Have You Moved from Print to Electronic?

e-Books: Prices Too High?
by Alan Eggleston, writer, editor, bookseller

There's an interesting discussion about the price (not to be confused with the cost) of e-books on two blogs:

• TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home, "Calculating a fair price for e-books."
• Galleycat, "Expert Explains Why E-Books Are so Expensive."

The essence of the debate is: Is the price is too high when the cost is so low? In this case, price is what the consumer pays to buy the e-book, cost is the financial burden of bringing the e-book to the consumer.

As an avid reader but not a fan of reading on a screen, high cost would be a barrier to my purchasing e-books on a regular basis. I prefer paper. What do you think?

What's in a Title?

Book Titles, the Author's Biggest Struggle?
by Alan Eggleston, writer, editor, and bookseller

If you're an author struggling with the title to your new bestseller-to-be, take a few lessons from the masters.

A book by British newspaper columnist and author Gary Dexter tells the story behind the titles of 50 landmark books. In Why Not Catch-21?, Dexter details the struggle to choose just the right number of catches to arrive at 22. Interesting story! First readers of Utopia by Thomas More thought it was a story of a real place, but there were clues in the title and the storytelling that discerning readers came to understand and that you can learn from. Why did Melville call his groundbreaking work "Moby Dick" instead of just "The Whale"? This and more is spelled out.

The full title of the book is Why Not Catch-21? The Stories Behind the Titles and it fully explains the work. As the preface explains, the book is based on a weekly column Dexter wrote for The Sunday Telegraph called "Title Deed." I want to do some research and see if it's still running, because it provides fascinating insight into how authors think and work, and how books are created.

• Update: I Googled "Title Deed Sunday Telegraph" and although I received several links, all showed truncated results hidden behind "High Beam Research" which requires membership for full review. You will, however, see examples from the column on the Title Deed link above.

First published in 2007, I found it as a paperback this weekend at Schuler Books in Grand Rapids, Michigan. ISBN: 9780711229259. It's a good read and offers an interesting view of the thought process behind authors and their books.

Review Disclosure

My Blogs:

• Alan Eggleston
• How to Rewrite a Cliche
• Booksville

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

Back to BizBooksPlus.net

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

LAS - New computer "disorder" from Microtrends author Penn?

By Alan Eggleston, Writer, Editor, Bookseller

Did you know that you may be a member of an untapped new microtrend group? If you spend hours on your computer reading or doing research or playing on Facebook, you could suffer from LAS -- Long Attention Span!

This is according to Mark Penn, lead author of the book Microtrends. He's also a political consultant for Senator Hillary Clinton and was the marketing consultant who identified the microtrend group called Soccer Moms critical to re-electing President Bill Clinton in 1996.

I watched with fascination this morning as Mark Penn discussed Microtrends at his book signing at a New York City bookstore on Booktv (CSPAN2). Among the microtrends he mentions were "impressionable elites" and the increasing abundance of "lefties," meaning "southpaws" or people who are left-hand dominant. Penn also said that we are all familiar with the microtrend of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder or those who suffer from short attention spans), but that with each microtrend there is usually a corresponding microtrend and that for ADD there is LAS -- Long Attention Span.

A group of people for whom LAS may be an effect are people who spend hours on their computers. Is that you -- and me?

His point was that science and medicine and marketing are addressing ADD, but they haven't yet acknowledged LAS. The group who do, says Penn, are often 10 years or so behind. Take the car market. Most people who buy cars today are women, a trend about 10 to 15 years old. Yet car dealerships are focused on the male shopper. So look for marketers to start selling you for your LAS addictions like computer time, books, and television time in about 10 to 15 years.

You can read more about Microtrends and Mark Penn and co-author E. Kinney Zalesne on their Web site. The book has gotten mixed reviews, but the trends are fascinating to read.

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.