The following is an excerpt from my new book Don’t Go Back to School: a handbook for learning anything.
To someone who has never tried, it’s not obvious how to learn the things you want to learn outside of school. I’m on a mission to show you how. To do that, I became obsessed with how other people learn best, and how they do it without going to school. → Read More
A number of startups have been trying their hand at subscription-based children’s books services, or something like a “Netflix for kids’ books,” so to speak. Today, another entry called Zoobean joins the flock, with the debut of its own handpicked catalog which parents can either subscribe to, or choose to just shop online like a standard e-commerce website. The company was… → Read More
Today marks the anniversary of the deaths of Cervantes, Shakespeare and Garcilaso de la Vega and the birthdays of Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice Druon, and Josep Pla. This date, as chosen by the UN, celebrates the book and all it has wrought and, perhaps more important, the place of the book as artifact and sextant in our lives. → Read More
TorrentFreak is reporting that links to Cory Doctorow’s book, Homeland, are being shut down after a DMCA request by Fox. Why is Cory’s Creative Commons licensed book that is available for free being attacked? It kind of sounds like it could be a copy of Homeland, the TV series, so they shut it down. → Read More
Following last’s year expansion into merchandise including toys, underwear (!), and more, EA’s PopCap is now taking its popular “Plants vs. Zombies” title to the printed (and e-inked) page. Penguin Children’s has acquired the physical and e-book publishing rights to the game, in a three-year deal. → Read More
Today, Amazon has announced the acquisition of social reading service, Goodreads. Specific terms of the deal weren’t disclosed and it should close by the end of Q2. Goodreads had raised $2.75 million in funding from the likes of True Ventures since launching in January 2007. When we talked to them last August, the site had over 10 million members and had catalogued more than 360 million… → Read More
Sproutkin, a newly launched subscription service for children’s books, has raised an initial, but undisclosed (and still ongoing) seed round of under $1 million from investors which include 500 Startups, the TechFellow Fund, and other angels. Like the tagline implies, the startup is introducing a Netflix for children’s books – that is, it’s a rental service where you pay to receive shipments of… → Read More
Google has just announced via its official blog that Google Play is officially one year old today. The actual marketplace itself is older than that, with the Android Market debuting in 2008, but it has been a year since Google changed the store’s branding to reflect its broader purpose, which extends to media and use on platform besides its mobile OS. Google rehashed some of its previous… → Read More
One of the amazing things about technology is that it opens the doors to things for less fortunate folks that many of us take for granted. Being able to sit down and read a good book is something that we do on a daily basis, but never think about all of the people out there who don’t have that luxury. With sites like Amazon, we have a seemingly infinite number of choices on what we’d like to read… → Read More
If paper books are going to survive anywhere for the next few years, it’s in our schools and on our kids’ bookshelves. However a company called Storybird has built a platform for kids and adults to build and share picture books in a few minutes. The books use pre-rendered artwork and allow authors to drag and drop pictures and text right into their work. Think of it as fanfic for the Poky Little… → Read More
One of the most valuable things parents can do is read to their kids, but keeping a steady supply of quality books in the house is still a challenge. Today, a startup called The Little Book Club is launching to address that problem with a subscription-based service for kids’ books. The service, designed for busy parents who can’t stomach the idea of reading “Goodnight Moon” every night for the… → Read More
With the closing of Spin Magazine’s print edition alongside the failure of the print edition of Newsweek (not to mention the shuttering of countless newspapers and magazines around the world) you’d be hard-pressed to say that publishing – particularly in the news space – is doing well. → Read More
Sometimes it’s nice to share a good book, and if you know me then you know that most of the books I’m buying are comics and graphic novels. These are a few of my absolute favorites this year and I recommend picking up a solid, meaty hardcover and hanging onto it for a few years. You know, like the old days. → Read More
When you visit a review on Google Play for an app, book, song or movie, you won’t have to worry as much about whether someone is sheepishly hiding behind a computer firing off nasty words, as Google has now flipped on the switch to display your Google+ name and profile picture with all reviews you add to the store.
I’m not so sure this is the best thing in the world, 100%, as you don’t have an… → Read More
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and a stalemate between Amazon and big retailers, including Barnes & Noble, over the sale of books from the online giant’s publishing imprint is giving a fillip to BitTorrent — once a hotbed of piracy, and now a straight-laced and legal content distribution network — as a platform for marketing books. Tim Ferriss, one of the authors signed to… → Read More
When I first met Micah Baldwin about five years ago, he was working at a company called Lijit, which helped bloggers monetize their content and keep track of how their sites were doing. I could tell that Baldwin was a passionate guy at that moment, scanning the crowd around us to make sure that everyone was having a good time.
