There are so many links I come across and there is not enough time to write longer posts about all of them. Borrowing an idea from Ben Dowdy and his Misfill feature at The Pen Addict, I have started sharing these links in a blog post with a short description about why each article is interesting for authors.
- Books By The Foot (booksbythefoot.com) – This company will let you purchase books by color, category, age, author or a bunch of other categories. You don’t pay by title, but how much room that take up on the shelf. Love this.
- Costco starts offering audiobooks (Costco) – The big box retailer has started offering audiobook bundles that can be played through the Costco app. Non-fiction offerings include collections from Jen Sincero, Walter Issacson, Pema Chodron, Eckhart Tolle, John Maxwell, Charles Duhgg, and Austin Kleon.
- 2021 Axiom Business Book Award Winners (Axiom Awards) – Axiom Awards announced their winners for 2021. They award in twenty five categories and gold, silver and bronze levels in each one.
- Editors get five submissions a day (Twitter) – This is a fascinating thread where an agent asked editors how many proposal they get. The answer appears to be five and editors go on to talk about their inability to evaluate everything that lands on their desks.
- 9 books to add to your 2021 reading list, according to career coaches (CNBC Make It) – From CNBC’s millennial focused site, there are a wide range of suggestions from Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to “picking up a book from an author who has vastly different viewpoints than your own.”
- 10 Must Read Business Books for 2021 (Gartner) – This is a pretty eclectic list with books on fungi, the post-pandemic world, Oliver Sacks, and meritocracy.
- Amazon Is An Illegal Monopoly (American Booksellers Association) – “[I]t is clear that Amazon is unlawfully restraining trade, is engaging in exclusionary, anti-competitive pricing schemes, and is using both its horizontal and vertical integration to create barriers to entry, increase Amazon’s market power, and unfairly manipulate marketplaces.”
- “I want to see pictures of books of *unusual dimensions*.” – (Clive Thompson on Twitter) – Kottke surfaced this thread recently and it is just fun to see all the examples people posted. The opening photo is from a collection of miniature books at the University of Iowa.
- The Power of Self-Publishing in Food Media (Food52) – I think we go through cycles of self-publishing as tools evolve and different industry verticals are affected, and this piece illustrates some stories from the world of food.
- Is It Time to Kill the Book Blurb? (Wall Street Journal) – The article complains about how the system for blurbs works. That is really what should change. Quotes can still help readers triangulate it a title is right for them.
- 125 Years of the New York Times Book Review (New York Times) – An amazing retrospective on the Book Review and the role it has played in culture.
- The Typewriter: Supercut (Ariel Avissar) – This supercut video plays “homage to typewriters in film and television, set to Leroy Anderson’s ‘The Typewriter’.” It is a perfect way to end this issue of Full Shelf ⁂
