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There's a message from Jeff Bezos on Amazon's home page describing the company's success with the Kindle. According to Bezos, Amazon sold out of the device within the first 5. 5 hours after its announcement, and have been struggling to keep up with manufacturing.
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Kate and I are at the kick-off of the O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference in NYC. People from all over the world are here for this year's conference; the MC just told us that attendance tripled over last year's inaugural conference in San Jose (Todd and Dylan were there).
Today there are two articles in major newspapers about the future of publishing:
New York Times: HarperCollins Will Post Free Books on the Web
Wall Street Journal: Publisher Tests Selling by the Chapter
We'll try to update more over the next few days.
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Frans Johansson's Medici Effect is now available for free as a pdf download from his website.
It is an interesting experiment for him and his publisher Harvard Business School Press to see if you can give it away and improve sales of a two and a half year old book. Love seeing this kind of experimentation.
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Booksellers and industry insiders alike were astounded a few years ago when Elizabeth Kostova's book The Historian went to auction and sold for $2 million to Time Warner, and the movie rights went to Sony for $1. 5 million. What made Kostova's accomplishment so remarkable was that The Historian was her first book, a 600-page, historical fiction tome.
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The New York Times must be reading our minds because just yesterday Todd and I were discussing the future of travel books, and today there's a great article about what travel guide publishers are doing to anticipate and incorporate changes in the industry.
A few approaches mentioned in the article:
Specialized guides are available online - you can get an entire guide to pubs and inns in the UK, without the other information available in more comprehensive guides. And, you can get a version that connects to the GPS in your rental car.
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