A Book Series for the Non-Reader?

If you have a non-reader in the family - someone who doesn't enjoy the process of reading or who is more visually oriented than word oriented, a new non-fiction book series may be their answer. It's called For Beginners Books. 


Here is how their website describes themselves:

"Every book in the series serves one purpose: to present to the reader in a straightforward, accessible manner the works of great thinkers and subjects alike. With subjects ranging from philosophy, to politics, to art and beyond, the For Beginners^® series covers a range of familiar concepts in a humorous comic book-style, and takes a readily comprehensible approach that’s respective of the intelligence of its audience. This series is for those who want to know more about a subject, but don’t want to get bogged down in dry facts. Each book is painstakingly researched, written and illustrated in a style that best suits the subject."

I bring it up because I think everyone should have the opportunity to "read," and a discomfort with the traditional book shouldn't be a reason not to. If something new comes along that will open them to the world of discovery that is the book, then by all means take it! If graphic novels, For Beginners Books, or even comic books introduce you to the joy of reading, have at it.


Credit to Jason Sadler of iwearyourshirt.com for bringing For Beginners Books to our attention.

NPR's Best Young Adult Fiction for 2009

Young Adult Fiction Is Good Reading for All

By Alan Eggleston, writer, editor, and bookseller

NPR (National Public Radio) announced its list of 2009's Best Young Adult Fiction. Books always make great holiday gifts, especially for young adults who are frequently into video games, cell phones, or clothes, which can become expensive. A book will allow your young adult to escape from your mundane world without breaking your bank!

• Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman
• Lips Touch by Laini Taylor
• The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge
• Marcelo In the Real World by Francisco X. Stork
• When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

The thing about Young Adult Fiction is, although it's written for young adults, it's easy to become enthralled as a fully grown adult yourself. Beware if you give any of these as gifts this holiday season, because you may find yourself holed up in a favorite chair over the winter consumed with a great read!

See the NPR page for brief summaries of each book.

My Own Additional Suggestions

If none of these titles sounds like your young adult reader, let me suggest any of the superb Peter Pan series of books that kept my wife and I occupied for many adventurous hours. I'm reading the fourth one now, and it kept my interest from the first page. Here they are, in order of introduction:

• Peter Pan and the Starcatchers by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry
• Peter Pan and the Shadow Thieves by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry
• Peter Pan and the Secret of Rundoon by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry
• Peter Pan and the Sword of Mercy by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry

Review Disclosures

(Book links to Amazon.com through my online book store, through which I may receive commissions for sales. No recompense received for reviewing books or passing on NPR information.)

Twitter me: @BizBooksPlus or @AlanEggleston

Why You Should Protect That Bothersome Book Jacket

Book Jackets: More Than a Marketing Tool

By Alan Eggleston, writer, editor, and bookseller

That dust jacket that comes with every new hard cover book: Do you really need it?

The quick answer is, yes, the jacket protects the book cover from wear, tear, and spills.

The longer answer is, yes, the jacket protects the book cover from wear, tear, spills, and over time, fading and weathering.

Believe it or not, a jacket can be more valuable than the book it protects, if the jacket is well taken care of. Thus, removing it while you read the book won't protect the book as well but may help retain the value of the cover, if you're a collector.

To protect both the book and the jacket, consider investing in a plastic sheet that will encase the outside of the jacket. Jackets easily tear or take on spills, smears, and marks the book would have taken on, and you can protect the jacket from those with a plastic covering.

If you decide to remove the jacket while reading the book, store it carefully. Jackets tend to curl and lose their bookly shape. If they end up under other things, you will end up with unintended creases. Instead, fold the jacket along a natural crease or, if you have a long enough drawer, straighten out full length until you need to wrap the jacket around the book again.

Twitter me: @BizBooksPlus, @AlanEggleston, or @a_copywriter

The Case for Bookends

Bookends: Why Bother?

By Alan Eggleston, writer, editor, and book editor.

It's pretty simple: The reason to use bookends is to keep your books upright and together.

For some, that's an answer to anal retentivism. For me, it's an answer to protecting my books both as an investment and for my personal demeanor.

Bookends Help Organize

Books are made to sit upright -- vertically straight on the bottom edge. The optimal way to store them is with even pressure on that bottom edge. The spine holds the rest of the book together, and when the book leans with uneven pressure on the spine because the book isn't sitting evenly on the bottom edge, the pages can pull away from the spine, especially when the glue dries and cracks or the staples or string suffer fatigue. Bookends, used properly, keep all the books straight with even pressure.

