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HarperCollins has taken its catalogs for booksellers and made them completely digital, increasing the amount of exposure for authors and giving booksellers additional resources. Very neat idea, including nifty tools for booksellers.
Tag Archives: Off-Topic
I Hear They Serve Coffee-Flavored Coffee
Michael Kelly:
The reason we have something to learn is that we have tried to be Starbucks. We’ve tried to be slick, trendy, and hip. We’ve tried to be a place that is non-threatening and easy to come to. And when you walk in, you see beautiful people in holy jeans and black glasses, all looking very intellectual and hair-frosty. Additionally, we have tried to make church a low-demand environment, much in the same way Starbuck’s is. It’s low demand in that even though the basic premise of the store is selling coffee, some people don’t even go there for coffee at all. And nobody’s going to pressure them about the coffee. That sounds familiar, too.
(via Cyberbrethren.)
Are You a True Believer?
Mark Hurst, on Good Experience:
New technology + same old thinking = same old outcome with a buggy interface.
What we need is new thinking. We need some true believers to stand up and say: we’re going to serve the patient, serve the traveler, serve the student, serve the customer, rather than follow the script of the past. No longer will we make them pay, or wait, or suffer only because we can get away with it. Now we will work in their interest, because it’s the right thing to do for them, and it’s the right thing for us in the long run.
links for 2009-03-23
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Human ingenuity is capable of the most extraordinary things. Pay attention to ideas, even the wacky ones. Especially the wacky ones. Because they're the ones that are going to be big.
Something for Nothing Can Make You Something
Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired.
I don’t expect that to draw you in for a very exciting post. What I do want to share with you is that he believes that the future of commerce and business, especially over the Internet, is in giving things away for free. An article about this very subject was the cover story in Wired about a year ago, and Anderson is writing a book that will be out in July called, simply, Free.
Pay attention to this one, because it’s possibly very revolutionary and is likely to turn some heads. He thinks you should be giving stuff away in order to make money.
He’s not necessarily talking about the Gilette model, either:
Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.
As examples, he mentions that after experimenting with paid content, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are now free to read on the Web (excepting some information in WSJ). At the time of this writing, I can even browse NYT on my iPod touch, using an application they wrote that is also free to download.
Ryan Markel 