It wasn’t even his party. → Read More
The founders of LitPick have known each other since birth. Seth Cassel and his dad Gary founded their first company, FlamingNet in 2002 when Seth was in fourth grade. Designed as a book review site, Seth and his dad Gary built the site themselves and began taking a profit. → Read More
We’re living in a pre-barbaric age. Gutenberg and the printed word cast out the darkness of a hundred mistakes, a thousand benighted cities hastened from the gloom, a million lights winked on in a million windows. The word, once hidden in the chests of the mind, was now scratched onto paper and carefully typeset into folios. The barbarians were cast out, fleeing ahead of the coming enlightenment. → Read More
Robin Sloan is the kind of guy who could write a book like this one. He’s a writer and “media inventor” which seems to be a lofty term for “cool guy who gets the Internet and understands that discourse needs to be both intelligent and entertaining to effect any sort of meaningful social change.” He also writes a damn good intellectual thriller, if you’re into that sort of thing. → Read More
Everyone’s favorite ebook bundle charity online sale thinger is back and you have 13 days to grab eight sci-fi books from folks like Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, and the Craphound himself, Cory Doctorow. → Read More
Writer and “Media Inventor” Robin Sloan wrote an interesting book called Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore about an out-of-work web designer in San Francisco who goes to work at a bookstore. The only things fantastical about his novel, I suspect, are that the web designer, named Clay, is out of work and that he can find a book store in which to work. → Read More
Films of books can often help drive sales of those books, and bestsellers often make for movie blockbusters, so it’s no surprise to see online bookseller Amazon today announcing that its content development arm, Amazon Studios, has optioned its first novel, the Amazon-published, Southern horror Seed, to begin making a big-screen adaptation. As with other content optioned by Amazon Studios — comic… → Read More
After becoming a 2011 MassChallenge finalist and graduating from TechStars Boston, Libboo shifted gears earlier this year, moving away from crowdsourced, team publishing to discovery. The idea being that books still lack their Pandora — a killer discovery mechanism that helps everyday readers find new, unknown authors and in turn helps wordsmiths expose their work to new audiences.
The… → Read More
Editor’s note: Sal Cangeloso is the editor of Geek.com and wrote a new book on an odd topic. It’s called LED Lighting: A Primer to Lighting the Future and it focuses on the upcoming explosion in LED manufacturing, offering a basic understanding of the technology and an interesting look at the history of LED lights.
You can buy LED Lighting: A Primer to Lighting the Future here and the first… → Read More
ngry Birds started life as a mobile app but it’s since become a sprawling merchandising and rights licensing empire for its creator Rovio — helping it rake in earnings of $106m in 2011. From clothes, to plush toys and even entire theme parks, the irate birds and smug pigs have succeeded in flinging themselves onto an alarming variety of shelves, spaces and places, as well as the pockets of… → Read More
This hack comes from a pair of charming Germans who created an app to find books related to apps you just opened. For example, when you download or install an app – Word, Photoshop, Skype – it will automatically find books related to the new app. → Read More
Another development in the UK market for e-readers, tablets and e-books as Amazon and Barnes & Noble move closer to launching more of their services and devices in the UK and Europe: the retail giant Tesco has purchased Mobcast, a digital bookseller co-founded by pulp fiction writer Andy McNab. Tesco tells TechCrunch that the price of the acquisition is $7.2 million.
Tesco notes that… → Read More
Ozon, the Russian e-commerce giant that started as an online and electronics bookseller but has since branched out into fashion and logistics services for other companies, is often called “Russia’s Amazon” for its size and scope. But in an interview today, CEO Maelle Gavet says the comparison only goes so far, for now. She tells TechCrunch that despite some tests, there are no current plans on the… → Read More
StoryBundle is just one of a few new “pay-what-you-want” book deals blossoming from the ashes of traditional publishing like ferns after a forest fire. This service, run by former Gizmodo pop star Jason Chen, is one of the cooler offerings out there right now and they started out with the Big Bang package featuring up to seven sci-fi books for your perusal and purchase.
You can donate as much… → Read More
According to an Amazon UK release, the company is now selling more ebooks than hardback or paperback books in Britain, a tipping point that we reached in the U.S. over a year ago. It took four years for U.S. ebook sales to overtake print sales.
The company is selling 114 ebooks for every 100 printed books. Amazon introduced the kindle in the UK two years ago. → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