Is it proper to store a book vertically on its back edge (opposite the spine), such as when it's too tall to fit on its bottom edge? That would be a second choice, and better than other options. The problem with storing on the back edge is that it may allow the spine to sag or bulge, and if the book is wide it may cause fraying of the spine on the shelf above. Worse options would be laying books across the tops of shorter vertically stored books or leaned at an angle, all which may promote warping or sagging and stress on the spines.

Another good reason to use bookends is to group books by subject or other criteria, or even for aesthetic reasons. You may simply have a few books together in a large area and want to show them off or keep them from scattering.

When You Don't Use Bookends

If you're going to lean or cant a book, such as for display, make sure you use a tilted shelf with a lip that will evenly support the bottom of the book.

Certainly, it doesn't hurt to lay books horizontally on their covers. However, make sure that the pressure on the cover is evenly distributed to prevent warping. Furthermore, you don't want to introduce other objects on or near the book lying on its cover that might scratch or otherwise injure the cover. And, you should minimize the amount of weight you lay on top of books stored horizontally. Tabletop books are designed to lie flat on a table top or shelf, of course -- just make sure you don't stack more than a couple together, and keep the surface clean and free of obscructions.

Bookends Make a Great Gift

If you know a book lover or collector, or anyone else for whom books has a place in their lives, bookends make great gifts. Most book stores offer a variety, from the simple to the stylish.

Review Disclosures

(Bookends link above to Amazon.com through my online book store, from which I may receive a small commissions for sales.)

Twitter me: AlanEggleston, a_copywriter, or abookeditor

How to "Break in" a New Book

New Books: Easing Them into Use

By Alan Eggleston, writer, editor, book editor

Ever see someone curve back the cover a brand new paperback novel? That's one way to crack it open for reading. However, that's not the best way, the way to make the book last.

A paperback isn't the most expensive thing in the world, so perhaps this isn't the example to go postal over. Yet, it illustrates the lack of care many people take in treating their new books. That lack of care often extends to all their books, even the expensive hard cover ones.

Fitness Stretches for Your Book

Think of a book as a body. It has a spine and attached to the spine are a tight skin (the cover) and taut muscles (the pages). When something pliable is tight, and you fold it quickly and unnaturally, it may snap or break. That can happen to books just like it can happen to living bodies.

When athletes prepare for a sprint or other athletic activity, what do they do beforehand? They stretch! That's what you should do for any new book, too. Stretch the binding that links the spine with the covers and pages to gently release the tension between them. By stretching it, you prepare it for hours of open and closing at your leisure, which makes for a more pleasurable experience for you.

Follow These Simple Steps

Stretching the binding is really simple and will keep the spine from breaking and the book in much better shape for a much longer time:

1. Stand the book on a flat surface on its spine.
2. Holding the book vertical, open the front cover a full 90 degrees and press your fingertips along the crease the length of the page.
3. Keeping the front cover open, now open the back cover a full 90 degrees and press your fingertips along the crease the length of the page.
4. Retaining the current sides open, return to the front of the book and fold three or four pages open together 90 degrees, pressing your fingertips along the crease.
5. Repeat this at the back of the book.
6. Alternate this for more and more pages between the front and back of the book. Although you could go all the way to the center of the book, I find a quarter of the way sufficient.

Once you break in the ends of the book, the middle will naturally follow as you open the pages.

I challenge you to try this and see if it doesn't make using a new book much easier and make it wear much better. Let me know what you think.

Twitter me: @AlanEggleston, @a_copwriter, @Booksville, and @Editor_of_Books

The Lost Symbol Is Typical Dan Brown Suspense

Review: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

By Alan Eggleston, writer, editor, bookseller

I am a big Dan Brown fan. No one paces a suspense story like Dan Brown, keeping you surprised right up to the end. He has kept up that pace in all his past books. Just when you thought you knew who done it, it wasn't until the last chapter that you found out who had really done it. However, he breaks that well developed writing style in The Lost Symbol, and I have to say, I was disappointed.

Don't misunderstand me; The Lost Symbol is full of surprises and suspenseful moments. The writing is still excellent and the pace is still brisk. My attention was rivetted after about the 15th short chapter. And to be fair, there are twists and turns in the plot right up to the end as Dan Brown leads you to the whereabouts of the lost symbol. Yet, I felt let down after the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist was resolved and chapters still remained. Oh, yes, we still have to point out the whereabouts of that pesky "lost" symbol.

