An Innovator's Dilemma... A Book With Many Faces - 08/09/2010 - 6:01 PM:
I believe I've posted about The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen, but it deserves another look. How you interpret its message changes depending on the stage of development you happen to be in. When I first read it, BookLamp was a small company, pre-any form of investment aside from our time. Back then, the book was comforting.
"Don't worry about people stealing what you do," it said. "There are reasons that large, well-run companies need start-ups to do the new and unproven."
Now that BookLamp has been operating with some level of investment funds for more than a year, it's interesting what other sort of information you see in it. In a way, it provides a very good framework for identifying why "founders" and "investors" often clash on how a company should be run. The basic premise of the book is that good managers in an established company will fund projects that have proven revenue, with an established and large market. This is a goo...
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Really, How Hard Can Book Recommendations Be? - 07/01/2010 - 9:46 PM:
It's easy to forget just how complex making a recommendation to someone can be. Not just book recommendations, but recommendations of any kind. What sort of food will they like? What sorts of movies? How about music? There are so many variables that can influence a person's preference that it's extremely difficult to decide which to pay attention to. And to make matters worse, it's different from person to person, so solutions don't always carry over to the crowd.
I often make the comparison between what we do and what Pandora.com does, largely in the sense that we use a "book genome" style approach in measuring the contents of a book and matching it to a user. But to be absolutely honest, there's a world of difference between analyzing a song that lasts for, likely, about four minutes, and a book that will take a human hours to read.
For one, a bad music recommendation will likely be caught by the user in the first 30 seconds of the song, and at wo...
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Nancy Pearl and the Wonderful World of Books - 06/14/2010 - 6:14 PM:
If you're unfamiliar with Nancy Pearl, she's the author of the bestselling BookLust books, and is probably one of the most publicly recognizable figures in the library sciences. Aside from being an author that writes books about finding books to read, she is a regular commenter on NPR's Morning Edition, was the Director of Library Programming at the Seattle Public Library, a judge for last year's Pulitzer prize, and a legend in the book discovery world. And she was in Boise last week speaking at the local library for two days; one open session to the public, and another for the local librarians interested in reader advisory.
I met Nancy Pearl's librarian action figure, complete with “push-button shushing action”, before I had a chance to meet Nancy Pearl herself. There was a stack of them on the table in the back of the room where Nancy was going to be speaking, complete with little plastic books that come in the packaging with her. I couldn't help but contemplat...
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The Wear and Potential of New York. A Chance Meeting With Tom. - 02/22/2010 - 12:11 PM:
When I first got going on this project, traveling to New York was always a very exciting thing. A week away from home? In New York? Cool. So much happens in New York, with that density of lives existing side-by-side, that it's impossible for me to visit without a sense of each day's potential. For me, a day in New York is like taking a snapshot of thousands of life's significant and insignificant events all at once. Next time you're in New York, take a moment to wonder how many children will be born near you that day? How many new lives are getting started within arms reach of you? How many fortunes are being won and lost? How many deaths and final goodbyes? How many first kisses?
When you arrive in a city the size of New York, with landmarks that are recognizable in nearly every film ever made there, it never fails to lend a sense of importance to whatever you're doing. This is still true for me; so much of the publishing industry revolves around New York tha...
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The Power of Being Reasonable and Ignoring the "Know It All" - 12/11/2009 - 4:17 PM:
One of the most important skills an entrepreneur can have is the ability to sound reasonable. That seems like a fairly basic requirement, at first, and it is; what that really boils down to is that your role as an entrepreneur is to be excited about what you do, while avoiding coming off as ignorant, manipulative, or arrogant. It also includes not being too self-assured, too resistant to criticism, too outlandish in your expectations, or too insane. It would be ideal to not sound insane at all, but let's face it – insanity is what gets people into being entrepreneurs in the first place, so that's hopeless.
I read a study once that changed how I look at the advice I collect from people, and also the advice I give to people, and it directly relates to how you define “reasonable”. More specifically, it changed how I look at strong criticism and strong opinion, which is something you'll encounter a great deal of if you're working on anything remotely interesting ...
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Why Google? - 10/14/2009 - 11:02 AM:
Therin, a long standing member of the BookLamp.org community, asked me a question earlier that I thought was worth promoting to the main page. Her question was, "Why Google?"
As things have progressed with the project, that's a question I've been asked in private, but never answered in public. Why did the original quest start with Google?
I don't know if my reasoning for picking the companies I did is a credit to me or a boon, but it does illustrate part of the ways that I think. My response to Therin is below:
________________
There were three obvious companies that could have been considered for CanGoogleHearMe.com. Google, Amazon, and at the time, Microsoft. All three were actively involved in full-text book scanning projects, which was the prerequisite for being considered. All three were working with content from multiple publishers, which was also a tremendous advantage.
Of the three, Microsoft was consider...
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The Three Weapons of the Start-up. Hello to Popular Science. - 09/28/2009 - 6:19 PM:
Every time Paul and I leave on some sort of business trip, it seems someone mentions us unexpectedly. We just got off the plane in New York, and I'm told that BookLamp was mentioned in this month's Popular Science. I haven't seen a copy myself, yet, but I've been getting e-mails about it all day. It makes me wish we could move forward with the Reader's Project a bit more aggressively - we've had access to a fairly large commercial database of books for a while (10,000+) that we haven't been able to roll out publicly for a variety of reasons. I know how lame it is to say something like, "Man, I wish I could show you all the cool things we have going on behind the scenes..."... but, well, I wish I could show you all the cool things we have going on behind the scenes. At some point we'll roll this out as a functional, non-beta service - though the form it takes may be different than what it is now. And it's likely to not be our first milestone, depending on things like... well, like...
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