Discussion About Book Reviews

Over at Char’s Book Reviews and Writing News is: Review: The Slippery Art of Book Reviewing, which is a review of a book about book reviewing as well as part of a Blog Book Tour for the book.

I assert that book reviews (and music reviews) are irrelevant these days.

I also added to that thinking in a Comment (which I must quote in full since I can’t find a way to link directly to it):

See, the thing is, before the Net, you’d read a review in paper. Then you’d have to make a real effort to order the book or buy it at a bookstore or go to the library.

These days, you can quickly sample a book via the Net.

Thus, there’s less need for the kind of reviewing that was done in the past. Instead of a “bullhorn” review touting something, a gentle tap on the shoulder to make someone aware of something is all the effort needed today, I think.

Go there and join in the discussion.

Kindle Fanboi Gets iPhone Mistress

The Apple Convert

Another factor also came into play last week. While attending the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco I got to hear famed venture capitalist John Doerr talk about his passion for the iPhone. At one point, he held his iPhone up and said he believes this platform will ultimately become more important and influential than the PC platform.

Read that last sentence again and let it sink in. Doerr wasn’t saying the PC platform is dying out and the iPhone will one day be more important than it. He’s saying that as revolutionary as the original PC marketplace was (and has been), the iPhone platform is poised to have even more of an impact.

Emphasis added by me.

Well, duh, yeah! Some of us have been saying that since we first fondled the frikkin thing.

[…] I can honestly say I would have been less inclined to buy a Kindle if I already had an iPhone. (Sorry Amazon.)

Yeah, well, beginning in January, those Kindle sales will tank:

iPod Touchbook mockup filched from Rex Hammock’s blog

Now I await his gushing posts once he experiences the majesty of Stanza! And some graphic novels from iVerse Comics.

— via Twitter from KatMeyer

Over 900 Free ePub eBooks!

Web-Books Publishing

We focus on EPUB ebooks.

Readers: We have more than 900 free EPUB ebooks in Classic Literature.

Authors: We provide a free publishing platform, which lets you easily convert Microsoft Word into EPUB (more info).

A few points about this.

1) It’s great to see so many titles that I won’t have to convert on my own

2) Some of them have great covers:

3) Warning: Only ten downloads a day allowed:

Close-up:

A bit of FAIL there. I didn’t find this out until I tried to grab number eleven!

— Via Twitter from top_book

Judie Lipsett For The Head Spin

Holiday Gift Suggestions: the Sandisk 16GB microSDHC for the Greedy Minimalist

How about eBooks? If the average eReader book is 400 – 500KB, then you could store something in the neighborhood of 37,200 books. Now imagine the shelf space that library would occupy.

Let me go a bit further than that.

Let’s say the average cost per book is $10.00.

That’d be $372,000.

More precious than diamonds?