If you like mystery, if you adore thriller or suspense, if you aborb conspiracies and like to untangle knotty plot twists, The Lost Symbol will be a good read for you. You may even find some of the plot holes don't matter so much -- like the tiny matter of the head of CIA security taking the lead in investigating internal U.S. security issues: Isn't that the perview of Heartland Security or the FBI? There were a few more little iniquities that bothered me, but I allowed to go unresolved because the story was too good to spoil with mere nits.

However, if you aren't a fan of Dan Brown's other works, you aren't likely to like this one, either.

Review Disclosures
(Book links above through my book store, for which I may receive commissions for sales.)

Twitter me: @AlanEggleston or @a_copywriter

1 More Way to Find Another Great Read

By Alan Eggleston, writer, editor, and bookseller

Another way to find a good read by an author you like is to use the online Literature Map Web site. Simply go to www.literature-map.com and in the "Name of the author" field, enter the name of the author whose work you just enjoyed and click the "Continue" button. The result will be a screen showing your author's name surrounded by other names. The closer the other names are to your original author, the more likely you will like their works. It's based on people entering author names and indicating whether they have liked those authors' works.

Example: I like Horatio Hornblower by C.S. Forester. If I want to find other authors who write stories similar to hose of C.S. Forester, I enter his name in the entry field. It shows me Dudley Pope, Rudyard Kipling, Alexander Kent, and Bernard Cornwall as closest. It's interesting that Patrick O'Brian, who also writes Napolean-era sea adventures is far to the right. And it's also interesting that the author whose Napolean-era sea yarns I admire most -- Julian Stockwin -- doesn't even show up. But this is a work in progress and the more people who participate, the more accurate it will become.

Give it a try. My good neighbor across the street told me about it and he uses it faithfully. Let me know what you think.

3 Easy Ways to Find Another Good Read

You liked one book, how do you find another like it?

By Alan Eggleston, bookseller

Originally published 7.10.05 on my BizBooksPlus.net blog under the same title.

Often we find books that we really enjoy and want to extend that enjoyment by getting another book like it. How do you find one?

Did you like the author's writing style or tone?

One way is to look up more books by the same author. Although an author's style can change over time, and subsequent books can easily be different, it's a good bet that if you like an author's style he or she will repeat it in other books.

Did you like the subject matter?

If what you like is the subject matter, then look up other books by entering appropriate keywords for the subject matter in the Amazon search box on either our business books page or our leisure books page. Here, making sure you get a good read isn't as easy, since different authors often vary widely in style and tone.

Find what other readers have liked

Another way to find similar material is by using the same Amazon.com search boxes mentioned above. Enter the title of the book you enjoyed (better yet, enter the ISBN) and when the book comes up on the page, scroll down. Amazon often lists similar books, suggestions of similar subject matter or similar authors that other readers have ordered. "If you like this book, you may also like these..." in essence.

• Search on our Business Books section

• Search on our Leisure Books section

(c) 2005 e-Messenger Consulting Corp. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Review Disclosure

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I was so intrigued by Five Years of My Life!

By Alan Eggleston, Writer, Editor, Bookseller

I was so intrigued by Five Years of My Life by Murat Kurnaz, I read it in a day. It's the story of a young German of Turkish descent who was charged with terrorism by the Bush Administration and was forced to live five years of hell in torture, even though he was actually innocent.

The book covers 255 pages, including epilogue. It tells of this teen of hard-working Turkish immigrants in Germany who decided to give up the wild life of a bouncer for a straighlaced Muslim wife from Turkey, a woman who knew much more about his faith than he did. After marrying her, he decided to study his faith before bringing her back to Germany to live, and he made secret arrangements to travel to Pakistan where he could attend a quick-study school on Islam. He didn't tell his family because he was afraid they would stop him from going. That was the biggest mistake of his life.

Kurnaz planned to accompany friends on the trip, but ended up going alone. He traveled from mosque to mosque with friends he made along the way. At the end of his trip, just as he was heading home, he was arrested. Although official papers said he had been arrested in Afghanistan, he was in fact sold out in Pakistan to American interests for $3,000 and shipped to Afghanistan. There he was interrogated, beaten, tortured, barely fed, and eventually shipped to Guantanamo, Cuba, where he spent the rest of his imprisonment.

This book is not well crafted English. It is a well written narrative. You will experience his uncertainty, his confusion, his pain, his human degredation, and the depravity of a government so focused on capturing terrorists that it refuses to see what it actually has, which is an innocent man. In fact, the government learned early on that Kurnaz was innocent, but Germany didn't want him back -- for silly reasons, it turns out -- so they kept torturing him anyway.

