Whether you love him or you hate him, Gary Vaynerchuck is obviously engaging. His web marketing book called Crush It is actually crushing the bestseller lists.
Anyway, here’s a clip of him being a lunatic on Fox and Friends.
This week, Amazon announced that it reduced the price of its Kindle 2 by $40 and launched an international version with a built-in AT&T SIM card. Barnes & Noble then leaked news of its new handheld digital reading device, scheduled to launch next spring.
In the video above, a Barnes & Noble rep explains how the company’s new e-reader will work. He notes the device’s key points of differentiation from the competition — it’s designed for lengthy reading and it’s a color device.
This is exciting for two reasons:
1. The added competition will probably (eventually) force Amazon to further reduce the price of its Kindle…affordable e-readers = yay!
2. Now I can read my entire collection of Dr. Seuss stories in one sitting without forgoing the stimulating, colorful pictures! (Kidding.)
In today’s New York Times Op-Ed section, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google,defends his company’s initiative to digitize all books. As in: every single book ever published.
Google Books, as the company arm is called, has been met with profound outcry from publishers and authors alike, who claim that digitizing the world’s books robs rights-holders. In the five years since Google Books began its incredible project, they have had to go through several legal battles in order to continue their work.
This initial negative reaction to the digitization of books is quick and easy. But as Brin points out, his project is not an act of reformation or revolution (I’m looking at you, Kindle). Instead, it is an act of preservation, safeguarding a culture and knowledge base that is profoundly vulnerable when housed only on paper. And by digitizing (which is, in my mind, a synonym for democratizing) knowlege, we allow it to be accessed and experienced in ways that are impossible when culture is contained in orphan, out-of-print books in far-flung libraries. What’s worthier of our protection and attention than the full sum of our culture?
LATFH.com is a wonderful themed Tumblr blog that has taken the necessary role of making fun of people imploring the world to make of them: hipsters. If you don’t live in New York or L.A., you may not understand the need to take these people to task. In the pursuit of irony, hipsters make a mockery of everything authentic, but their goal to be counter-culture is subverted by the strict fashion and social codes of hipsterdom that ultimately enforce normalcy within their subculture. They need to be stopped!
The trend of blog themes becoming books tells two important things: 1) humble themes can make a big splash and 2) the blogosphere is taken seriously by publishers.
I can’t wait to proudly display the book on my coffee table (which, I should note, is not littered with hipster regalia: semi-philosophical musing on the benefits of polyamorous arrangements, bad LPs from the 80s, and half-empty PBR cans).
