Posts Tagged with ‘books’

Today I am pleased to be able to exclusively report on launch of a very interesting website - BookRix. The Munich-based company has been operating the German-language site in the .de domain zone for a while now and today they are making the debut of the English-language version. The German-language community seems to be a pretty active one to me so hopefully for the company this will be repeated in the English-language version as well.
The site’s owners describe it as [...]

Today news comes to us that Amazon has finally acquired the social network for bibliophiles Shelfari. Amazon has been a long-time supporter of the Seattle-based startup with its investment of September 2007 but the relationships now move to the higher level with the acquisition.
Shelfari developers do not disclose either the acquisition amount or what exactly the plans are for after the acquisition is completed - just mentioning that “there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will [...]

In the time since Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine popularized the term crowdsourcing, the 'wisdom of crowds' has been implemented in several varying ways across the web resulting in virtually eliminated “cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals.”
Digg and StumbleUpon are two examples of crowd wisdom where most of the labor is provided by the user community completely free of charge for each of the companies, though others such as CambrianHouse, iStockPhoto and Threadless compensate users/sellers through royalties and [...]

For a long time bookseller Borders has been saddled with an affiliation to Amazon. Amazon has run its web site, leaving Borders to run its offline stores. This year Borders has been given back control of its web site by Amazon, and is in the process of developing a new site, currently in beta, that will launch in alpha on February 1st of this year.
This is Borders' chance to break the mold of Amazon and introduce Web 2.0 [...]

The movie rental business was revolutionized by the launch of Netflix and its online monthly rental subscription service that eliminated trips to the store, late fees, as well as a lot of business for the once mega-popular Blockbuster chain of stores. It even led Blockbuster to follow suit, however unsuccessful the attempt was, just to fight to stay in business.
Now, Paperspine is a new online venture that is aiming to transform the same successful subscription model used by Netflix into [...]

I gotta be honest. Having opened my trusty ol’ PowerBook this morning and looked the latest bits from my favorite feeds, I’ve so far seen almost nothing of immediate interest that I think worth picking apart. Some of the stuff’s recycled material. Various opinions on where the Web is headed in ’08. Tedious Facebook talk. Something about Nokia downplaying speculative predictions of Apple’s and/or Google’s growing influence in the mobile space. You know, just a bunch of fluff, more [...]

We all know of Google?s established time limit for user-submitted material to be uploaded to YouTube. Ten minutes. That?s it. No more. Have a good twenty minutes or more of highlights from that Little League baseball game you?ve wanted to share with the extended family via the video host? It ain?t happening. At least not in one whole shot. Long-form podcasts? Nien!
And we all know why the cutoff point was established some time ago. To combat piracy and copyright violations [...]

As a writer, I?m partial to inventions that have to do with those provocative things we call words. Obviously. So when I read a piece published very recently in Red Herring which spoke of a social network, or ?online community,? meant to bring authors among the likes of Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, James Patterson, Salman Rushdie, and Norman Mailer (now deceased; his widow intends to soon establish a memorial page at the site) and their readers together using [...]

Are you a bookworm? Does your budget for dead trees and new ideas exceed your means? Do you have a jones for reading that rivals the national debt in expense? BookMooch is here to help.
Other services offer related services. Most notable of these is BookCrossing, combing a love of books, a need for books on a budget and scavenger hunts in one web application. What do you do if you don't have the time or inclination to go digging [...]