Thank goodness Kurnaz's family learned of his whereabouts, people of goodwill fought for his release, and he didn't give up hope. At the very end, even though the government knew Kurnaz was innocent, as he prepared to board a plane to freedom, they insisted he sign a declaration of guilt or he wouldn't be given his freedom. When he refused, they let him go.

See if you're hooked by the details, the memories, the fear, the insanity of it all like I was. I read this in a day, and I never read a book in a day.

Five Years of My Life, An Innocent Man in Guantanamo

By Murat Kurnaz

ISBN-10: 0230603742
ISBN-13: 978-0230603745

Want to Find a Book Quickly? Use Its ISBN.

To ISBN or not to ISBN.
By Alan Eggleston, Writer, Editor, Bookseller

I just got into an interesting "conversation" on LinkedIn, the online network for professionals. On LinkedIn you can ask all the other professionals around the world any question you want, and this gentleman -- from Chicago -- is about to self-publish a book and wanted readers' opinions whether he should bother to get an ISBN (International Standard Book Number).

It reminded me of when I was a bookseller in a bricks and mortar bookstore and people would come in looking for books but wouldn't have a title or author's name. They would have seen it somewhere, perhaps even browsed it on one of our shelves the week before. However, they assumed we would be able to figure it out from their general discription. (It had a yellowish cover and it was on that display table over there ... four weeks ago!)

Ladies and gentlemen, bookstores have tens of thousands of books on hand. Most are shelved according to author and then, if the bookseller has time, alphabetically by title -- otherwise, by author in the order he takes them off the book cart. Sometimes in sections like Biographies, they're shelved alphabetically by subject. In the computer section they're shelved alphabetically by title. In every case, it's section by section, so everything in Mysteries is shelved together... everything in Science Fiction is shelved together, and so on.

Believe it or not, I'm heading for a conclusion here.

Your best friend when looking for a book is the ISBN. When you find a book you like -- in the store, at a friend's house, online, at a used book sale, in the library, in someone's hand, lying on a table, buried under piles of papers, in your daughter's backpack -- wherever, and you want to get a copy for yourself, take down the ISBN. Give the ISBN to the bookseller. He or she will be able to immediately locate the book with it. No questions of how to spell the author's name, no questions of whether words in the title are one word or two, no wondering if your author was the main author or the author listed second, he will be able to locate it quickly with the ISBN. Anywhere in the world! Even on your laptop through Amazon.com, Alibris.com, or Barnesandnoble.com.

Find the ISBN number of any book with the copyright and library catalogue information, usually at the front of the book. It will be either a 10-digit or, nowadays, 13-digit number. See the ISBN Web site for more information on this system.

My new colleague on LinkedIn got a lot of advise from readers about whether to bother getting an ISBN. The one that made the most sense to him, he said, was from this bookseller who explained how much easier an ISBN would make it for consumers to find his book.

Are you a professional? Take a look at LinkedIn for professional networking.

Book Hunting 101

Finding a book can be easy, if you have the right information in front of you.


By Alan Eggleston, bookseller
Originally published 7/08/05 on my BizBooksPlus.net blog under "What You Need to Find a Book".


Your search for a book can be a lot quicker if you know a few things first:

If possible, for a specific book get the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) – all bookstores use the same ISBN, which makes a book easier to find in whatever bookstore you find yourself. If you're searching online, enter the ISBN into the search field.

1. If you don't have the ISBN, know at least the title and author.


2. If you don’t know the ISBN, title, or author, you may be able to find the work by subject or using keywords that describe the book or parts of its content.


3. If you don’t have a specific book in mind, you can find choices among books of the same subject or using the same keywords.


4. If you don’t have a book in mind but you like a certain author, do a search by entering that author's name in the search field. Keep in mind that some authors are prolific writers and you may have to choose from a number of titles.

Some cautions about looking for a book:

• A book often comes out in hardcover first. Be ready to wait awhile if you don’t want to buy the hardcover edition -- it generally takes about a year before the book comes out in paperback, if indeed it comes out in paperback at all. It can take even longer if the book is popular, like The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown, which has been on the New York Times Bestseller List for a couple of years.


• Don’t expect to find a book using a physical description. Unless you actually run into the book, descriptions seldom work.


• Some publishers are specialists, such as Scholastic, which publishes children’s books for the educational market. Often their books are available only by special order from schools.


