Stranger things are happening, I’m sure. Following Radiohead’s excursion into online freebies, Random House has decided to distribute for a limited time the much-hyped Charles Bock’s debut novel Beautiful Children at amazon.com. Why? According to Jynne Martin of Random House:
If it’s good enough for Radiohead it’s good enough for us! The online landscape is changing quickly, and we must take risks to find new ways to bring people to books. In this case we have a book we think is unique, fearless, and brilliant. Giving this book away for free online is a way to offer everyone a chance to read as much of the book as they want, and if readers love Beautiful Children as much as we do (and as many critics and early readers do), this will spread the word as widely as possible.
Instead of making it available for download as a .pdf file, I think it would have been more interesting to make it free through amazon’s Search Inside the Book feature. What better way to test out reading books online with the option of buying the physical copy?
Original article here
By pjjoseph
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February 27, 2008 – 6:40 pm
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I just found out that I’m going to be presenting at this year’s BCLA Conference (British Columbia Library Association) conference, which is exciting because it’s my first time presenting at a conference. I’m going to give a background on the social bookmarking tool del.ico.us and then demonstrate the relative ease and versatility of managing a library website’s list of web links by feeding del.ico.us bookmarks to various places on the website. What I really like about this idea is that librarians can use del.ico.us as a bibliographic tool, maintaining a strict controlled vocabulary of tags to ensure that links are published to the appropriate pages. For a hint at what I’ll be presenting on, go to the ECI Library’s del.icio.us account. To see the links published on the library’s website, go to the Research Guides section and browse around.
By pjjoseph
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December 1, 2007 – 8:10 pm
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LOTS Design is a Swedish firm making beautiful prototypes of simple and sustainable consumables. The Imprint thermo coffee mug combines practicality with a clean aesthetic. It’s made using double-walled china, capped with a tight-fitting rubber lid, and comes in two sizes: latte and coffee. I’m not sure if the cup is available for purchase or if it, like many of their designs, is still in the prototype phase of development.
Original article here
By pjjoseph
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September 26, 2007 – 2:29 pm
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