On Words and Business

I’m proud to announce the publication of Career Launcher: Manufacturing. Published by Ferguson, authored by me.

If you’re interested in manufacturing careers or know someone who is, check it out.

Have you ever wanted to learn how to predict the future?

Check out Eric Garland’s book Future, Inc. It’s all about how the futurists predict the future. And how you can, too. It’s not as hard as you might think.

Or check out his blog about forecasting.

Fun stuff, with the potential of serious impact on your business.

Movable type - 1040

Printing press - 1454

Dot matrix printer - 1970

A format in which words do not have to be printed to be read - The present

A format currently only imagined? - The future

Freakonomics…you read the book (and enjoyed it, I hope). Now read the blog.

I can’t wait to read SuperFreakonomics, the new book by this amazing team.

The cover story in this week’s Publisher’s Weekly is about an interesting new way to publish books and still make money. Counterintuitively, it includes giving away a free e-book. It also includes some pretty creative ways to monetize the effort. But it isn’t all about the book.

Maybe it isn’t all about the book anywhere anymore. Maybe it never will be again.

Good luck to Cory Doctorow. I hope is experiment is wildly successful!

Thanks to Robert Darnton, the director of Harvard’s libraries, for a book about books:  The Case for Books

As he wrote in Publisher’s Weekly last week: “I’ve been invited to so many conferences on ‘The Death of the Book’ during that past decade that I think books must be very much alive. The death notices remind me of my favorite graffiti, inscribed in the men’s room of the Firestone Library at Princeton University:

God is dead.  –Nietzsche

Then, added in another hand:

Nietzsche is dead.  –God

The book is not dead. In fact, the world is producing more books than ever before…”