• Some shoppers remember that they saw the book – such as, it was on a display at the front of the store, it had a yellow cover, and there was a picture on front. That describes far too many books in today’s crowded market.
  
• All bricks and mortar bookstores employ booksellers whose job it is to help you find the books you want. However, there is a limit to how much help any bookseller can provide you if you don’t know the title, author, ISBN, subject, or keywords. If you find the right title but the store doesn't have it on-hand, most bookstores would be happy to order a copy for you. They may even call around to other bricks and mortar bookstores to see if they have it.
  

(c) 2005 e-Messenger Consulting Corp. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.


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Book Recommendation: Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar

I’ve only read the introduction and the first few pages of chapter 1, and I can already tell you, Ya gotta read Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar… by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein.

What attracted me to this smallish book was the crazy title, which immediately caught my eye from the new books table at my local bookstore. What got me to buy the book was the mixture of jokes and philosophies that produced them. Yeah, jokes aren’t just about being funny, they’re about ideas and attitudes and points of view. This book looks at the two together, as its subtitle explains: “Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes.” It’s a trip for your mind through your funny bone.

I’ll give a fuller review when I have finished the book, but I wanted to give you a heads up on what looks to me like a good summer read, an easy way to expand your mind while having a good time.

By the way, this week it’s number 13 on the New York Times Bestsellers list!

Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat Is Releasing in Paperback

Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat is releasing in trade paperback on July 24, according to Publisher’s Weekly. It’s actually the second revision of the very popular book since its debut in April 2005. Why buy the paperback version? Besides being popular with anyone not willing to pay for the hardcover version, the paperback has been updated. Says PW, “The new edition offers two new chapters, one covering the spread of disinformation via the Web, and the second about the use of the Internet for activism. There’s a new 35-page conclusion and, promises the publisher, all the statistics are revised.”

How to Find Your Next Good Read (and your next...)

When I worked at a bookstore, people occasionally asked for reading suggestions. The problem with that is that everyone’s taste is different and not everyone is up on all the new books. In fact, there are so many new books published each year, it would be impossible to keep them all in mind. Plus, there are always little gems hidden in among the swell of okay-reads that pass through bookstores all the time, and those are usually passed along as readers discover them, not as they’re hyped. So I have a better suggestion.

BookSense is a group of independent booksellers, and they have a Web site. The site includes reading picks (recommendations) by independent booksellers from across America. Booksellers are the people who work in the bookstores and keep the shelves full. They read a lot and they know what’s popular as well as what’s new. Because they work for independent bookstores, they are less pressed to push particular authors and they are usually closer to their clientele, more loyal to reader tastes and more aware of what readers like. Independent booksellers have a closer read on the reader’s pulse and the market of good books, IMHO. Consulting BookSense for a book recommendation taps into the wisdom of thousands of knowledgeable bibliophiles. The Web site also includes a store locator for independent bookstores associated with BookSense, in case you’d like to visit a store and talk to a bookseller in person.

So, look at the reading recommendations on the BookSense Web site. Consider those in addition to sources like newspaper bestsellers lists, online bookstore bestsellers lists, magazine Best 100 Books lists, book award lists, and various critical book reviews. Online bookstores also offer the “if you bought this you might also like this” or “readers who purchased so and so also bought this…”, although that isn’t always reliable. A better option is to go to your local bookstore(s) to see what the book clubs are reading. If you have access to cable TV or satellite TV and C-SPAN2 over the weekend, watch BOOK TV for non-fiction author interviews and coverage of book fairs (or consult the BOOK TV Web site).

What I wouldn’t necessarily consider is what bookstores highlight on their end caps and shelves. Why? Part of the display is hype, part of it is mere positioning, part of it is art, and part of it is filler. I’d also take with a “grain of salt” the recommendation tags bookstores put on their shelves (“I’d recommend…”), because sometimes that’s hype rather than true, heartfelt passion about a book. Sometimes.

Often, the best recommendation is that of a friend or relative or colleague whose opinion you hold in high regard. Someone whose taste is sound in books, movies, music, television, and other “artistic” forms.

If you’re going to lone it in the store, browsing for instance, I wouldn’t buy based on the book jacket or leaf. It can be a good guide to storyline, but it is hardly an objective view of the quality of the read. I always fan through the pages and pick a few at random, reading a few passages to see how well the book is written, getting a feel for the plot and dialogue, and discerning if I can stand to read a whole book of the author’s prose. That’s always the best test.

Good luck! Tell me how you find good reads.