects(budget, actuals and variance)

- Marketing Campaigns: Typically a campaign for a specific title or series. Campaigns will include many Projects

- Marketing Projects: Any type of marketing activity including Emails, Ads, Press Releases, Exhibit Materials, Galleys, Interviews and so.

- Exhibits - managing contacts, registration, advertising, budget, attendees, materials, titles.

We are also building out new Baseline reports to support this including Marketing Plan Production Status Report, and a detailed Marketing Campaign Report for a title to deliver to Publishers, Editors, Authors, Book Buyers and more.

The most exciting part about this is how well the 'engine', built by our development team, served our needs without go back to our development team. This is one of the payoffs that we cherish after a long, long road developing. The tip of the iceberg emerging from the ocean.

Bully!

Let this blog post simply be about a nice visit to a wonderful bookstore. No great book industry predictions or extrapolations, or insights on technology or the software business. Just a nice visit to a great bookstore.

Think Norman Rockwell, as my poor writing skills, attempt to recreate the visit.

It's Christmas week in Manchester Vermont - snow is falling, the ski mountains are excited to cover up the Vermont ice from a recent thaw, and we have arrived at lunch time with the afternoon to explore.

Manchester, VT is known for it's outlet stores, but at the heart of it is the Northshire Bookstore. They happen to be a trading partner for our Eloquence Onix services, but that is irrelevant to the story, except to point out that they have always taken a progressive approach to remaining a vibrant independent bookstore.

And vibrant it was. The place was packed. Sure, it was a vacation week, but it was still nice to see it packed. Moreso than any other store we visited. We added to the packing factor by walking in with 10 people: Grace and the girls, Grace's parents, my brother Peter, his wife Geralyn and their new son Maxwell.

Northshire is an old inn, amended over the years with new wings and nooks. They have a cafe in the store and a wonderful childrens section upstairs. We spent no less than 1 1/2 hours there, browsing, reading, chatting, playing with Maxwell. Given the option of outlet stores or a book store, take one guess which I would pick. What was neat about the visit was the simple fact that the love of reading was palpable - in the visitors and the staff. I spent 10 or 15 minutes eavesdropping on a staff member espouse his enjoyment or hatred of many different books with one single customer. Remember - the place was packed with a line at the register and all three registers ringing constantly, and this guy had an indepth discussion with a customer about his opinion on different books. The book I chose to buy and read was one of his recommendations.

Geralyn, being an English teacher, was recruited to find a book for my 4th grader Jillian. She enjoys reading but hasn't quite gotten the bug: she seems to be in between the early chapter books like Magic Tree House and older series like Harry Potter and hasn't really adopted a genre that excites her. After a long time, they declared success and found just the right book.

After much perusing and deliberation myself, I settled on River of Doubt, about a little known expedition undertaken by Teddy Roosevelt, shortly after his defeat in his second presidential election. This book is about a months long expedition into the heart of a completely unknown section of the Amazon, and descending a river never previously explored known as the River of Doubt - in a dugout canoe no less. It is remarkable to me how much there is to learn about this giant of a man. And as a non-fiction adventure book, this story has it all: malaria, insects, indians, snakes, panthers - and a ex-president who like to say "Bully!" and charge on. Man, do I love that.

On Peter's recommendation, I almost picked up the bestseller Einstein, but decided that it would have to wait for a long vacation - its big and will simply require some time to truly appreciate it.

My family was spread out all over the store for quite some time, but eventually we rendezvouzed at the cash register with treasure in hand and headed back up the mountain to Stratton.

If your headed that way, I recommend you carve out some time to go and enjoy Northshire. Save some appetite for the Cafe and some enthusiasm for finding just the right book. Bully!

Northshire Bookstore

It takes a good book

I travel quite a bit, and eventually everything goes south, so to speak. This week included one such trip - taking 24 hours to get from Nashville to Blue Point. No big deal really; it happens and I survived. One good long night of catch-up sleep and all is good. The trick, however is remain sane during the trials of a trip like this. Rudy Guliani once said that when everything is going crazy around him he simply tries to be the calmest guy in the room. Although that is not really in my nature, I do try to achieve it. Even when the pilot violently aborts a landing moments before touch down in dense fog in Charlotte.

One of my weapons against insanity during this trip was simply reading about fly fishing-in this case I was reading John Gierach's Fool's Paradise. Grace and I have read all of his books over the years and have always loved how he is always able to capture the true nature of the sport - mainly how it us more than just the fishing, but fishing is everything. But he does it with near perfect sense of comedic timing, lulling you into a warm sense of quiet atmosphere and then casting a zinger at you, causing the reader to laugh out loud, even on a crowded plane with weary passengers.

One particular line caused me to laugh. After spending an entire chapter describing the misery (and joy?) of fishing alone in winter, with freezing hands and gear, he closes the final paragraph with the simple line 'I wonder what all the stupid people are doing for fun.' That got me through an hour or two of travel with reduced blood pressure.

I have been reading this book one chapter at a time, as an ebook on my iPhone which is to say that it is always with me ready to provide a moment of relief. In my opinion, it is one of the most compelling reasons to read a good book. I am sorry to say that I have finished Fool's Paradise and fear I may be a few books away from another book which provides just the right medicine, right when I need it.

What He Said

I am just going to regurgatate Thomas Friedman's recent column Generation X - why aren't our kids more radical. These are some of the key points I have been saying in conversation over the past few years, but he is more articulate (hence the writing job at New York Times).

The basic premise of the column is the legacy we are leaving for our kids, as compared to, say, the Greatest Generation. Read it.

I know the debt clock in New York has gained recent attention, pushing over ten trillion and running out of space, but of course it has been there for years, and is on my route to several publishers as I pace Manhattan. It has had a chilling effect on me to see that my family owes, for example, $65,000 (that of course is ancient history). That clock caused me to vote in certain ways (well, that certainly didn't help), but also to live in certain ways.

We built a brand new house - but believe it or not it is only 1900 sq. feet. Many people wonder where the third family room is? Any new house under 3000 feet is ludicrous. But I certainly enjoy my more affordable 15 year mortgage, low gas and electric bills. My financial adviser twisted his face when I said I went with a 15 year 4 1/2 percent mortgage. Why not go 30 years, and invest the extra money each month - you can earn easy 8-10%? Why? because it is my house and it will be paid off when my kids start going to college.

We certainly have enjoyed the use of no interest credit cards and we have one skeleten in the closet on that front from our winter sabbatical, but we are working on it.

Several years ago I installed a 3.4kw Solar Photovoltaic system on my roof - as much as could fit. This generates about 1/3 of my electric. Quietly. Without maintenance. And is warranteed for 30 years. All you have to do is pray for sun.

I buy the rest of my electric from a wind farm in upstate NY through a LIPA program New Wind Energy. This is so easy it's ridiculous. You simply sign up, pay a little extra for your electric with a special Clean Energy charge on your bill, and the Wind Farm pumps the amount of energy you buy into the grid on your behalf. They make extra revenue and can then invest and increase capacity. You have reduced your carbon footprint. I have seen the parade of fuel barges lined up outside the LIPA plant in Port Jeff, and it aint pretty.

In my driveway are two Toyota Hybrids - my Highlander which gets a true 26mpg and carries 7 people and my Camry which gets a true 35mpg. By the way, the Higlander Hybrid is the best driving car we have ever owned. It is heavy because of the battery and electric motor which gives it a stable feel, and the pickup is outrageous: the result of a 6cylinder engine combined with the immediacy of a big electric motor.

We grow live coral in our saltwater reef tank so that our kids can appreciate the incredible beauty of this gift from God. Given the recent articles on coral reef depletion, the only place you may be able to find these species in a few decades is in an aquarium.

I voted for Barack Obama for many reasons but in this context because of the failure of our republican led government to reign in the budget deficit and recognize the future economy which will be based on innovation and energy. Despite some shining stars in the US, I believe the ramp-up in environmental technology was missed, so far. I have Japanese solar panels, German inverters converting the solar energy to DC, and japanes hybrid technology in the driveway. Are we going to concede these industries as well to others? What is it we actually excel out? Financial Services? Now we are in a position where the budget deficit will have to increase in order to retool our industry and culture. Wonderful. Friedman's article discussed what I have believed and said for some time. Barack has linked the prosperity of our nation with innovation in industries, coupled with energy independence and his right.

I list my green creds not to gain favor, but to simply backup my core belief on the future of our nation and earth. It is sort of like Actions Speak Louder Than Words, but there is a little more to it. I am not a guy with a long beard living off the grid in a yurt high on a mountain. I am regular people. And regular people need to make the leap. To varying degrees, our solar project has inspired 5 other neighbors on my block to put solar power on their roofs. My statement is in the action.

On the other hand, it might be kind of fun to live in a yurt off the grid at the top of a mountain. But I know I can't pull off the beard...